How is it possible for your smile to exist so completely while your heart is shattered in your chest? Tell me, sunshine girl, how is it possible for one to be both entirely heartbroken and wildly joyful about life? How do you thrive with a heart full of sad memories?

She exists and creates in her own world. A dollhouse of perfect safety, a treehouse of the wildest adventures. She exists for the joy of herself, dreaming in cozy corners and open fields. And the expectation, or rather simplified opinion, is that she can only be one or the other. To exist as a representation of both sunshine and catastrophe makes no sense and she wishes it didn’t. Wishes that the reality she has learned to mold under could be as simple as a black and white picture.

Everything she’s always known has been gray, complicated and confusing, but at the same frustration that creeps through, she holds gratitude in her heart for the complexity of the human experience. The heartache and the wild joy it brings.

For years, I believed that the capacity for someone to experience joy was matched by the absence of pain. That those who had a smaller mountain of hurt in their heart simply had more room for love and joy and adventure. I don’t believe that anymore. I think that those who have been hurt the deepest have the greatest capacity for happiness. They may not know it in the moment, or for years even, but the painful shape happiness out of the most catastrophic circumstances. They’ve become friends with joy, deciding to pursue it, to invest in it, to cherish it, because they’ve become well attune to the depths of valleys this life springs on them. It is not as though they have a mistrust in goodness; they recognize that when joy comes around they must pocket it away in their chest, nurture it, comfort it, sing sweet lullabies to the peace it brings. And in turn, those blossoms become the lifeline in times of torturous heartache. And it remains, because the broken hearted choose to let it.

Sunshine girl, meet trauma mads, you coexist for the purpose to love and care and comfort one another. The space of your own body is enough room for the two of you to thrive, the kindness of your heart is enough to love the heartbroken and the joyful. You have built the treehouse of your own dreams and softened the edges of your cracked and bleeding feet. You are both sunshine and trauma. Not one is more important than the other, but they each are deserving of the same attention and honesty. The complexity that exists in your heart is nothing but beautiful.