I know that you think this is never-ending and that you’ve hit rock-bottom, but this sufferance won’t last forever, just like the happiest moments in your life didn’t. It is hard to look at the bigger picture while you’re suffering, so maybe you shouldn’t be aiming to see it and causing yourself more pain with each failed attempt at it - Maybe for now you should only be taking baby steps to make your way out of this dark phase. Start with acceptance, accept your circumstances for what they are. You can’t make progress if you’re in constant denial of the harsh realities in life. Things that you’d never imagine happening - happened, and now your approach towards these situations is the deciding element of how much destruction they can really cause. Aim to minimise this destruction, aim to minimise the power and control these hardships have over your thoughts and life. Pain is inevitable, you will have to go through some of the most uncomfortable, difficult and painful moments in life before you get to the good part of it. Once you’ve opened yourself to the infinite possibilities of everything that could go against you, you’re prepared to fight the battle and rise above every barrier that stands in your way. So if right now, you feel like you’re at your lowest, just be prepared to find out how strong you really are, how much you can really endure and how many battles you can really win. Because in life, there will always be new struggles awaiting you, they’ll always be lined up as you exit one after another and the best part is, these struggles and small victories along the way will be the true source of how far you’ll make it in life.

Looking back, I realise how much time I wasted and how much energy I put into fighting battles that weren't mine to fight, how many people I saved from collapsing only for them to end up shattering my heart at the end, how I put myself second for people who wouldn't even put me last, how I kept my entire heart open for the people who didn't deserve a single corner of it, how I kept going out of the way only for them to leave me on my own when I needed them, how the world has made me so cold over the years, how the new me doesn't like to spend a single moment on people or things that I know wouldn't last or simply aren't worthy of it, how the world took away the kindness I was always so happy to offer; with all the cruelty it was rewarded with, how the world made it so difficult to give new people a chance into my life, to feel the joy of shared experiences, to simply just find comfort in knowing that I'm not wasting my time anymore and my kindness isn't being taken advantage of all over again, that all my love wouldn't be flushed down the drain like all the times it was taken forgranted.

If you've read "Milk & Honey" by Rupi Kaur, you probably know how beautifully she has expressed the four phases of life through her poetry. //

MISSING PIECES TO A JIGSAW

The hardest part about life is; that it comes with the promise of death and you live your entire life being kept completely in the dark about "when" it arrives to you or all the people around you. You've planned all the years ahead of you as if you can swear you'll make it upto that day, you make promises of a lifetime, you leave things for tomorrow without knowing what it brings. The truth is, life surrounds around oblivion, first you forget that life doesn't last forever and then you forget that it ever lasted. Once death arrives; people fall completely silent, all the traces of their existence eventually disappears, every tear shed for them and every call upon their name is only a shout into the void and all that is left are the memories. In the end, life is only dust and ashes or the dried petals of flowers you leave on someone's funeral.

It was 5 in the morning & the sun had finally started to appear in the sky after a whole night of heavy rainfall, I watched from afar as it forced its way from behind the clouds that obstructed its light. The first ray of sunshine on my skin felt like a spell that made me feel alive, rebirthed and cleansed of all the sorrow from the past.Maybe life isn't that complicated; I thought to myself, maybe it isn't about moments bigger than this; when I'm sat on the balcony with these people talking about life, embracing it, embracing the arrival of a new day, a new beginning. Maybe what makes life complex is the belief that it is supposed to be full of complexities. Even the sun has challenges to overcome and battles to fight before it can finally shine afterall. Maybe our struggles are the clouds that we need to survive our way out of before we can shine, maybe they are the union of thunderstorms and sunshines that forms rainbows. I looked at how everyone's eyes shined brighter than the smiles on their faces and in that moment i thought to myself and smiled; what else is life about if not this?

Hold onto hope, even if there's only an ounce of it left within you, sow it in your heart like a seed that you blindly believe will blossom the flowers that you desire for; wakeup everyday and water it even if you don't see any goodness coming out of it, have faith in; & make peace with the fact that growth is a process, for even the most beautiful of flowers take time to grow out of dirt.

Some journeys have no destinations, they are just that; journeys full of beautiful experiences. They are just moments that you always look back on and keep safe in the treasure box of your memories. No matter where life takes you, you'll find traces of them every now and then. You'll find yourself looking at an old photograph or dialing an old number or sobbing like a baby to a song that came up out of nowhere or finding a note in the pocket of an old pair of jeans and for a split second, you will feel the same excitement that you felt back then, you'll feel alive again, you'll feel all the love and passion filling up your veins all over again. The essence of these moments lies in the incompleteness of them. Sometimes, the yearning for destiny and the unreachability of it is what makes us fall in love. It is like tasting the oldest wine and staying drunk forever on the idea of the impossibility of finding anything of its kind ever again.

From a young age, we often see so many failed marriages or relationships around us, we often see so many couples just “settling in” or “trying” to make the relationships work that we are convinced at a point that this is probably just how they work, so we do the same. We choose to settle in and struggle to make our relationships work with people who we aren’t happy with, who are not the right ones for us. The truth is that our bad experiences and the bad examples around us make us believe that love is only in the movies or in fairytales and that it doesn’t exist and that real life relationships work differently or that they’re meant to hurt us when actually this is far from reality. We just need to wait for the right time and for the right person to come along, we need to wait till we find someone our souls connect with, someone who our mindsets match with, someone who makes us happy and someone whose happiness actually means to us, someone who loves us wholeheartedly and someone who isn’t afraid of sharing their life with us, someone who we would happily share our lives with, someone who loves us with all our flaws and imperfections. I was forced to believe that relationships are meant to be a struggle and that we have to settle in until the right person entered my life. That’s when I realised, we need to stop settling in for less than what we think we deserve. We deserve love, commitment and happiness. Your partner is meant to help you grow and make this journey of life more beautiful for you, your partner is supposed to stay by your side on all the good and bad days in life. We need to stop struggling with toxic relationships and wait for the right person. ❤️❤️

Well we only need the light when it’s burning low,

“One day all of it just hits you and you realise how much you’ve been missing on. We often look for happiness and peace in all the wrong places when it is just right there within ourselves. We look for it in people, in drugs and in clubs, we look for it in midnights when the rest of the world is asleep, we look for it in the smoke of cigarettes, we look for it in the arms of people who might not be there for us the next moment we need them and guess what? We fail to find it. The darkness within us only grows deeper and darker, the moment we place our heads on our pillows and close our eyes to sleep, the monster that we’ve been trying to escape from starts haunting us, it’s there in our head, no amount of alcohol, cigarettes smoke or music could kill it. We don’t realise that happiness is there all along the way, in those little things that we often fail to care for. Happiness is where we least expect it to be, it’s not in one place but in many different places along the way, the key is to see the beauty of those little moments or those places and feel the joy it brings. The greed for more or everlasting happiness leaves us in the middle of nowhere, because everlasting happiness doesn’t exist, it cannot be found, it has to be made and felt in all the little things in life. We need to recognise all the toxicities that take it away from us and we need to get rid of them, it could be a person, a habit or anything. Get rid of it, see the beauty of moments and live them to the fullest.” ❤️