My thoughts, as I was turning the lights off and tucking blankets around little snoring bodies, were dancing around the idea that once you hit your teenage years, (approximately the ages of 15-18), you feel invincible. You are finally starting to understand the world, and the little knowledge you have, plus an amazing confidence that you can do anything you set your mind to, explodes in your body and nothing can get you down. You can be faced with a life or death situation, and you can confidently make a choice, knowing that somehow everything will work out. This is the only time in your life that you can be this bold. You are convinced that the world is made for you to experience it. Naivete can be a very dangerous thing, but in this time it is an advantage. You have not truly met failure yet: in fact sometimes you wonder if it even exists.
You don't start off this confident. As
a baby you are completely dependent on your parental figures with no
abilities of your own. Slowly you become more independent, but only
in your own little protected world. Yes, at the age of 11, you can
probably fix your own (if meager) meals, amuse yourself with various
media (books, tv, games, etc...), dress yourself, put yourself to
bed, clean up your own mess, even briefly watch over a younger
sibling or a pet. In your small world, this is utter independence.
But it is when you grow into a teenager that you start to gain your
confidence in the outside world. It's your first trial run as an
adult, and you can't lose.
The invincibility is imagined, of
course. Teenagers die every day: some from accidents, some from bad
choices, some intentional. But in some ways, believing is doing:
there are stories every day about teenagers who do amazing things
that no one could have survived. I personally follow the idea that
if you believe something enough, it is real. Either because your
faith made it exist, or because it existed all along. But I digress.
Sometime as you stumble along in this
bubble of awesome, a person usually experiences their first love.
Not just a crush, but an actual love requiring interaction between
two individuals, no matter how brief. And this is where the first
crack appears.
Imagine your heart in an idealistic
fashion for a moment. A red, 3-dimensional puffy heart, completely
encased with a golden, glowing shield. This is a teenager's heart.
Your heart is strong, whole, proud, but it is also slightly immature.
The first time you love, you have to open yourself up to
vulnerability. You can't experience love if it is locked away inside
a golden orb. You have to cut open your shield. As the shield is so
closely connected to your heart, you end up cutting your heart a
little, too. This wound, although painful to the touch, also allows
you to love, and to bond. Your partner's heart, which has also been
cut open, presses up against yours, and between the two they staunch
the flow, and eventually tissue grows over both hearts and together
you are invincible.
It is a different kind though: you are
dependent on the other. Being alone reopens the wound. Together it
grows back together, and you are strong, but you now have a weakness.
Now let's say this love is not meant to be, and both hearts
permanently rip apart. Your heart does eventually heal. Your shield
is mostly intact, but there is a scar running directly down the
middle. You feel a little weaker, a little more vulnerable, but a
lot more wiser than you have ever been. You know pain now, internal
pain that no medicine but time can touch, and you can deal with it.
You can be brave about your weakness, and act in spite of it.
Time marches on, and your heart beats
strong. Maybe it meets up with a few more hearts, connecting and
then ripping apart. It hurts, it always does, but it heals into a
scar, and you keep going. One day you meet the heart that matches
perfectly with yours, and they connect in a new and solid way. But
for the first time, you feel your invincibility is truly compromised:
there will never be a time again when you only have yourself to
worry about. You will always keep an open wound held tightly closed
with someone else's heart. You need their love like you never needed
anything before. So you take your weakness, and you accept it, and
you grow a little braver about it. You know you can be hurt, but you
step forward into life anyway, knowing that it is a little more
precious now that you have someone else to live for.
For some, that is the pinnacle of the
story. It is enough to love someone and to be loved in return, and
walk hand in hand to eternity. But for many, it doesn't end there.
Your heart changes again.
You take your heart, and out of the
strongest, purest part, you cut a piece off of it. You bind it with
a piece of your partner's heart, and it grows into a child. Their
heart blossoms, new, innocent, beaming with love and beauty. Your
heart is permanently missing a piece, but it is not gone, just moved.
To compensate, your heart swells bigger and more brilliant than
before, but it always strains towards the missing parts. With each
new child, you cut one more piece out, and create more love. But
never again will you play with the idea of invincibility. Your
shield has vanished: your heart outgrew it when it pushed past its
borders to protect and love the piece that had flown away.
As a
result, you are more brave than you have ever been. You willingly
put yourself in front of objects, ideas, or people that would harm
the little pieces of your heart that have broken free to live on
their own. Even when you are the most vulnerable you have ever been,
and you stand to lose more than ever before, you are a soldier, a
warrior, a surrogate shield and protector. You do not take so much
as a minute to consider your bravery: your actions are instinctual,
and as old as the oldest soul born into the world. But even as you
step more cautiously through life, careful to keep watch on all your
scattered pieces, guarding their own vulnerability until their own
shields grow, you live with more love, compassion, and emotion than
you ever thought your little heart could handle. That's because it
has grown, through its experiences, into more than you ever could
possibly be alone. Your strength lies not in your defenses, but in the sheer power of your love. It is this love that carries us up and over the scars and wounds torn in our heart and sustains us, and by default our family, through the ups and downs of life, until it is time to lay your heart to rest. It rests depleted and sated, and having given its all, now lays down and slumbers with no regrets. The pieces, now grown into mature hearts of their own, are possibly bonded with others, or even creating their own pieces to carry the love on.
They are the legacy of your first injury, the first time you questioned your invincibility and cut your heart open to allow another in. They are the progeny of your first act of true bravery.
