The Universe is Yours

Letters my younger self would have wished to hear.

Illustration by Al Short

Written by Dia Wondimu

17.

Today is the day you leave home for the first time, you’ve got all you need in the running car awaiting you: your best friend in the passenger seat and a single suitcase in the back.

Your heart is pounding as you walk down the groaning steps of where you grew up, anxious yet excited. You know this is the start of a new chapter, but you’re too numb at the moment to take it all in… you remain that way for a few years more.

You spend your first few months throwing yourself at whatever silences the chaos that is your mind, and spend the following few months blaming yourself for doing such things.

I need you to know that you’re doing nothing wrong. You are simply unlocking the door to yourself. After being raised to believe that loving yourself and being selfish are synonymous with one another, this is a tough mold to break out of, but you can, and you will.

18.

You become an adult today. You even registered to vote the second that clock hit midnight then went on to buy yourself your very first lighter: white and gold with a majestic lion on the front, the words “Leo” engraved in a beautiful gothic font– it’s perfect, and you end up saving it long after it empties.

You’ve been allowing yourself the grace to discover your likes and dislikes. You love cartoons, you tolerate some country music and you hate vodka.

You spend most of your nights overanalyzing songs, films and television shows, wishing with every tear that you could somehow teleport yourself into any other universe to escape your reality. You hate yourself, so you live vicariously through the tales of the TV and, in a way, it helps you gain a better understanding of who you are becoming.

“When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours.”

Those words echo back to your overly-stimulated ears and shatter your perception of everything.

Hours into binge-watching your favorite show, “Rick and Morty,” a little too under the influence and somehow on the brink of a breakthrough.

You quickly shuffle around your dark sheets to find that sleek black remote to hit pause and sit with that sentence for the remainder of the night.

I don’t know if it was existentialism or the fact that you hadn’t gotten a lick of sleep in the past twelve hours, but something inside finally clicked.

What if nothing really mattered? What if everything you’d ever done, everything you’d ever gone through in your mere 18 years on this planet meant absolutely nothing? What if you aren’t real? What if nothing’s real and you’ve just got a really creative mind that somehow made all this up?

You could feel your heart begin to pick up in pace, it was glorious and terrifying. If nothing truly mattered, yet you are still breathing here at this moment, then maybe that meant you could decide what mattered and what didn’t. The possibilities were endless, and the universe was now yours.

19.

You start at a new job today working graveyard while still in school. You now live off fifteen hours of sleep most weeks and spend the majority of your time alone, embraced by the anxious comforts of Red Bull and nicotine.

This is a not-so-gentle nudge that something needs to change, it has been over a year since you discovered that quote, and even though you still believed it to be true, you had yet to actually apply it.

You get more and more frustrated with yourself, upset that most of your time is given to everybody but yourself. Like Atlas with the weight of the heavens on their shoulders, you struggle as you try to uphold the unrealistic expectations you’ve set for yourself.

This frustration is what drives you to finally do something for yourself, because no matter how long it took, eventually you got sick of feeling hopeless and started to wonder how to change.

You find yourself deep-cleaning your space to call in new energy, and run into old items tucked away. One was a crystal that you had received from a friend not too long ago that would lead you to the front doors of the local crystal shop, curious of the secrets they might hold for you.

You learn more in the coming months than you have in 19 years because you finally found something that truly inspires you.

You end up finding teachers who introduce you to the worlds of shadow work, healing your inner child and finding tools to help connect you to a future… For the first time in your life, you wake up content in your body and don’t wish you were somebody else anymore.

You end up meeting your twin flame along this journey, spending the warm nights skating at sunset and contemplating existence with them. She helps you laugh in the face of what scares you most, and teaches you that you don’t need to take on everything alone: a lesson you hold on tight to before you move back to school for the fall.

20.

Today is one of the darkest days you have to endure, and you don’t have the grace to process it at your own pace.

Your brother got arrested today, you saw the whole thing… Too many cops with too many guns, you’ve never felt so helpless in your life. You spend what feels like eternity replaying it in your mind, a single question haunting your heart: if anything, anything had gone differently– would he have died?

You bury that trauma in the back of your brain, I mean, who has time to process emotions when they’re busy? That’s what you tell yourself for the next eight months. You start a new job and bury yourself in work, school and an internship, taking up extra classes to keep your brain as busy as your body.

You speak of it as though you’re over it, desperately trying to convince yourself that you’re fine, praying that if you say it enough times you’ll actually believe it.

Spoiler alert: you won’t.

You exhaust yourself until your body eventually gives out and you end up spending the better half of spring break sick on your parent’s couch drinking Pedialyte and binging all four “Shrek” movies. You’re angry, but secretly grateful to the universe for giving you a break.

This is the moment you reevaluate your life, again.

If this universe was still yours, why do you wait so long to deal with this? Did it not matter enough?

In a questionnaire done to study post-traumatic avoidance behavior in trauma-exposed Black women, it was discussed and concluded that validation of these traumatic events would be the key to efficiently assessing behaviors.

In your case, this means that you won’t be able to start healing these wounds until you accept and validate your feelings of fear, and allow yourself to feel everything before beginning to healanything.

This wasn’t easy at all, but you get through it and come out the other end with your head held high and love in your heart. You aren’t “over it,” but you have accepted the fact that you need a little more time to heal, and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The love you hold for yourself blossomed tenfold this season, and you now see how life truly is an ebb and flow: there are euphoric days dipped in love and warmth, and there are also many (many) nights filled to the brim with tears and despair. But, no matter how the exterior of your life changes, there has, and will always be one constant through it all: you.

And you don’t want it any other way.