The Blessings We Try Not to See

I’ve been sitting at my desk for hours this morning, staring at the blinking cursor while trying to pull something meaningful out of a mind that doesn’t feel like it wants to cooperate. I’ve had conversations this week with people who carry an enormous amount of wisdom and generosity, people who care deeply about this community and who always leave me seeing the world a little differently than I did before we spoke. I’ve had those fleeting moments of clarity that usually open a door into what I’m meant to write about, and yet nothing seems to hold together long enough for me to shape it into something whole. Instead, everything feels scattered, pulled between wanting to offer something polished and powerful and wanting to simply be honest about where I am right now — which is tired, foggy, and trying to find my footing after a week that has felt heavier than I want to admit.

I’ve been wrestling with a chronic health issue that flared badly in the last few days, the kind that clouds your thinking and slows down every part of you that normally moves with ease. It has made me forget things I don’t usually forget, lose words in the middle of sentences, and I can feel the weight of that in my conversations. When you’re used to being articulate and present and engaged, suddenly feeling like your brain has turned to fog can make you question more than your health — it makes you question your confidence, your clarity, your value. Writing from that place feels almost impossible, because writing requires a kind of internal steadiness I haven’t had this week.

On Sunday, I was feeling particularly sick and completely depleted. I spent most of the day on the couch with no capacity for TV, no desire for music, and a kind of restlessness that felt like both my mind and body wanted to escape themselves but couldn’t. My dad suggested I try reading, and under normal circumstances I would have reached for one of the books stacked on my bookshelf, but even holding a book felt like too much. So I turned to the audio version of The Alchemist, a story I return to whenever I need grounding or reassurance or a reminder that life still has a way of guiding us, even when we can’t see where it’s leading.

I laid there with William Wallace curled up near my feet, looking thoroughly unimpressed and entirely too familiar with the story, as if he had memorized every chapter through sheer exposure. As soon as the narration began, I felt something in me soften. There’s a rhythm to that book — a gentle momentum — that invites you into its world without asking anything of you in return. And soon enough, the snow outside blurred into the background, and the story took over the edges of my mind the way it always has.

Then came a line I had never really heard before, even though I must have passed over it several times in earlier readings. I paused the audio and wrote it down because I felt it land so clearly:

“Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.” 

That line struck me because in the fog of this past week, it has been incredibly easy to focus on everything that feels wrong — the pain, the exhaustion, the frustration of being far less productive than I want to be. When all of your attention gravitates toward what isn’t working, it’s almost impossible to notice what still is. Hearing that line made me confront how quickly I slip into a mindset that prolongs my own suffering by ignoring the very things that could steady me. I could feel the truth of it immediately: the curse wasn’t the illness itself — it was the way I was relating to it.

Something shifted after that. I kept listening to the book, not because I suddenly felt well, but because it reminded me of the subtle ways life tries to communicate with us through instincts and moments and people. And I noticed that when I stepped into my conversation with Mike Claflin on Tuesday, I was listening from a quieter, more open place than I had been earlier in the week, as if some part of me had finally stopped trying to fight my own discomfort long enough to hear what life might be trying to show me through the people in front of me.

Mike came into the recording booth at the station, and before we even officially started, he let out a big cough that went straight onto the live broadcast. We both laughed, and the moment set a tone of ease that I needed more than I realized. Mike talked about his childhood in Taiwan, the constant movement between cultures, the ways he learned to observe people and adapt quickly to whatever environment he found himself in. What struck me wasn’t just the breadth of his experiences but the humility with which he carried them; he talked about his life as though it were simply what happened, not as though it were a collection of impressive milestones. And yet beneath that simplicity was an unmistakable through-line — he had spent his entire life responding to what was needed, stepping into the places where his skills and instincts could support others, and trusting the pull of those moments even when they didn’t reveal a clear destination.

Listening to him, I kept coming back to that line from Sunday.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse. 

Mike hadn’t ignored the blessings in his life — even the unconventional, difficult, or unlikely ones. He had followed them, even when they didn’t look like blessings at the time. He paid attention. And as he talked, I realized I was being shown a different version of the same invitation the book had offered me: don’t ignore what life is handing you, even when it comes in the form of discomfort or uncertainty or someone else’s story that stirs something in you before you fully understand why.

And then there was the other piece of this week, the one I have been grappling with quietly — someone from my life fifteen years ago reached out unexpectedly, reopening a chapter I had closed so firmly I no longer allowed myself to remember who I was back then. The message felt like a jolt, as though the ground beneath me shifted just enough to throw me off balance. It’s a strange feeling to be confronted with an earlier version of yourself you’ve worked hard to forget, especially when you aren’t feeling strong enough to process everything that comes with it. My first instinct was to push it away, to preserve the distance between who I was and who I am now, but the more I tried to resist it, the heavier it felt — almost like ignoring that part of myself was its own kind of curse.

That’s when I realized the blessing I was ignoring wasn’t the message itself — it was the opportunity to soften toward a past version of myself I have spent years feeling ashamed of. It was the invitation to offer compassion inward instead of withholding it. And when I finally sat with that recognition, I found myself pulling out an old photo of me as a child, standing in a field in a dress, holding dandelions with a smile so open and uncomplicated that it almost aches to look at it. The picture is blurry, but the feeling isn’t. I loved that little girl immediately. I saw her innocence and beauty and possibility without hesitation. And then I realized that every version of myself is deserving of the same tenderness — and that learning to see myself that way is part of the work I can’t avoid anymore.

So this week has been a lesson in listening — not just to the universe or to the people around me, but to the parts of myself I’ve tried to outrun, the ones that rise up at inconvenient times asking to be acknowledged instead of pushed away. It has been a reminder that blessings don’t always arrive with clarity. Sometimes they arrive as illness, as restlessness, as unexpected conversations, as reopened memories, as a man in a radio booth whose life reminds you of the importance of paying attention, as a childhood photo that makes you remember someone you used to be and still are.

I don’t have any grand conclusions to offer. I’m still in the middle of it — still foggy, still tired, still trying to find my balance — but maybe clarity isn’t the blessing anyway. Maybe the blessing is simply the willingness to stop ignoring what’s in front of us, to listen to our lives even when they feel messy or confusing or uncomfortable, and to trust that paying attention is its own kind of healing.

-Amanda