This isn’t a post about him. This is a post about you.

You, dear reader, are a human being. You are a person who breathes and lives and who is capable of the same intelligent thought that invented everything from the wheel to the iPhone. The fact is that you are here because at some point in history, two other human beings brought you into the world. My opinion is that you’ve made it this far for a reason.

You are not the only one who is here. There are others. Some worship the same God, some don’t. Some have more melanin. Some love different people than you would like them to. Some have embraced their true identity, despite the one forced upon them at birth. Some have worked hard even as their bank account reads E, while others lavish in mansions because they were handed opportunities based on a privilege they did not ask for, yet have anyway. There are almost 7 billion others, not a single one of them you, but each of them them. 

To them, you are a them. Each of us exists as an other in relation to someone.

Yet it is in our otherness that we are one. Our skin and our minds and our hearts and our spirits are each of them unique and other, and that is what makes this world we did not ask for, yet have, a rich mosaic of life. We are each a stroke in a painting that’s a few thousand millennia in the making, each of us a word in a book that’s still being written. Every one of you is part of humanity’s verse in history.

Black, white, able bodied, transgender, Islam, impoverished, Asian, two-spirited, Latino, cisgender, disabled, young, Christian, mentally ill, thin, wealthy, elderly, fat, bisexual, agendered— these and countless more markers are all truths for certain individuals. These unique elements build our identity and make us who we are, and they are all of them valid. Because you are the intersectional sum of all these things, you too are valid. You have others who love you, as you love them. And for the sake of each and every other, we must all have love for one another.

When hate enters your heart, it’s like clear waters destroyed by oil. It poisons you and all who drink you up. But love is what heals. Love is everything the light touches, love is what brings flowers to bloom and humans into being and puts wonder into the eyes of our children. We only make this world any kind of better or any shade of great when we see the value in each and every other. The individual stanzas that are our other is what makes us a beautiful poem when we all come together.

So as you are here, you with your beautiful other, remember others are also here. We are all here together, and it is together that we will decide what kind of poem we want to be.

(Note: Featured image is an original abstract painting by Elayna Mae Darcy)