If you haven’t noticed, I have had a bit of writer’s block lately. I have been stuck on something that seems to be standing right front of me, not making room for any other posts to present themselves. She’s a tough one, this figure in front me. She’s myself at about twenty. Perhaps she’s standing here because I resolved to regain my youth this year. Perhaps she here because I have been going to yoga regularly, and when my body warms and my blood and energy is flowing, I do see my 20 year old self in the yoga studio mirror. (Of course, this illusion is dashed as soon it’s time to do back inversions.) Perhaps she’s here because being named a finalist in the inspiring blogs category made me laugh to myself and think of this young woman, looking out at the world with her head in the clouds and her heart on her sleeve, and how I wanted to be different than her.

For years, I was ashamed to look back at my younger self. Yes, I had a good heart when I was 20, but I was always beating myself up for not being able to focus hard enough to get all A’s in school, or for writing with my heart rather than my head. I spent years in graduate school, focusing finally, fine-tuning the instrument that is my mind and being a bit ashamed to look back at my earlier writings that I thought were more feeling than substance, like this excerpt from the journal I wrote while spending a semester in Jerusalem studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

“What do I have a right to judge here?….There’s a part of me that really doesn’t trust the concept of change–not that I don’t believe things can change but I’m a little afraid of getting lost in the struggle for change, so that present life is negated in some ways. You have to negate it [when struggling for change]…it’s hard to concentrate on the “now” and the beauty. Dad tries….Dad does more than try. But I think I see a different kind of beauty than Dad does–one that is very rooted in the present and isn’t so universal. I don’t know if he would find the subborness and passion of both Jews and Arabs…as beautiful as I do. If I could find a word other than beautiful I would use it–bittersweet, perhaps, and an integral part of whomever God is.

“A small boy just sat down 6 feet away from me. He can’t be more than 4′ 11″ and he’s smoking a cigarette. He’s eyeing me out of the corner of his eye. That’s the kind of bittersweet I’m talking about. He just got up and left with his hands in his pockets. Shoulders hunched.”

Almost twenty years later, I don’t see a conflict between seeing beauty in the present and struggling for change. I also have known, and am better able to see pain. I have seen the face of my father in an open casket. I have held a grieving mother’s head on my lap. I have let my body lead me through pain, panic, and and then teeter between exhaustion and exhiliration as and after two daughters entered and magnified my world. I have felt my heart open wider, bringing greater joy and fears.

I have changed. I understand pain now. But I think I would still see that boy with the cigarette as beautiful. I understand now that my Dad would have, too. And here I am, at this blog, this room of my own, writing from the heart again.

So I claim her. I claim this young woman in front of me.

And I am proud of her.