Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

by Aspen Matis

“But in creative fields, a degree is a prerequisite for nothing.” Annoyed, I took another sip of wine. Justin gripped the back of my neck, bizarrely soothing. “It’s not about the piece of paper,” he told me. “It’s the people you’ll meet, professors and connections. Even just from a statistical perspective, ignoring all the positive intangibles, you’ll be maximizing the chance of greater opportunity.”

ten thousand years ago, human beings were migrant—we were like the birds. The average human would see only about a hundred people in her lifetime and would know each one profoundly, deeply bonded. Today, humans in cities will see a hundred beings in just minutes, naming them strangers, a dehumanizing designation.

Perseverating,

I thought about how 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.

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.