I love this part…..I call it “The Becoming”. To those of us who have been given for many of the days of our journey, burdens that make our heart break in what seems to be a condition and not an event…. who love so deeply and dream with such abandon for fairy tales and happy endings….. who have the hands that hold a million other hands in their sorrow and comfort the world….. The Becoming is that time that only we are privileged to. It is that time that after our dreams, that every bit of gratitude we could muster were praised with, have been swept away in ashes we watched burn as we prayed over and over for them….. please, please don’t. The desperation that we feel in these moments where something we loved so deeply slips away and the fear that nothing so precious will ever, ever come again are replaced by a person who once again “becomes” someone. A strength begins to replace the pain and a determination that is the force that moves every mountain begins to surge. A sure knowledge that our new journey has begun and those beautiful moments in life that only people like us experience are here. The pain of an empathic soul….. it’s one of our gifts to the world because we bare it. But the trade off is the miracle of who we are. “The Becoming” is when I remember who I am. And I am Brandy, and my words can lift a broken person up in my love and give them a reason to try. My words can turn a life headed in despair to nothingness around to chasing something they never knew they wanted. And a million other tiny little things that we see in the beauty of every smile we leave with our kind words. And I know “The Becoming” is well under way because I made those grandiose statements about myself without one single bit of an urge to delete them because I know that’s who I am. And in this particular version of me I seem to have found all those moments in my life where love filled my heart so deeply that it made everything worth it. I feel Annie. I feel my Gramps. I feel my Uncle Doug. I feel Hunter. And Abbie is standing off in the back but she’s here…… And my Bub- always front and center; grinning at his BranBran cause he already knew we’d get here. And so the gifts that replace our pain, the lesson that comes shining through….. love never dies. And the way we honor it is our decision….. to mourn or to celebrate. To keep it alive or to bury it till the agony suffocates it. Love big and never stop. Find the joy, search endlessly . Turn your face toward the sun and gulp it in. Its a beautiful thing to know this woman I’m becoming- Hey everybody, I’m Brandy.