It's OK to Feel Small
Really. It’s totally fine.
It's ok to feel small. To feel limited. To contract and turn inwards. It's ok to ignore calls and close your eyes and think, fuck, I feel really afraid and the world is shit and I'm hurting. It's ok to mourn the small things and miss the little kindnesses of people who are no longer with us and feel, even for a moment, that you need your mother's arms around you right now and you just can't do this, not now, not at 17 or 28 or 35 or 49, not when you're reduced and diminished and baby small. It's ok to feel like you can't. Or won't. Like your voice is gone and all you have is a whisper of a self left.
This too shall pass. The world will expand again. We will stretch our bodies and apply aftersun to burned shoulders. We will hold one another in bed and on the street and at worship and in a restaurant. We will feel more than elbows and read more than emails. We will smell one another's perfume and sweat and remark that the heat is really something and complain about the wind, and we will weather the ache of carrying our love in spirit form now that bodies are at rest.
Remember the mustard seed and the mosquito. Smallness may seem like an ending but it's a pause, a breath, a waiting.
It's beginning