Pay attention, or you will miss the beauty around you.

"Create something the world has never seen before."

Felicity is pictured with her art collection from a multimedia class she took in winter, 2023.

For an audio version of this essay, please click below:

Felicity is the one of my five children who reminds me the most of myself. She is introverted, sensitive, perceptive, and deeply empathic. She cares about justice and is affected by observing others who become targets of social aggression at school. Her inner world is rich, vibrant, and imaginative, and she expresses what she sees and feels through her art.

But there is one aspect of her personality that frequently astounds me, and I think, Felicity is a better person than I was at her age. The attribute of which I am writing today is this: her courage.

Last year, Ben and I enrolled Felicity in the same school Sarah has attended since first grade. This might otherwise have been an ordinary life event, except Felicity was in seventh grade last year. It was the first time she’d experienced a typical, traditional school setting after seven years of homeschooling.¹

Within the first few weeks of school, Felicity approached me with concern for a girl she’d met who casually mentioned that she often “felt like hurting” herself. I counseled Felicity on what to do: go to your school counselor and voice your concern after you talk with this girl and obtain more information. Felicity did speak with the girl, who shared more specifics about her home life, her self-hatred, and the possible means she had access to harm herself.

“Well, I think it’s time to get some help from the school counselor then,” I told her. “It’s important that you only tell a trusted adult at the school, though. The other kids at school don’t need to know about it.” She nodded. As the oldest of five kids, she understands the value of privacy.

The next day, Felicity walked straight up to her homeroom teacher. “I’m afraid she’s going to hurt herself,” she explained, and her teacher accompanied her to the guidance office, where Felicity shared what she knew. That evening, Felicity told me, “She’s gone. She left school. What if she’s mad at me?”

I said, “Sometimes people do get mad when we involve another party to help. I think it’s because they feel embarrassed, and maybe they were taught that they don’t need help. They might feel ashamed that their pain is brought to the light.”

Her teacher called me to ask if I was aware of the situation. I said I was. Her response: “Felicity is a very brave girl. I’ve never seen a student do something that tough.”

Remember, Felicity was a new student. And she was in middle school.

That takes gumption.

For about a month, there was no sign of this girl at school, and Felicity grew increasingly concerned. I told her that the adults had taken care of it and that the girl was likely receiving the help she needed outside of school.

One day, she showed up at her locker. The girl turned to Felicity during a break in the day and said, “You kinda ruined my life. But you kinda saved it, too.”

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Felicity and me with our red-white-and-blue on Independence Day, 2022.

I learned about the social constructs of the Alpha generation from my daughter—their slang, the way they used social media (not usually constructively), their disinterest in reading books, their involvement in sports. Since Felicity did not get her own cellphone until almost eighth grade, she often felt ostracized because of the way her peers used technology to either include or exclude others.

“I don’t get it, Mom. Why doesn’t anyone my age love to read anymore? It makes me sad.”

I nodded. It makes me sad, too, I thought.

Because our family milieu differs drastically from most typical American families, Felicity has adopted art as her medium for personal expression. She has dabbled in various forms: sculpture, watercolor and acrylic paintings, jewelry-making, paper crafting, and…writing.

I tell her often, “You are a far better writer than I was at your age,” but she doesn’t believe me. Today, I want to share a poem with you that Felicity gave me permission to use publicly. When I asked her to tell me what it means to her, she said, “As artists, we need to come together as one and create something the world has never seen before.”

They create a masterpiece.
They come together as one.
Dewdrops of color make our world seem
Better.
We ignore and move on with our lives
Acting like nothing happened.
Floating
Breathing
Living
Coming together.
We ignore it.
The colors darken,
Crying with shame—
Weeping black
Gray
And brown.
They wish we could see them.
The azure blue paints the sky
The yellow is shy
And blends in the background.
Green covers the grass in hues of
Olive and lime.
Yet we ignore.
Why even bother seeing the beauty
If you can’t see anything at all?

Felicity wants us to notice each other. She wants us to pause, pay attention to the beauty that exists around us—but also within us. Her poem is a call to action, a call to care.

What might have happened if Felicity didn’t notice the hurting girl at school on the edge of despair? Or if she never appreciated the way the earth and sky speak to her through shades and hues of varying intensity?

There are harbingers of hope all around us. They often come to us in unexpected forms. They speak in whispers, through songs, when we are still and silent, as we dream. They happen in smiles and hugs and wilted dandelions and, yes, even in our loneliness.

The single most lesson my brave daughter has taught me in her young years is this: There is no trial so great that the human spirit cannot transcend it. And there is no pain so deep it cannot be assuaged by the presence of someone who cares.

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If you liked this essay, please consider checking out these other, related articles I wrote:

1. Finding solitude: look within and look around—Returning to beauty allows us to become makers of beauty. “The habit of pausing and scanning my surroundings has served me well, because now I look forward to it. When my heart is laden with worry, as it tends to be, a signal in my mind tells me to stop, look outside my window, and wait until something delights me.”

2. Being authentic in a superficial world—Being true to ourselves often means taking radical steps away from popular thinking and mass appeal. “No one can know for certain what it means for you to be authentic, except to say that you have to access what you know to be true about yourself - and then honor that, especially when it is difficult and you are the lone caterpillar spinning your chrysalis, believing without evidence that eventually you will emerge from it a winged creature.”

3. The highly sensitive writer—Our words give space to an exhausting world. “A highly sensitive writer takes what stirs within her heart and gives birth to it on the page. She extends her heart-in-hand as an offering to the world, because she believes that what she conjures in the universes inside her is worth permanence and connection. And she does not eschew pain —hers or others’—but instead incorporates everything she feels and observes and internalizes into the creative work that, she hopes, will bring forth some shred of light, encouragement, and beauty to a dismal world.”

1. I’m not going to get into the discourse between brick-and-mortar versus homeschooling here. That’s another story, a long one, but suffice it to say that I spent over a year deliberating whether to homeschool Felicity as a kindergartner. At the time, it worked well for our home situation, because Sarah was in the thick of both inpatient and outpatient therapies and about six surgeries from birth to age three. Felicity needed to feel secure, with minimal disruptions, to be grounded in a familiar environment.