7.19.21 // Brianna Madia, to deeply embrace the self

I love following badass females who write lines of words that dance in my mind hours and days after I read them.
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Today: @briannamadia
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The words of Brianna Madia, "I want to deeply embrace the complicated entirety of myself and the deep change I’m undergoing."
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If this doesn't stop you in your tracks, it will one day. It will stop you in your tracks because change like this is unavoidable in the human experience. The change Brianna is talking about is a monumental shift, a movement as shaking to our core as the rearranging of the continents after Pangea. It is the familiar becoming unfamiliar to hopefully become familiar again.
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But the last part, the unfamiliar becoming familiar again, is not guaranteed and it is the hardest part. It is what Brianna (I think) means by her embracing the complicated entirety- in order for the unfamiliar to even remotely start to feel like home, you have to embrace the new landscape of your soul.
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And a big challenge with that embrace is remembering that embracing the new landscape is a solitary experience and not a given with the people who have grown used to and expectant of the old versions of our soul.
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Those people stand on the old continent as we break apart and oceans start to separate us. Sometimes there is a fierce goodbye and sometimes there is a slow painful drift. Both leave "embracing" even more challenging when you awake to realize that it is only you that you need to embrace.
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That isn't to say that there won't be new people who are on your continent ready to hold your soul in soft hands and your existence in an endless space of support. But to embrace yourself, loving your change has to come first.
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Brianna is a beautiful example of that embrace, her eye purposefully blind to the future and taking the present moment by storm in an unapologetically powerful way. She radiates radical self-acceptance even amidst monumental shifts.
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Thanks, Brianna, for the words that will dance in my mind for days.
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[mirror selfie #3... And I miss Scout]