I Know What is Right

When I was a child, I would leap for joy whenever a teacher praised me for being smart, for being right.

I took the greatest pride in hearing my parents say that I was the girl they never had to worry about, for I never needed to be told twice.

And I can still say that I do. I know my way through what must and must not be, what to choose and what to refuse, the blacks and the whites, and have learned, too, of the grays in between.

But if you ask me if it still makes me happy, I cannot say for certain.

Somewhere along the way, life began asking things of me that blurred the lines of what I knew to be right. There were plans I had built with such certainty, only to watch them no longer fit the pages of my life; places I once knew so well, yet one day no longer felt like home; people I thought I had memorized by heart, suddenly becoming strangers. There were things I had once believed were meant for me, the right pieces of the puzzle of my life, until slowly, quietly, they began to fall out of place. There were choices I never wanted to make, yet life kept placing them in my hands.

I found myself standing before choices that had no answer written for me, no rule to follow, wishing someone would tell me what was right—even twice.

But some things had a way of telling me when they had run their course. I used to resist endings, convinced that perhaps one more attempt could change where things were headed. Yet some truths only become clear when you have lived them enough times. And in time, letting go became less a decision I had to wrestle with and more an instinct I had grown into, one that no longer needed someone to tell me what was right. 

Life has grown me into a body with slippery hands, one I could now call a master at letting go. I have fast feet that know the way out of spaces where ease no longer lives. And I live with a mind that knows what must be done, precise and unflinching, yet always at odds with a heart that insists on softness, hoping things might somehow find their way back into “being right.”

But again, I am smart. I know what is right. And this is what is right.

So perhaps, someday, all of this will make sense. Perhaps the plans I had to leave behind, the places I had to walk away from, and the people I could no longer keep close will prove worth the weight I carried in leaving them. Perhaps I will come to understand the quiet lessons behind every choice—that some decisions can be right and still feel like a loss, still settle heavy in the chest, still echo long after they are made.

And when the lesson is learned, when the pain has settled into something I can hold without flinching, perhaps I will leap again for joy.

Not because being right has become painless, nor because it means being smart or that it gives me pride, but because, finally, I have learned to trust myself when I know what is right for me.