La Tortuga

I came across a meme a few weeks ago that simply said:

It’s like everybody forgets the turtle won.

I thought about it for a second, reposted it on my Instagram and carried on with my day. For several days after that though, I found myself going back to it and questioning what it meant and why it kept chasing my thoughts.

We all know the story of the turtle and the hare and if you’ve started following along with my notes, you may have realized I don’t like long paragraphs, so I’ll spare you the unneeded story time.

That being said, I am a very curious person and like to dissect the meaning of things and dig deeper into the concepts behind ideas.

We always seem to remember that the hare lost the race and that the turtle won. But what I don’t hear us talk about is what it took to get there.

The reunion process.

I often explain how my search moved rather quickly. I found a box at my parents house labeled ‘Adoption Files’, read through hundreds of documents, tried my best to process it, failed, and then came back months later ready to search.

With an address to a small market in Tejarcillos, Costa Rica, my biological mother’s name and an overwhelming amount of hope and fear, it took about 5 days for everything to unfold, that’s the hare.

But it’s the nearly three decades before those 5 days that get looked over—the turtle. For years, I wondered if I’d ever find my brother, if he remembered who I was or if he was even alive. Once I found him, I thought I was free from the past—I never thought about how it would stay with me forever.

Ten years after that reunion came my divorce, a separation that led me into needing to understand myself more and how the past was affecting my future. I never imagined how taking that first step into taking care of myself would ultimately bring me home.

We forget about the countless hours, talking to a healthcare professional, dissecting our deepest wounds and the aches we’ve faced, desperately trying to find light in them. We forget about the physical anxiety of sending a message, asking for answers and understanding that we may never get a response. The emotional solitude, when everyone around you is so happy and supportive while your entire world is getting turned upside down, minute by minute.

The phone calls. The disappointments. The glimpses of hope. The light at the end.

We treat healing like an event when it’s actually a process. And maybe that’s why the meme stayed with me—because it’s easy to remember the five days that changed my life, but I can't stop thinking about the thirty years that made those days possible.

Pura Vida