At the Start...

You spend a lot of nights awake and shaking, full of a deep fury. You shoot arrows of hatred and they all seem to come back and attack your heart like boomerangs. Loneliness licks away at you like a wolf observing its prey. Some nights you can’t imagine a night darker than this one. Nights where the light is at the end of some very long tunnel and you’re tired. Your body is tired of moving forward. You spend a lot of time asking yourself “how can I fix this?” Because the thing is, you want to get better. You want to feel better, live better. People around you give you all kinds of advice - start exercising, talk it out, write it out, drink more water. But that’s too much. You handle it the only way you know how: by surviving. You sleep often, eat when you can, shower when you remember, meet up with friends when you feel up to it. Because the thing is, the thing that no one tells you is that healing is monotonous. Boring. Exhausting. It takes forever and it always feels like you aren’t making any headway. You have a bad night and it feels like you’re right back where you started. But one day, you get up before 11 and consider it a victory. Weeks later, you go for a walk and the fresh air clears the fog in your head for awhile. Sometime later, you’re sitting in a restaurant somewhere and it hits you that you feel lighter than before. Maybe it’s a small change but that’s fine because you go to bed that night telling yourself that tonight is not the darkest night. We heal the same way we grow: slow and quiet until we bloom.