The below prose, is from my spotlight that happened in the camp that I was in.
Before I end tonight, I want you to think about something.
Inside your body, right now, flowing quietly through your veins, is iron.
The same element that builds bridges.
The same element that survives fire.
The same element humanity used to build cities, railways, machines, and skyscrapers.
And somehow… a part of that exists inside you.
Your body carries strength in ways you don’t even notice.
Every heartbeat.
Every breath.
Every time you got back up after life pushed you down.
There was something inside you still fighting to keep going.
And maybe we forget that sometimes.
Maybe we spend so much time focusing on what is wrong with us that we stop noticing what is powerful about us.
We look at our failures.
Our heartbreaks.
Our insecurities.
The nights we stayed awake overthinking everything.
The moments we felt completely lost.
The mornings where getting out of bed felt like a battle.
But even after all of that… we are still here.
Still breathing.
Still trying.
Still becoming.
And I think there is something beautiful about that.
Because strength is not always loud.
Sometimes strength is simply surviving.
Sometimes strength is getting out of bed when your mind tells you not to.
Sometimes strength is choosing kindness after life has hurt you.
Sometimes strength is allowing yourself to hope again.
And every single person in this room has that strength inside them already.
Not because life was easy for us.
But because we endured it.
And here is the part that amazes me the most.
Stars spend their entire lives creating light.
Deep inside their cores, they keep fusing smaller elements into heavier ones, burning hotter and hotter, fighting against collapse for millions and billions of years.
Until one day… they reach iron.
And iron changes everything.
Because stars cannot fuse iron the way they fuse other elements.
Iron is where the fight ends.
The star can no longer hold itself together.
And eventually… it collapses.
A dying star tears itself apart in a massive explosion.
And in that final moment — after all that burning, all that pressure, all that struggle —
it scatters its elements across the universe.
Including iron.
The iron coursing through your veins right now…
was forged in the heart of a dying star.
Think about that.
Before there were cities.
Before there were oceans.
Before there was Earth itself.
Entire stars had to live, burn, collapse, and die… for you to exist.
So when you feel broken, or lost, or like your life is falling apart —
remember this:
The universe has always created beautiful things out of collapse.
Stars do not become beautiful despite falling apart.
Sometimes…
they become beautiful because they fall apart.
And maybe humans are not so different.
Maybe the heartbreaks, the failures, the grief, the loneliness —
maybe those moments are not the end of us.
Maybe they are the beginning of something new.
Because if the universe can take the remains of dying stars…
and turn them into people capable of love, kindness, courage, and hope —
then I think there is still hope for all of us too.
You are not ordinary.
You never were.
The stars had to die…
so that you could live.