Those were nights I barely slept, when every waking moment was a possibility, a step closer to life. I was seventeen then, and five and a half endless yet gone-in-an-instant years later, some days I still feel the same. Arrogance and insecurity, hope and fear, ambition and doubt. Always at the cusp of something, the right words forever at the tip of my tongue.

Amazing still it seems, I’ll be twenty-three.

For a second I thought I had it all figured out. I knew what I was doing, knew that I was good at what I was doing, knew that I would succeed. That’s the arrogance, scoffing at the insecurity that was soo a thing of the past. And now I am shaken to the core, ambition made meek and called into question, the target of resentment. I feel small and frozen in time. I stumble along, wild-eyed and lost and yearning for something still.

It’s cyclical: first a spark, then hope, success, wild confidence, untouchability. Then the tiniest tear, fissure, crack, unnoticed at the first before it grows and spreads and overtakes. Then the crash. The fall. The weakening.

That’s where I am now—at the bottom and cut down to size. Time to pick up the pieces, to learn my lesson but not wallow in its wrath. This is the time for wide-awake. The momentum has stopped and I am still. I am myself stripped away and laid bare, made vulnerable in the best way, in the way that allows for more—for clarity, for discovery, for growth.

In the hollow, a space gives way. Light streams in. You are forgiven. For your insecurity, your arrogance, your doubt, your dreams, your terror, you are forgiven. You are growing and this is how it should be, how it will always be. It is not a race to finish line, not a prize to be won. It is slow and it is steady and it stretches on to forever.

This is it. When you laid awake at seventeen, wide-eyed and breathless for tomorrow, breathless just to begin, this is what you saw, this is what you dreamt of, this is the possibility, now reality, now yours. This is your life.