“Meg, I give you your faults.”

“My faults!” Meg cried.

“Your faults.”

“But I’m always trying to get rid of my faults!”

“Yes,” Mrs. Whatsit said. “However, I think you’ll find

they’ll come in very handy on Camazotz. anywhere and everywhere” – from A Wrinkle in Time

Ever since I was a wee tiny, I’ve heavily identified with Meg Murry. Perhaps it’s my personal stubbornness and lack of emotional maturity. Perhaps it’s the mousy brown hair that has long since been murdered by red dye, the glasses, the intelligence, but this was a character I could always identify with… with one notable exception. In spite of always being the outsider, in spite of people going out of their way to attack me and try to tear me down, I have always liked and loved who I am. That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the lessons of making your supposed weaknesses into strengths; if anything, this has bolstered me throughout the years.

I merely offer this as food for thought. In this, an age where we are constantly beat down with how terrible we are (so buy something to fix it! Gauranteed happiness!* (*not for you, for the person getting rich off of you)), it is vital to stop, shut down the rest of the world, and take stock of ourselves. I know that it is not in vogue to know yourself, and that it’s not an easy thing to do. It is in fact one of the most frightening journeys you can make, but it is eminently rewarding. After all, you are your own closest companion on this journey through life. To know yourself is to increase your quality of life, to know how to best utilize yourself and your core being is to life yourself, and thereby have other people like you better. Or not – who cares as long as you are comfortable in the company of yourself? To not know yourself is to spend life falling into the same hole time and time again, to be exploited and confused by others, to spend life constantly regretting everything you did and didn’t do because frankly, you didn’t know better.

That isn’t to say that you’ll always get on with yourself – we all find things that bother us, that are less than acceptable, that are exploitable. That’s why the things that we like and realize about ourselves to be ‘wrong’ are such a challenge. I myself have spent hours crying and agonizing over realizing the very things that bother me most in others are the things that I was in denial about myself (hypocrisy is the most popular one I see others in denial about, I add as an aside. We all do it – admit it, move on!). It does get easier once you start tearing down the walls within yourself, and once you come to terms with your ‘bad’? You’d be surprised to realize just how good it might just be.

I hope this finds you all well, and provides some food for thought. You are awesome, I am awesome – we just have to be willing to look inside ourselves to admit it.

‘Til next!