When I wake every morning, I rise as one, at once. I look circumspectly in mirrors at pieces and then a whole. Rarely, if ever, does it cross my mind that I am a puzzle in myself. That I am holed. It is in those rarities, though, when reality strikes me bold. Life happens fast. I have been trained to see me holistically, to supposedly understand me, but… if you don’t get lost, there’s a chance you may never be found” I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning. Chest up. Blind to what I often find as excess weight around my waist, I glanced only quickly. I didn’t stare at the dark spots that lie between my not so perfectly arched eyebrows. Running my right pointer finger along my brow to “tone it down,” I didn’t even notice the chipped polish that even pure acetone would not remove from my fingernails. My braids are overdue for removal, but I wasn’t overcome with temporary phenotypical obsession. Instead, I stared into tomorrow, and the …

There’s a quote that reads, “Mistakes are proof that you are trying.” I love that quote; it’s encouraging, not condemning. The more I read it though, the more I realize I don’t exactly agree with it. For me, it isn’t the mistakes that prove effort, it’s the acknowledgement, the conceptualization of whatever act as “mistake, and what’s more, it’s the conviction one feels after the f(act). To acknowledge something as a mistake is to admit wrongdoing, to hold oneself responsible for having committed the wrong, and to make conscious efforts to act differently in the future. Whether our mistakes are intentional or unintentional, and we will all make both, reconciling takes on the same process. It wasn’t until recently that I realized the need to reconcile with myself, I always thought  it had to be two or more involved for some sort of resolution. Well, I’ve found that in some ways, there are, even when I reconcile with myself… there’s the guilt-crazed one who made the mistake, the judgmental one who condemns me for having …