"Anna!" my friend Kim cries when she spots me heading onto the ice. "Give me a hug!" She skips toward me in her figure skates and throws her arms around me.

"Awwww," I respond, returning the embrace. "Are you sad?"

"No," she laughs. "I am happy! I'm happy to see you!"

Kim is in her 50s. I am in my 40s. She and I and a few other regulars have formed a sort of a coalition of less-than-young skaters dedicated to the art. Our relationship is here, at the rink. It is one of laughter and curiosity and adventure. Our relationship is light.

And yet, because of a simple hug, I assumed Kim was sad. Kim doesn't pathologize my assumption, of course. Instead she shows me her new skirt and how it flares and scallops when she spins. She grins like a little girl. We are all kids out here in the ice.

I've never been much for hugging. When I was a kid, hugs were hellos and goodbyes, obligatory polite things done with close family and friends. Hugs were for comforting my mother as she bawled uncontrollably for incomprehensible reasons. Hugs were apologies, too, received after punishments that, at my young age, I didn't recognize as unwarranted and extreme. These patterns carried over into my adult life, into relationships I was too wounded to recognize as bad news. Hugs were exchanged when people died, too. That seemed to happen a lot. My life, for so many years, was an anticipation of sadness.

Things are different, now. If I still lived in that sadness it's unlikely I would have seen the significance of my assumption that a hug meant Kim was sad. Or if I had, I would have internalized it, turned it into a story about the broken girl with the broken heart who would never get better. I wouldn't be looking at it as I am now, with curiosity and an immense desire to repair that sad-first outlook.

Discovering my obsolete behaviors used to be a disappointment. These days they are unearthed treasures. An adventure. A puzzle. A chance to fix something! A sign that sad-first is already on it's way out.

Still not a hugger, though.

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This is my optimistic entry for the #monomad challenge, held daily in the Black and White Community.
Give it a try.
_{but don't give us a hug}

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