Margins and Margins

Except it’s your inner self to your outer self.

It’s your outer self to your inner self.

It’s your sadness to your happiness.

It’s your happiness to your sadness.

It’s every change you wanted to make to be who you are to who you became.

It’s every breath you never thought you’d never live to take to every breath you’ve taken since.

“Praise is for the bedroom, Cross. Not the training ring.”

and then not have the MMC have a praise-giving kink in said bedroom is a crime.

i keep visiting the Internet and it’s a terrible time, every time.

here’s an itemized list of 33 years of grievance against the internet.

I deserve to take care of myself.

I deserve to eat, to nourish, to listen to my body.

I deserve a living space that supports my mental health.

I deserve access to medical care and pharmaceuticals that support me.

I deserve to feel better.

I deserve to connect, to communicate, to feel.

I deserve to feel better.

Even when I’m tired.

Even when I’m burnt out.

Even when I’m behind.

Even when healing feels like it takes three steps backwards.

Even when my nervous system is fried.

Even when I disappear inside exhaustion.

I deserve to be well.

I deserve to be well.

I deserve to be well.

It’s up to me to give myself what I deserve.

me, the next day, exhausted: how could this happen?!

i hate being tired. i also hate having to go to bed.

i have learned nothing. (day 6 since lunar new year and i am already profoundly tired.)

but for the love of god, don’t ever let me scroll again.

my wrists ache with self-inflicted carpal tunnel and I’m convinced scrolling has fully outpaced human anatomy.

scrolling feels like slow self-harm, but with memes, while capitalism ate my posture.

Stopping your antidepressant feels like becoming yourself again. And honestly, it reminds me a lot of you. They say grief chemically alters your body on a cellular level. Grief-induced depression. And I never planned to continue your legacy of romanticized suffering.

I reject my inheritance of hard-earned generational trauma. It was a cycle I thought I’d already broken when I dodged your particular flavor of living. Turns out death leaves fingerprints on your nervous system.

I choose not to romanticize this.

So yeah — store bought will have to be fine. I’ll dose myself to happiness. I won’t let it break me.

I spent my teens becoming anything but you. I won’t let the demons get me now in my 30s just because your death ripped a hole in my skin and left me exposed.

I can’t let grief become my personality.

I love you. I miss you. I forgive you. I hope you can forgive me.

Pain tattoos while joy writes in chalk.

The body remembers impact,

not weather.

Joy leaves no scar.

Only evidence we have to believe.