If you've been following along you've read that this month I've had trouble finding what there is to look forward to in life.  I've had trouble as well, seeing the beauty in not only my life but also my self as well.

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On Friday I dressed up for dance in a new outfit that I purchased during my recent travels.  Looking at myself in the mirror, I...felt beautiful.  Of course, I am not perfect.  When I spin around, my dress flares out in a flattering way but also shows part of my legs in a way that I didn't appreciate (but it's too warm to wear leggings...).  But that doesn't change the fact that I really did feel like I was beautiful.  Yeah, other people also commented on my outfit a bunch too, and that certainly didn't hurt, but really the main fact was that I felt comfortable in my own skin, even though nothing much really had changed about my skin.  I just wore the right clothes (well, and put on the right makeup) that I realized that yes, I am actually beautiful.  I don't know if I felt popular, or loved, or all of those other things.  Socializing is still a bit of a challenge -- maybe that's not necessarily a bad thing.  But it's really hard to feel good about yourself when you don't like the way you look and feel, I think.  I didn't participate in those VBall waltz stuff this year not because I thought I was not qualified, but because I just didn't like the way I felt dancing at the time.  That sort of thing really matters.

Today, I felt nice too.  I wore a different piece of clothing that I had also purchased during my recent travels -- I guess something good came out of it after all -- this one more casual.  I didn't feel "beautiful" like I did on Friday, but I still felt good about the way that I looked, and felt.  It was a pleasant feeling.

Today, also, life ended up showing me "why?".  Why there is still a point to continuing on.  It reminded me of the things that I should be looking forward to, and what I should be both grateful for and reaching for at the same time.  This month I had felt like I was going through a process of "trying to remember what makes life fun".  It turns out that that is not something that I had to do all on my own.  And life had a way, of stepping in to gently push me toward happiness.

Relationships are at the same time both tenuous yet enduring.  When I say that, I don't mean that some relationships are fragile while others are lasting (though that is true, too).  But rather, that a single relationship, can be -- and often is -- both, at the same time.  It's easy to feel that a relationship is so conditional, so passive, treated so..."secondary"...but even when it feels like you can't depend on a relationship, sometimes it is still there to catch you anyways.  Relationships take a lot of work, I think.  That's something that I realized over the years, that I can't expect there to be a relationship where I can just have it take care of me automatically.  I need to be explicit in my needs, to communicate my wants, and ultimately to facilitate my relationships and not just "hope" that they will turn out the way that I want.  But maybe =I= don't always have to be the one facilitating everything.  The idea of that is really overwhelming, after all.

Sometimes, things don't quite turn out the way that you expect.  It was a little over a year ago, when I had been shown a path forward in life, and felt incredibly validated by it.  It as though my way of being was actually paying off -- that my steadiness and consistency was bearing fruit in a big way, that it was actually leading me to somewhere better.

It turned out that that was not the way forward at all, though.  That door was closed off to me, and I was left to wander in the woods until I stumbled upon another path -- the right path.  This one was not so easy for me to get to, and I had to cross some of the thorny vines in the forest in order to get to it.  But having been on it, I realized that this was really where I was supposed to be.  I just didn't realize it earlier at the time.

Maybe a similar thing happened to me earlier, last week.  That I felt like the path I was on was a dead end, that I wasn't really getting anywhere, that I was back in the same darkness that I had been for so long.  But life came to show me that there was a way forward, and that things really weren't that bad.  Things turned out differently than I expected, like how a road can seem so confusing in the dark of the night, but so peaceful and tame once the sun comes out.

Under the sky, after crying
The sun and flowers are all laughing

You said that this world is too terrible, making you want to escape
With red eyes you cried, then smiled, saying you don’t want anything

My angel, be happy, don’t cry anymore, okay?
Look back, there are friends behind you who would let you rely on them anytime