It was Lenny who started it.
They were sitting together on a quiet Friday evening - the kind that arrives at the end of a long week and feels like a small gift - and Lenny said, without any particular preamble:
“Tell me something hard you’ve done.”
Scarlett looked at him. “What?”
“Something difficult. Something that felt, at the time, like it might be too much. And turned out not to be.”
Scarlett opened her mouth to say she couldn’t think of anything. And then stopped.
Because she could.
The first day of school this September. Standing in the doorway of the new classroom with its unfamiliar arrangement and its unfamiliar view, not knowing how the year would go. She’d walked in anyway.
The assembly. Four seconds of complete blankness in front of the whole school. She’d sat back down. She’d gone home. She’d had the days after. And here she was.
The wobbly friendship weeks at the start of term - the uncertainty of whether there was still room for her in the shifted group. She’d sat down next to Maisie anyway. She’d stayed open to Anya. There had turned out to be more room than before.
The grey Monday after she’d thought she was better. She’d kept going, even when keeping going felt like swimming through something thick.
The bench with Daniel. Not knowing what to say. Saying nothing. Staying anyway.
She looked at Lenny.
“That’s quite a lot,” she said. “Just from this year.”
“Just from this year,” Lenny agreed.
“And I didn’t know I was being resilient when I was doing it,” she said slowly. “I just thought I was - getting through it.”
“That’s what resilience is,” said Lenny. “Getting through it. Not gracefully, not quickly, not without the hard days in the middle. Just - continuing, because there’s nothing else to do.”
Scarlett thought about the assembly. Which had felt, at the time, like the most catastrophic thing that had ever happened.
And now, just a few weeks later, it was a story she could almost tell without her face going hot.
“Does it always get smaller?” she asked. “The hard things?”
“Most of them do,” said Lenny. “In time. The ones that don’t get smaller - you get bigger. You grow around them.”
Scarlett sat with that for a long moment.
Then she got out a notebook - the good one, with the blue cover - and she wrote at the top of the first page:
Things I have already done.
And she started to write.
🫶 Dream big dreams.