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Gratitude, Hope, and Sharing our Strengths
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” ~Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
In her 1937 novel ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ Zora Neale Hurston tells the story of Janie Crawford’s passage from repression to spiritual fulfillment as she clashes with the expectations thrust upon her by her community. The novel, a story of ‘becoming in black America’ casts a long shadow over the Harlem Renaissance period and mirrors the hopes and struggles of blacks embodied through literature and arts, including motifs of racial and gender roles, inequities and oppression, liberation, relationships, and lives of self-fulfillment.
As I winded down the month of August while reading the novel, one of its themes (living a life of self-fulfillment) stood parallel to the myriad of struggles I’ve been through over the past year as I went through losses, mental breakdowns, failures, grief, disappointment, and the pressure of dealing with ‘the expectations thrusted upon me by my community.’ I’d my first therapy session in November of last year and have since been through highs and lows with a series of traumas. The thing about the traumas of our past is that it re-emerges with triggers, or through experiential reoccurrences. With the pressure of leaving college a few months back and figuring what’s next, the quarter-century crisis ushered in a lot of uncertainty, disillusionment, and questioning inwardly about the things I hold on to, with so much anxiety about what’s to come — jobs, career, relationships, etc. I don’t have many ways to deal with these things, and one of the few is having lengthy conversations with my friends for shared strengths and hope, most especially with Celine everytime, and many times a few weeks to our birthday.
Celine, like me, feels anxious about birthdays and the exhaustion of one year for the next with all the hard questions to be asked and reflections to take. Is this where I want to be now? Did I achieve the things I wanted over the past year? What meaning and purpose are the center of my life? And, perhaps, the ever-pressing temptation to measure your life and age with your peers and their achievements.
While we have these conversations, I am reminded of two things:
Firstly, that I am not alone in this; there…
