I want to see my roots and know myself

I used to think that beautiful things existed for others. That I couldn't deserve them unless I bloomed. I thought I had to bloom, because everyone around me had covered themselves with flowers. And I was a cactus with thorns. And I didn't know that cacti have their own beauty.

Like others, I would patiently wait for the day when I would bloom. I would decorate myself with fake flowers and hope that no one would notice that my flowers were fake until that day came. I would resent the world because I couldn't bloom.

It was unfair. The world was not a fair place. But how could I bloom when I never fed my soil, never took care of it? I was only responsible for this, but I didn't know that either...

One day I decided to let go of this strange obsession I had with blooming. It actually happened spontaneously. I stopped imagining colorful, beautiful flowers that I could show to the outside world. I turned inward and left the outside world outside.

I didn't want to show myself anymore, I wanted to know myself, to see myself as I am. I had never done this before and the deeper I went, the more I wondered what I would find.

I wanted to see my roots, touch my roots. To take care of my soil. Watering it, feeding it, enriching it with minerals and small stones. And I did that, but nobody ever knew about it. I loved everything I saw deep inside and in the end I kept them to myself instead of shouting them out.

I no longer thought that beautiful things existed for others. I deserved them as much as anyone else. I treated myself to trips, records, art books, earrings, ceramics classes, dance lessons. These things gave me unadulterated happiness and pleasure. I was angry with myself for denying myself this before.

I thought my thorns would fall off as a result of all this, but they didn't. At the end of it all, my roots grew stronger, I clung tighter to my soil, my thorns grew bigger and bigger, and finally, when I least expected it, a big pink star-shaped flower bloomed.

My flower looked like the flowers Frida Kahlo wore in her hair, like the flowers Emily Dickinson wrote poems about. The flowers Joni Mitchell smelled while playing guitar in the countryside. The flowers Virginia Woolf put in small porcelain vases. The boundless tenderness in the eyes of all the women who made me who I am. My flower was made of the same material as their tenderness.

I had made it out of compassion for myself, without knowing it, without expecting it, without planning it. Now I had something beautiful too. I was like them now. Like others. However, my flower lived only one day.

I thought I would be sad and shed tears when it wilted, but that was not the case. Because now I knew that beautiful things take time, they require tenderness and patience. If I wanted to blossom, I had to do it in my own way, at my own pace, in my own way. No one else could give me that. And I was never going to be like anyone else.

I have never changed my opinion that the world is not a fair place. I know the world is not a fair place, I know what it means to give a pink flower that blooms one day a year while others bloom in all seasons.

But I'm not a tree. I am a cactus. I get my strength not from my colors but from my thorns, my roots, my trunk. And when I can bloom one day a year after long efforts, I consider myself lucky.

Because in this colorless world, when it is so easy and attractive to surrender to unhappiness, I don't know anything else that requires as much courage as persisting in choosing compassion every time.