Selen Y. lives in our Brooklyn community.

There is a women’s homeless shelter that we visit every Tuesday. This facility is specific for women that also suffer from mental illness. What gathers us together is that we sing songs of worship and we pray a decade of the rosary. The women that I encounter at the shelter make me happy to be there because of their readiness to welcome a new friend and be fully present in the conversations that we have.

One day when we were visiting our friends there, I had the chance to meet a young woman who had lost many of her teeth from, what I assumed, drug use. She would usually listen to rap music on her own, occasionally run in circles, and pretend to be singing quietly and dancing.

While a few of us were in a conversation in a little circle, it came up that she was born on the exact same date that I was. We both got so excited to find out this cool information that we high-fived! But I couldn’t hold myself back from wondering how we have such different lives, even though we were born on the same day. It made me reflect on the fact that my life is not what it is because of my abilities and achievements, but rather, it is a gift. I didn’t choose the mother and the father that I was born to, neither did I choose the country. But everything that I have was given to me.