byChrisWhite – 2014

It began not with a revelation but with a phrase, unremarkable on its face and yet persistent, like a crimson ember buried beneath grey ash. Start where you are. Four words. They arrived at the cracked-open window of my consciousness unheralded, dropped like a coin in the dust, and stayed—clangless, quiet, increasingly heavy. Perhaps they were said in a sermon, muttered by a my mother with coffee breath and weary eyes, or plucked from the wilted pages of a self-help book left in the waiting room of a hospital. It didn’t matter. The phrase remained. Hung there. Waiting to be seen.

They say the beginning is the hardest part. I think it’s the part we lie about the most.

You imagine the hero as someone who plans, who readies himself, who waits until the wind is at his back and the field is dry and the soil is warm beneath the hoe. But the world does not deal in comfort. The world deals in necessity. And necessity quite often begins in the middle of pain.

So we begin here, not because it is easy or noble, but because it is the only place left.

There is a tendency in humans—a narcotic vanity—to preserve our suffering like relics behind a shadow box. We speak to it in the dark. We anoint it with our pouted silence. And we convince ourselves that in staying still, we honor those we have lost, that grief, unmoved, proves devotion. We become curators of the unhealed. We learn to prune and soften the thorns until the pain feels like home.

My brother Mike left this world without a note, without a curtain call, without asking whether I was ready to be the son who stayed behind. He died not like a soldier in glory but like a man carrying too many weights across a rotting bridge. I did what the remaining son does. I dressed in black. I folded flags. I nodded to casseroles, to stories that rendered him and his life into something easier to swallow. I told my son and our friends that he was brave. I told my mother he was finally safe now. I told myself nothing at all.

Because grief, real grief, is not loud. It is not ceremonial. It does not weep on cue. It settles inside the bones like winter. It hardens the joints. It makes liars of us all.

There came a morning, cold and thin, when I spoke his name aloud—not in reverence but in rage. And the name rang different. Not holy. Not broken. Just his—as if he had never belonged to any of us at all. I stopped thinking about what he’d done to me and began to wonder what he had endured. I began to unspool the myth of my own centrality, as if his death were some asteroid aimed directly at my earth. I realized he had been living a whole life I could not see.

This is the arrogance of grief. We imagine ourselves the axis of someone else’s suffering. But no one dies at you. They die from themselves, from their own tide, their own undertow.

I remember standing once at the edge of a pool, age five, all knees and elbows, my stomach alive with fear. I watched the other of my siblings flail, the instructors shout. I watched until I could recite every motion, every failure, every form. Until I was sure I wouldn’t fail. Then I jumped. I did not leap out of courage but because the waiting had turned to rot. The thinking was a wound. The doing was the balm.

That boy is still in me. He wears better clothes now, speaks softer, but he’s there. He waits. He studies. And he lies. He tells me to hold. Wait for perfection. Wait for the clean page, the sharp tools, the applause. He tells me I am not enough. He tells me I will fail.

And still I move.

Still I begin.

Because life does not wait for readiness. It does not ask for credentials. It demands witness. It demands that you arrive—wounded, foolish, uncertain—and start from wherever the hell you happen to be.

If not me, then who? If not you, then who? 

The aftermath, that brutal, beautiful word, isn’t just the rubble. It is the soil the fire leaves behind. Rich. Untended. Waiting to nourish another decision.

I tell you now, plainly: there is no single moment that will ready you for your life. There is only this one.

You will carry your pain. You will carry your guilt, your failures, your absurdities. You will carry the voice that tells you not to try. Carry them like a pack. Carry them into the daylight. Let them see what you make of them.

I did not deserve Emily when I met her. I was broken, unfinished, frayed at every seam. But I loved her. And I began to build myself, plank by uncertain plank, in the image of the man I hoped she saw. She loved me not for the man I had become, but for the one she knew I could be. That, too, is a kind of grace.

There is no shame in needing to grow into your own life.

There are days when I wake with the doubt already perched on my chest. I hear it whisper: who are you to begin this absurd plan? Who are you to try this overly ambitious task? And still I rise. I write. I parent. I work. I dare to call myself whole, even if only for a moment. I start from where I am, every single day.

If there is a secret to any of this—any of it at all—it is that your worth does not begin at the summit. It begins in the dirt, in the failure, in the breath you take after the cry. It begins where you feel least certain. It begins in the middle of the mess.

When Mike died, he did not take my voice. I gave it away. I wrapped it in guilt and shut it in a drawer. But voices, even wounded ones, will not die quiet. They itch. They rattle. And if you do not use them, they turn on you. Speak.

Say your name.

Say your want.

Say your sorrow.

Then speak again, louder, until your voice feels like home.

There is no blueprint for beginning. There is only motion. And motion is defiance. Motion is survival. Motion is faith.

You are not too late.

You are not too broken.

You are not finished, even if you believe yourself to be.

The road is not straight. It curls. It doubles back. It mocks your plans. But it moves. And you must move with it. And you’re glad for it. 

Each day is a liturgy of second chances. Each breath is a beginning. And if you wait for the thunderclap, the miracle, the sign—you’ll miss the miracle that is your own persistence.

So if you need a sign, here it is:

Start where you are. Speak your name into the stillness. Take the step, however small, however trembling. Start.

And when the voice returns—and it will—telling you you are not enough, that you should wait, that someone better is already ahead, tell it this:

I am not finished.

I am not done.

I am beginning.

Right here.

Right now.