Violet has given us a new literary challenge, and this week it comes from one of my favourite people, Maya Angelou!
“I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss” – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
And here is my response to the quote!
🥰🥰🥰
Mira had always believed her life would follow the map she drew at sixteen.
Stage lights. Applause. A dancer’s silhouette spinning in gold.
That was her dream—simple, bright, and shining enough to guide her through long rehearsals, sore muscles, and the small-town voice that whispered no one from here makes it big.
But dreams, she learned, rarely ask permission before shifting.
At twenty-three, weeks before an important audition, her father collapsed. A silent fall in the kitchen, a frightening ambulance ride, and suddenly Mira found herself signing papers instead of performing pirouettes. Her mother needed help; the family store needed hands; the house felt too large and too fragile to leave behind.
“I’ll go next year,” she told her dance instructor. “It’s just a pause.”
But pauses lengthen when the world leans on you.
She stacked shelves instead of choreography. She learned to read medical forms instead of new combinations. And at night, when she lay in bed, she felt the ache of a dream she had folded up and placed on a high shelf—out of reach, but never entirely out of sight.
Yet life, quiet as it was, kept offering small gifts.
She discovered she loved the early-morning calm of opening the store—the way sunlight pooled slowly across the counter, as if greeting her first. She found joy in teaching dance basics to her niece, who giggled every time she lost her balance. She grew close to her father in ways she never had before, learning the stories he saved for long afternoons—stories about the dreams he once abandoned too.
And one Saturday, while leading her niece in a wobbly spin, Mira realized something: the dream she lost had made space for a different kind of meaning. One rooted not in applause, but in connection. Not in fame, but in presence.
Years later, when her father was well enough and the store ran smoothly with new staff, Mira opened a small dance studio beside it. Not the grand stage she once imagined—something quieter, something hers. Children filled the space with laughter; adults rediscovered the joy of moving again; her niece became her star assistant.
Mira never made it to the audition she once thought would define her.
But in giving up that path, she gained a fuller life than she ever planned—one stitched together by family, community, and a kind of everyday magic she might have missed if she’d chased only the spotlight.
And sometimes, in the quiet after a class, she would stand in her empty studio and dance—not for an audience, not for a dream deferred, but simply because she still loved to.
Therapy Bits 
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