The Beginning

And this is how it begins, I think, The healing. Just a decision made, less a choice than a necessity: A sudden awareness that there is no path but this, and maybe it’s not just a decision, that makes it sound too easy, too simple, and there is nothing simple about saying to yourself, “I want to get better.” There is nothing simple about telling someone else, “I need to get better,” and “I can’t do this alone.” Just, ignores the complexities that lie within the losing of oneself. 

The twelves years of dissociation. The twenty-five years of habit forming, of impressionism, of my own existence being the friction that separates me from the human experience.“Life” spent resenting my own skin, my experiences dripping in the heaviness of shame, of embarrassment.

Paralyzed, stuck between the fear of living and the despising of letting fear control me. Wanting to get better and wanting to give in, simultaneously.

Wearing myself down little by little until the only relief is nothingness. 

It is here, when you forget to think about anything but surviving, when even if you were to try to imagine the future, there is no path imaginable that doesn’t add to the weight, no decision that isn’t exhausting, 

That you finally give in.

 And finally, instead of fighting between the two truths, instead of believing there is an option for a peaceful life. For an existence that doesn’t require you to drain your soul each night, wringing yourself dry like a towel left outside during a storm, watching with indifference as the last of your will drips onto the cold, hard concrete below,

You give in,

To the idea that nothingness doesn’t sound so bad, and “I won’t even know if I’m gone,” and the fear of death no longer outweighs the fear of living, and you forget that this isn’t normal,

And you wonder how everyone else can do it with all this weight, and instead of seeing your strength, the strength it is taking you to live every single day carrying the weight of the whole motherfucking universe on your shoulders and still survive, you think, “I am not good enough.”

Living does not come naturally to me.

I am left feeling as if my own birth was a punishment, not a cause for celebration.

Born into a cage of my own making, my insides rip apart my own being. My search for external love, for external validation, a desperate effort to prove myself wrong. Only giving more and more of myself away in the process. Each hit of dopamine followed by an increased thrashing, a toddler screaming out for more, begging for attention, terrified of being left alone. 

Anything in pursuit to not succumb to the weight of the only knowledge I’ve ever known to be true, the words I hear chanted throughout my bones at my highest and lowest moments alike: 

I am not enough.

I am intimately familiar with the ceremony that follows. The downfall: the temporary lapse in my ability to project myself as I would like to be perceived by others. An explosion, happening quickly, violently, unanticipated. The control tethered so closely to my soul, is ripped from the inside out, leaving my body ravaged in its wake. I am gutted, and I am hateful.

In the space that Grace is begging to live, where recognition and acceptance no longer exist, where a weeping soul is denied mourning for the emotions that have been silenced for so long, in the space that is begging to exist for processing, for progression, for feeling and learning and understanding, lives only hatred, only harshness.

There is disappointment, and anger, and shame, and weakness. I am angry that I was not able to withstand the rising tide. That I was not “strong enough.” I let the pleading of my soul reinforce what I have decided is true:

 I am not strong enough. 

And instead of listening to her needs, I let the process begin again. And so how it goes day by day, week by week, year by year until I have arrived here,

In recognition:

 There are only two options: 

There is life and there is death.

So for me, there is no other option than to break this cycle, to live. For this is not life, 

and to continue in this way would be to plunge the dagger straight through my own heart, as if fate herself forced me to do so.

So I stopped, and finally could say, “You have it all so fucking backwards,” and believe it (at least a little bit.) And instead of craving approval, instead of falling into the false comfortability of the life that has been set up for me piece by piece by others, I only ask for peace. 

For contentment, for the ability to acknowledge the fear that accompanies self exploration and move forward with it, reaching an agreement for companionship with the emotions I let dictate my life for so long. 

And not one part of me feels sure of myself, and I do not feel better, or less scared, or more capable, but I feel okay, for the first time in a really, really long time.

I can acknowledge the layers and layers and layers and be uncomfortable, but still feel hopeful, understanding there is no life in which light can exist without darkness.