The Thing They Cannot Take

Notes on radical remembering

Remember Who You Are

"There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” - Nelson Mandela

There was a photograph somewhere in my mother's house of me at four years old, standing in our backyard with my arms stretched wide to the sky like I'm trying to hug the whole world. My hair is a disaster, my shirt is on backwards, and I have this expression of pure, uncomplicated joy—the kind that comes from believing, without question, that existence itself is a gift.

I look at that photo sometimes and wonder: when did I start apologizing for taking up space?

We all have that photograph, don't we? Maybe not literally, but we all have that moment—or string of moments—when we moved through the world like we belonged here. When we laughed too loud and asked too many questions and believed that wonder was a perfectly reasonable response to being alive.

Something happens between that child and now. The world teaches us to dim ourselves, bit by bit. To be realistic. To stop expecting so much. To understand that life is hard and people are disappointing and dreams are for children who don't know better yet.

But here's what I've been thinking about lately, especially when the news makes it feel like humanity is circling the drain: what if that child was right all along?

What if that unguarded delight, that instinct to trust, that reflex toward love—what if that wasn't naivety we needed to outgrow? What if it was the thing we were supposed to protect?

I'm not talking about toxic positivity or pretending everything is fine when it clearly isn't. I'm talking about something deeper. Something that recognizes the darkness without letting it define the story.

There are people in this world who have given themselves over to their worst impulses, who seem to wake up each day wondering how much light they can suck from the room. They want us to believe that cynicism is sophistication, that hope is foolishness, that caring too much makes us weak.

They're wrong.

The most revolutionary thing you can do in a world that profits from your despair is remember who you were before they taught you to be afraid of your own brightness.

I see it sometimes, in the most unexpected moments. The way a stranger's face changes when someone asks if they're okay and actually waits for the answer. The way people instinctively reach for each other during disasters, how communities form around tragedy not because anyone planned it, but because caring for each other is more natural to us than not caring.

The way you feel when you catch yourself laughing—really laughing—despite everything. Like you've remembered a language you thought you'd forgotten.

That's not weakness. That's not denial. That's the part of you that knows something the darkness doesn't: that you were made for more than mere survival.

We get so focused on becoming who we think we should be that we forget we started as exactly who we were meant to be. Before the world convinced us to edit ourselves, before we learned to second-guess our instincts, before we started apologizing for wanting things and feeling things and hoping for things.

That four-year-old with arms stretched to the sky? She's still in there. He's still in there. Still believing that the world is wide enough for all of our wonder, still knowing that love is the most logical response to being alive.

The people trying to convince you otherwise—they need you to forget. They need you to believe that kindness is weakness, that optimism is ignorance, that the part of you that still believes in magic is the part you need to outgrow.

Don't give them that victory.

Every time you choose curiosity over judgment, every time you offer help instead of holding back, every time you let yourself be moved by beauty or stirred by injustice or surprised by joy—you're not being naive. You're being defiant.

You're refusing to let the world's brokenness break the thing in you that was never meant to be broken.

You're remembering that limitations live only in our minds, but when we use our imaginations, our possibilities really can become limitless.

You're choosing to fall in love with being alive, again and again, in a world that keeps giving you reasons not to.

And that choice? That stubborn, persistent, unreasonable choice to keep your heart open?

That's the thing they cannot take.

Unless you let them.

---

Image ©2025 Gael MacLean