I know this letter matters.
To the person who reads it while sitting alone on the floor.
In bed.
Standing in front of the kitchen sink.
Feeling brutally unseen.
Stuck in a timeless non-validating nature of their life.
I write this for you.
I don’t really care for the person who has been loved by many.
Who lives comfortably and laughs out loud while on the phone with their best friend.
I never wrote for them.
I wrote for the invisible face.
The unheard heart.
The person who has lived an unfair life, for real.
The one who never had it all.
For the one who lost it all.
The one who knows what it means to live within mountains of suffering.
Where there is no valley. Ever.
This is for the person who has learned to live well without hope.
Oh you brave soul.
You have found a way to see yourself in the midst of poisonous loneliness.
In the center of multiple moments of pain.
Never really one event of loss, but millions of them clustering around you.
What is the definition of life when everything is made of loss?
I know you are searching for meaning.
You think, there must be something monumental hiding behind the mountains you have climbed.
I searched for that myself.
But maybe the meaning is more about not caring of the elucid monument but the seeing of ourselves as the only mountain torch.
The glue of all the clusters.
I talk to you the most because it is you who knows how to light up the mountain with your haunting upward steps, regardless of the heartless nature of your path.
You are the only one I respect.
I share my life with.
Especially the darkness.
Everything else, is just small talk.
These letters have always been personal.
Otherwise what is the point of writing to a warrior kneeling on the side of the mountain, hovering between giving up and taking another step.
The only voice you would listen to is the one who knows that just because you don’t look like you are in imminent danger, it doesn’t mean that you are not afraid.
Please know that the meaning of your life lives within you, away from the confines of a clean cut life story.
The road is long and dark but it becomes bearable and livable when you find your own meaning about your loss clusters.
Even though I don’t believe there is a reason for everything.
I believe that we can write out our own personal vantage point of view.
I started to write mine for the first time after he died.
Even though this was not my first loss, it was the first time I took over the pen and wrote the next chapters of my life.
I could not write a fairy tale, a happy ending. But I could write myself inside a hero. I could find a way to the brave words of her life. Because of that, I know you can too. @SecondFirsts (Click to Tweet!)
It’s not about a better, easier fate.
It has never been about that.
It’s about knowing that death is coming.
Loss in plural is inevitable.
And yet you find a way to write a chapter that still has pain but with a view of the stars, the galaxies above you.
You find a way to go and write from the moon.
And you find the meaning.
You see yourself on the side of that mountain, lighting up the way for us all.
And for the first time you feel that it was not all for nothing.
It was for the light in you, you could only see from the moon.
With a moon landing,
Christina
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Christina Rasmussen is the creator and founder of The Life Reentry Institute, Second Firsts, and Star Letters, and the host of the Dear Life Podcast. Christina is on a crusade to help millions of people rebuild, reclaim, and relaunch their lives using the power of their own minds. Christina’s work has been featured on ABC News, NPR, The White House Blog, and MariaShriver.com. She is the bestselling author of Second Firsts: Live, Laugh, and Love Again, which has also been translated in Chinese and German and just released her second book Where Did You Go on expanding the mind in ways that allows co-creation with the forces of the universe. She is also writing her first work of fiction: a science fiction story about a woman on a quest to start over and begin a new life. You can find more information on her website and follow her on FB or Twitter.
Image courtesy of Drew Tilk.