“But,” she continues, “what I don’t like is this intense pressure for everyone to be fucking exceptional all the time. Or, no. This idea that we aren’t already exceptional. I mean, yeah, we have to not waste our goddamn lives watching TV and shopping. That shit has to stop. But the life you’re talking about: It’s beautiful. And fuck anyone who shames you for wanting it. This one life: It’s all we get. It’s not about the likes and the degrees and the bank account. It’s about the love, man. It’s only about the love.”

My heart breaks wide open then because I get it, I get it so hard: My mom didn’t mean that our family wouldn’t have been complete because I wasn’t enough—just Hannah. It wouldn’t have been complete because our hearts had more room in them, and that space was for Mae and for Drew and Ben and even my new baby sister, Pearl. And the little ones in my own future. I’m enough as I am, but if it were just me, I wouldn’t be truly happy. Because I want my family. I want the love.

“Fuck, Jo. Fuck.”

“And that, my friend, is what we call an existential mic drop,” Jo says.

I’ve learned something the Little Prince’s thorny rose never did: A rose is beautiful whether or not anyone is admiring her, choosing her. Shakespeare said, “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” And it’s true. Her beauty does not increase or decrease under observation—a rose is going to bloom whether you see her or not, whether you put her in your vase or walk right on by. She is not just. She is. And that’s enough.

Jo unzips her backpack and takes a plastic bag out. She hands it to me. Inside is an old dish towel wrapped around a bowl—the most beautiful bowl I’ve ever seen: grayish-blue pottery with gold-filled cracks all over it. Somehow delicate and strong at the same time.

“My sponsor gave this to me the day I quit the shit for good—a little over six years ago,” Jo says. “It’s from Japan.” She reaches out and traces the tip of her finger along one of the cracks. “It’s a style called kintsukuroi. When pottery breaks, the potter puts it back together with gold instead of throwing the pieces away and starting over. It makes the piece even more beautiful—and much more valuable.”

It hits me then, a memory of my mom singing along to Leonard Cohen in the kitchen while she makes soup: There’s a crack in everything … that’s how the light gets in.

I hold the bowl between my palms, the gold blurring as my eyes fill.

You are enough.