When I first read about this year’s call for submissions, “The Art of Healing”, I honestly kept thinking back on that slightly-overused phrase, “healing your inner child”–which, to me, sounds the same as “get your adult life together” or “get a new therapist with higher rates.” I realize that, as a 20-year-old with newly-diagnosed ADHD and a tendency to bite off more than I can chew, I won’t be doing any formal “healing” anytime soon. It wasn’t until I (re-)watched Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017) that I noticed some uncanny resemblances between my life choices and those of Saoirse Ronan’s character. The final minutes of the film see Lady Bird wake up, evidently bitingly hungover, in a hospital bed positioned opposite a younger boy being treated for a much more severe-looking head injury. Somehow, the prolonged silence between the two seems more pitiful for Lady Bird, almost in a shameful way. 

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Being a college student during the pandemic, especially without the luxury of taking time off from school, has since resulted in the phenomenon of slowly losing a once-familiar work ethic to an insatiable desire to “make up” for the year(s) of socialization I’d lost to COVID. The outcome? Spending my Sundays Lady Bird-style: lost in an overwhelming cloud of longing yet also regret; nostalgic for a time that has not yet come. A Fear Of Missing Out that is best treated not by chugging water or taking an Advil, but rather taking a stroll to a nearby church. Not to listen to the sermon but rather to the harmonious sounds of a full choir of a dozen or so unique, beautiful lives. Not with any intention of sitting among the pews but rather entranced by the songs on a Sunday in April, only to realize that it’s Easter Sunday, and you’re no longer ten years old and suffering the worst Kinder-egg-and-jelly-bean-stomach ache of your naive little life. No, you’re 20, and you’re beginning to realize the only person to begin to understand this Sunday’s existential crisis is the one who held your hand to get you there in the first place. Thanks, Hope. And though I may not wake up to see you sitting in your twin bed across from mine every morning, I will truly always see your face.