Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

by Aspen Matis

an admission of uncertainty is so often, in our culture, seen as weakness. Yet it is only when a mind admits I do not know that it becomes open to unseen possibility, and honest inquiry. It’s as if discovery becomes possible only when the fixed channels of one’s mind become electric, charged with the untamed energy of wonder. In this way, humility is the necessary precondition for all learning.

“When we remember to stop struggling, we rediscover we are floating. Trust the water, it will carry you.”

And there is real benefit to new adventure and to fresh space, solo. Time and tangible distance can give a person the opportunity to think with sharper lucidity—unfiltered and undirected by the thoughts of everybody else. But “escaping” via complete and total bailing to “find” oneself can also be a mode of withdrawing from the world—seductive, but ultimately cyclic.

In grief, we find a new view—a fresh perspective, which organically generates fresh expansion: personal revolution. Because in the wake of devastation, growth becomes the only survival option. In this way, loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.