There is a particular kind of gift in being seen by someone who notices things in you before you are ready to notice them yourself. It does something to your relationship with what you are capable of. It makes the believing slightly easier, and the believing, it turns out, is most of the work.

I was in a season of beginning to trust that what I thought about myself might actually be true, and life responded the way it tends to when you stop arguing with it: all at once in a rush of color and possibility that felt almost too large to hold. Making this piece was how I processed the excess, how I gave all of that feeling somewhere to land.

Dispersion is what happens when white light meets resistance and scatters into its full spectrum, all the colors that were already there, invisible until something pushed back against them. The hard seasons, I think, do something similar. The grief and the difficulty and the things that felt like obstacles were also what broke the light open into something more complete. A spectrum is richer than a single beam.