She's Been Waiting to Meet You
On suerza, Viola Davis, and the strength you forgot you had.
The best thing you can do if this landed? Like it, restack it, and tell me in the comments what's waking up in you. These conversations are why I'm here.💙
March arrived this week, and I felt the first whisper of something loosening.
On Monday, I immersed myself in the annual Philadelphia Flower Show, where beauty whispered to my spirit and senses. I wandered through exhibits exploding with impossible colors. The tulips were so saturated they looked painted, while smiling orchids defied the gray Northeast winter, perched in the crooks of tropical trees. Every once in a while, a whiff of hyacinths filled the air with something that smelled like a yes.
Nature does its work silently, never breaking its rhythm. Not quite spring yet, but the promise of it. The way the light shifts ever so slightly, and your body knows before your mind does.
I needed that promise. Because the world has felt so heavy lately. Heavy in ways I don’t have words for, and I suspect you feel it, too.
And so, this week I went looking for hope. Not the toxic positivity kind — the real kind. The kind that tells the truth about the darkness and then points toward the light, anyway.
I found it in two unexpected places.
The first was Viola Davis at the NAACP Awards. The video came to me from my Pysanky egg artist friend Jenny, who shared Viola’s speech in her newsletter. Viola stood at the podium and said something that stopped me cold:
“The definition of hell: On the last day on earth, the person you became meets the person you could have become.”
I had to sit with that for a while. Not because it frightened me, though it did, a little, but because it cracked something open. All that potential. All the versions of ourselves we’ve quietly folded up and tucked away because life got complicated, or someone told us we were too much, or we got so good at being the good girl that we forgot to ask what we actually wanted.
For those of us in our third chapter, that sentence hits differently. We don’t have unlimited runway anymore. The question isn’t someday. It’s now.
Which brings me to the second thing I found — a word I’d never encountered before, in a publication called Living in 3D , from fellow Substack writer, Amy Brown.
Amy shares her joy at finding the word “Suerza’” (pronounced soo-wair-zah.) It’s a made-up word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, that blends the Spanish words for luck (suerte) and strength (fuerza). Koenig’s definition made me hit the pause button, just like Viola did.
Suerza: A feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all. A sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds.
There it is. That’s the antidote to the heaviness.
Not denial. Not pretending the world isn’t what it is. But this: you are here.
Against extraordinary odds, you made it to this exact moment. All the generations before you, all the near-misses and the heartbreaks and the losses, you are breathing and reading these words and feeling the first hint of March light.
The luck that you made it here. The strength to finally become her.
Spring doesn’t ask permission to arrive. It doesn’t wait until the world is less of a mess, or until we’ve figured everything out. It just comes, quietly and insistently, pushing up through the cold ground.
You get to do the same thing.
This is your season to ask: what version of myself have I been postponing? What have I been waiting for the world to settle down enough to become?
The person you could have become is still possible.
She’s been waiting to meet you.
Suerza. You have more of it than you know.
QUESTION: What’s waking up in you this March? I’d love to hear.
P.S. The friend who brought Viola's words into my life — Jenny, the Pysanky egg artist — is joining me on Substack Live on Thursday, March 12th at 11 a.m. for a conversation about creativity, expression, and making beautiful things in a heavy world. I'd love to see you there. Please mark your calendar.🤍
Wow...that was wonderful, Ilona. I feel less heavy already, and it's only 3:55 A.M. As I opened up the drapes this morning, I noticed the difference in the light already. I could see the silhouette of the mountaintops against the skyline...the light is indeed beginning to change. It lifted my heart. I am thankful.
Your reference to Viola’s message reminded me instantly of this quote from a book I loved and highly recommend:
“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library