It's Been a Long 4 Years

It’s been a long road and long time coming. I’ve been in and out of therapy and mental states of wondering why I bother and why I wake up. Why is getting out of bed necessary and why do I aim to keep living in a world where my mind hates me, my thoughts scare me, and everyone just thinks I need to “be happy.” Nothing makes sense and nothing feels right. I am alone in a room full of people who “love me” and absent the entire time I am there. I do not have a hole inside of me but I understand that I am not whole. I have pieces of me missing and yet I can’t convince myself going to find them will even matter.

When you’re lost inside yourself and everything feels like a bad dream, bothering to attempt to heal yourself is a joke that you don’t find funny and a lifelong dream you feel you’ll never fulfill. I spent the first 36 years of my life wondering all of these things, feeling all of these things, and being told so many things that made no sense for me whatsoever. I’m not mad at the people who told me to be happy or just smile or be positive because for most of them that is all they know, and to be honest, they lie to themselves every day because it’s what people do. None of them truly understand how to love themselves, just like I had no idea. First you have to know who you are, accept who you are, and then learn to unlearn all the things you were told that were wrong about yourself and how you should live your life.

It's not easy, no one ever said it would be, matter of fact they always say, “it’ll be hard and that you should just buck up and push through life like everyone else.” They don’t realize that it doesn’t have to be hard, they don’t have to have a badge of honor saying they walked the hard road because it isn’t necessary. Your life can be easier, not devoid of issues or unfavorable circumstances, but it does not need to be purposefully difficult so that everyone else can see that you made it.

I’ve spent the last 4 years (since November 2020) finding myself, healing myself, setting boundaries and keeping them, letting go of the toxicity that ran through me, and cutting toxic people out of my life. Sometimes they don’t even know I cut them out, I just simply stopped. Not everything needs, deserves, or gets closure and that’s ok. I had to forgive myself for being the devil in other’s stories while still allowing myself to be that story line. Not everyone or everything deserves an explanation and sometimes you just have to cut the cord faster than you rip off a band aid and run the fuck on.

Life is about choices, you have the power to make those choices for what suits you and yourself best, regardless of how others see or feel about you and your choices. Not making a choice is making a choice, spinning around in the same circle expecting to be in a different place in 5 months or 1 year is crazy and will not work (believe me, I know). People will be affected by the choices you make; you cannot control that. People will be angry with the choices you make; you cannot control that and need not worry about it. When you decide to bring the light back to your soul, it will irritate the people who only seek darkness. Let it.

None of what I have been through in the last 4 years has been easy, there has been tears, pain, hospital visits, sickness, scary moments where I didn’t trust my own thoughts or feelings or actions, losses, gains, happiness, and a lot of WHAT THE FUCKS! But where I am at today was so worth every bit of it. Am I at a place where I am glowing and happy without issues or pain, no I have had a shit 2023 and it has tried to carry into 2024. But I am clear minded, I am clear headed, I love myself enough to know that I can pull through this. I am aware enough to know that I created the situation I am in by my choices which means the next choices I make can get me into a whole different situation, a happier, healthier one.

Saving yourself, learning who you are, and forgiving yourself, and loving yourself are all lifelong journeys. They are the reason everyone says, “it’s the journey that counts, not the destination.” The end game to all of this is death, so focus on the journey you get to take, with all of its crazy and pain and love and light and dark and messiness and happiness and structure and nonsense and everything that each breath allows you to take. The ride ends eventually, give yourself the right and allowance to throw your hands in the air on the way down the slopes and being scared on the way up them.  Everything in life is worth doing, you just don’t have to do it the hard way. Especially when it comes to loving yourself.