370,000

How marvelous it is to be special, even when you are statistically inevitable.

At exactly 12:00 P.M. 19 years ago, my mother’s laborious work finally came to an end; her third baby girl was born.

I was born in the Grand Hôpital de Dakar. My parents and relatives rejoiced at the news of a healthy baby. Though it is estimated that approximately 370,000 births occur every day, they believed me to be the most precious little thing in the world.

How marvelous it is for one’s coming into the world–the very event which must happen for all others to follow–to seem so special when it is inevitable!

But that initial celebration has long since quieted, replaced by a louder, internal noise.

Very often, I find myself overcome by an impending sense of doom, as if everything around and in me were to crumble suddenly. I feel anxious and melancholic, nostalgic for a childhood long gone. I examine my distress as if it were a foreign notion that I must grasp in its entirety. Is it sensible? Is it quantifiable? But most of all, is it beautiful? Is my anguish deep–poetic, admirable, glamorous? Can it be transformed into something of value? Something worth being looked at?

The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier once stated that nothing is lost, nothing is created; everything is transformed. This principle is known as the law of conservation of matter and suggests the amount of matter in the universe has always remained constant. And so today, nineteen years after my mother suffered hour after hour to give me the gift of life, I choose to believe that my pain, too, will flourish into something worth loving.

My pain, yes, my pain. That which was once random atoms yet to be formed; that which transformed, billions of years later, into particles within my dear Milky Way; that which now exists as part of me, one among 370,000. That which was always and will always be. That which is ever evolving and changing will continue to do so, and I, “the master of my fate, captain of my soul”, will turn it into something glorious.