and yet, she was loved
published: 2012-04-20How many photos have I taken in my life? For a couple of years, I had even taken the effort of sticking photos into albums. My student life is therefore neatly arranged by date. Those albums take up a lot of space. They are full of smiles. They have become my memory of those years. Not all the photos made it to the page, the rest are in some box somewhere in an attic.
My sister made me a photo album for my 40th birthday. Now, someone else was putting order to my life, deciding what was worth remembering. Before opening the book, I wondered who would be looking back at me from the pages. I discovered photos of me I had never seen before. Taken in a gentle way and carefully ordered.
An angel-reader recently said to me: “you should bring out the 5-year-old in you. The 5-year-old woman, that is to say.”
I look at the 5-year-old in the photos. That 5-year-old wasn’t always smiling or feeling she had to. She was just being herself. And yet, she was loved.