What do you do when you go through life being told you are weird, too much, and not what you should be? That you have no chill, you are trouble and you cause trouble, therefore you should not do what is different or difficult or unclear? That it is dangerous to think so much and deeply, to earn scars that might not heal pretty, to try for more than what is deemed reasonable and proper? That you should be more like your older sister, that your tolerance for pain and risk and embarrassment is abnormal, that you should listen to people who have never done what you are doing but still know better?
The first thing: realize you can choose your response.
You could shrink yourself to fit the criteria they give you. Being the butt of jokes around the family table at gatherings, feeling deeply lonely among people you love most, being told to not ask so many questions and talk so much about things that interest you — all that (and the like) drains the soul, body, and mind. it could be easier to learn to live with it, pretending it does not hurt, rolling with the punches as long as you are not dying. Choosing to go along with it, always being the first to throw water on your own fire, and choking down your laughter and tears because expressing strong emotion is viewed as immature and ridiculous by those around you — that way you would not have to deal with a bigger enemy than yourself, that way you would know none have killed you but your hands and your own tortured mind.
Or, you could rebel instead. You do everything they tell you not to do, throw your savings into sketchy half-baked dreams that never made conventional sense in the first place, spend years building businesses and projects only to burn them down at the end just because you could, drive to places and talk to people your circles would be aghast at. You zone out in conversations where people rehash your personal list of failures as social entertainment, closing your eyes for a moment to hide the flash of passion you could never get them to understand. You are not who they say you are, yet you cannot prove anything about who you know you are — the misalignment and frustration and confusion build enough pressure to implode and explode almost simultaneously. You turn your back on not just the beliefs you were raised with, but other people’s entire frameworks of being, thinking, and doing things. You ask dangerous questions and do everything you could to find answers. You bring your life and being into darkness in a desperate attempt to see whether there is yet light for the heretic you are, and hunger and thirst for the tiniest flicker in the far, far distance.
And then, one day, as if stumbling upon a trickle of water in the midst of a wide, wide desert, you find it. (Or it finds you.) A shivering flame.
You choose to follow the light.
And it shows you that the only way to live honestly before God and man is to think, speak, and act as an individual aware of his or her agency and accepting that it means vision, effort, sacrifice. It shows you that reason must be married to faith, though you might not attend the wedding in your lifetime, nor fully understand their vows. It demands you see that responsibility for your life goes beyond curating your reactions to life and coloring within the lines — it includes the why and what of lines you put onto the canvas, the particular blends of colors and shades your soul creates that others might not see or appreciate, the timing of waiting for certain brushstrokes to dry before putting down another. It tells you that reality is malleable; that opportunities are not just given but self-created; that your mind and body are not simply tools to be taken care of, but temples within and through which to live out poems and prayers. It asks that you happen to life instead of simply going through it. It forces you to make friends with Death and the demons within your soul, not to love them but to understand them for what they are and cease fighting against them in your crusade for Life. It burns away the dross of past selves and the false gold of future you’s, and grounds you in the present with your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds with the freedom of Atlas shrugging with the heavens on his shoulders.
And in the end, what matters it if your death is not glorious? You have lived without apologizing for your existence; you have cried over real, unimagined pain; you have laughed with your arms outstretched, standing on the edge of many cliffs; you have looked fear in the eyes and dared it to kill you even when your knees were shaking; you have climbed mountains that sometimes fell on you; you have striven, cared, known. You have as one who did not desire unearned wealth, nor allowed futility to stop you from creating beauty in the face of destruction, nor feared what man could do to destroy you and what you stand for, nor lowered your standard of being when you knelt to raise up others, nor shirked the responsibility of owning a complex mind tied to a sensitive and broken soul.
In short, you have been in the world as an image of God.
That — that! — is glory enough.