Part Three of a Three-Part Reflection
I've fought many mental and emotional demons to get to where I am now. More than I can recount in this simple essay.
And I'm still fighting.
But this is perhaps the most important lesson.
Because You love me, I am worthy.
Really? How cringe.
Read on.
Knowledge can make us informed and sharpen our thinking. But it cannot soften our hearts, or even heal them. It cannot teach us how to love.
You can look reality in the face and still never see it.
I never thought my mother would pass from cancer. It did not run in the family. Instead, a childhood fear was Alzheimer's.
It seemed to follow the women in my mother's family. My great-grandmother passed away from it. I watched it take my grandmother and experienced living with the disease as a child while my mother cared for her. My Aunt Rocky, who passed a few years after my mother, would also succumb to it.
So, long before my mother's death, I had imagined that perhaps Alzheimer's would one day come for her, and even for me.
Cancer was a shock.
When my mother passed, I was in the midst of my master's degree in history. I had three concentrations—Medieval and Early Modern History, Antiquities, and the Middle East.
Some of what I remember being able to do may sound impossible, but it's as if I had superpowers before my mother's passing.
I could recall scents on command as though experiencing them in the present. I had a remarkably sharp visual memory. When taking exams, I could visually recall the spatial location of information from study aids or textbooks as it had appeared on a page.
I dreamt in color and experienced touch, scent—and most aspects of the waking world.
Then my mother died.
And I lost large chunks of my memory.
I lost the ability to recall scents on command, although I still have a strong sensitivity to even faint smells. More frighteningly, I lost much of my short-term memory.
One of my sisters would become infuriated with me because I couldn't remember conversations or interactions from just hours—or sometimes minutes—before. She thought I was fabricating my inability to remember because she simply couldn't understand it.
I can still see my sisters' faces looking at me with complete bewilderment while I cried in confusion, pleading with them that I wasn't lying.
I simply didn't know what they were talking about.
I've perhaps mentioned this experience only once in my life because I know people have a hard time believing it.
After all, my own sisters didn't believe it.
Slowly, over the years, I recovered aspects of my long-term memory from before my mother's death. But there are still gaps in the years surrounding it.
Remember, I was in a master's program when my mother passed away? I was reading 800-page books, secondary sources, and primary sources across three concentrations.
By this time, knowledge was part of how I understood myself.
And suddenly, whatever I put in didn't seem to stay in.
I still wanted knowledge.
I just couldn't trust myself to retain it.
I lost confidence not only in my memory, but in what I knew.
Until recently, I've lived as an impostor inside my own head.
I've been afraid of being seen for what I really was—and what I wasn't.
And for the most part, people continued to believe in my intelligence and my peaceful, zen-like demeanor, all while my mind and heart raged against me.
In later years, I came to understand that what I experienced may have been a form of traumatic amnesia, along with other trauma-related cognitive impairments. There was also a family history, again with the women in my family, that made the experience even more frightening to me.
My mother told me about a public mental breakdown my grandmother experienced during an extraordinarily traumatic period of her own life—her children being taken away from her by her own family. My grandmother tore at her body, hair, and clothes. The children were eventually returned.
As a teenager, I witnessed my mother experience two episodes during periods of extreme emotional and family trauma. She became catatonic-like and unresponsive—unable to move or communicate with me, staring fixedly while making the same ba-ba sound. I sobbed, pleaded with her, stroked her hair and cheek, my head in her lap, begging her to come back to me. I believed, deep within my being, that her love for me would bring her back.
She did return to me.
Both times.
She later told me she could see me and hear me somewhat, although she seemed unreachable.
I didn't have that kind of break. My experience was different.
I did not lose touch with reality.
But I lost something I had trusted almost as much—my memory.
So there you are.
Beauty of the face is an unearned gift.
Beauty of the mind is an achievement.
But neither, in the end, is enough.
Who am I without beauty?
Who am I without intelligence?
Knowledge.
Learning.
Alzheimer's.
What a tragic end. Possibly my end.
Why did I need to be beautiful?
Why did I exchange beauty for knowledge, only to have my idols destroyed?
As I've prayed, reflected, and meditated, I've come to understand that underneath both desires was something else.
I needed to be worthy.
I've spent much of my life trying to prove it.
I am beautiful.
I am smart.
I am good because I am self-sacrificing.
Different evidence offered in defense of the same case.
I've been atoning for a wrong I never actually committed, other than feeling not enough.
Unworthy.
And so I've worked.
I've achieved.
I've learned.
I've served.
I've sacrificed.
I've tried to earn my deservedness because I believed, somewhere within myself, that it had to be earned.
But that couldn't have been farther from the truth.
A few nights before I began writing this three-part reflection, I wrote something in my journal:
"Because You love me, I am worthy."
I don't mean that another person's love determines my worth. Human love is imperfect. Coming from another person, we might even consider such a thought dangerous or needy—the language of obsessive love.
But I wasn't writing to another person.
I was writing to God.
I try not to preach—but I will ask you to take a moment and look deeply within yourself. This kind of reflection requires vulnerability, and what you find there may even come with anger.
How many times has God chased after you, saved you, reminded you that He loves you?
And yet you still doubt your worthiness.
How many times, no matter the sin, the crime, or the fault, does His mercy welcome you back?
He is perfect.
He is God.
And He loves you.
And if perfection sees you as worthy, perhaps you must finally admit that you are.
I wrote something else in my journal that night:
"How many miracles must you receive before you are convinced you are worthy of them?"
You see the miracles, but you call them coincidences.
Why?
Why can you not see them for what they are and allow yourself to believe that you deserve them—that you are worthy of them?
So, perhaps Que bonita was never really about beauty.
Perhaps it was about being seen.
First by my mother.
Eventually, by myself.
And always, by God.
So I offer you your own Que bonita moment.
Remember—
You are beautiful.
You are loved.
You are worthy.
This is my reminder, just as much as yours.