surviving through the deep and dark.

"you get to a point where it starts to feel okay to feel again,
and the midnight air doesn't suffocate you,
and the sky doesn't seem to hang so low anymore,
and if i would've told myself this a month ago,
that it'd all be okay,
i wouldn't have believed it,
but here i am,
standing in the middle of a forest with no one around for miles and a miles,
and i do not feel alone."
-m.k.


I used to love words. Not even just love them, but I was passionate about them. If I read something that intrigued me- it captured me. I felt like I was apart of it- and it was apart of me, and I had to write it down. To keep it forever, so i don't forget. To try and hold onto that feeling that I felt in that moment.  Words would literally make me feel alive. Writing them, reading them, creating them. And for the first time in a long time, this poem did that for me today. My soul feels awake. And I wrote this poem down. And I wish I could take what I feel inside right now and give a piece of it to all of you so you could understand how real this is for me. Because this poem is me. And i've been away for a while. Trying to rebuild myself from a long dark road of anxiety and depression. Because it broke me. More broken than I've ever been before. And i'm not going to be dramatic but I'm not going to sugar coat it either because that's not being real, and I'm being real.

I used to be able to write about pain. I used to be able to turn my dark feelings inside of me into words. It was an escape.  I was turning something dark into something beautiful. And I think that's why I love words so much. And honestly, I love honest- real- true- broken- dark- unedited words. Because we all feel that way sometimes. At least, in my mind I think we do. That at some point we all feel broken down and lost. But no one likes to talk about it. No one likes to talk about their true feelings because of what ifs. What if people will judge me? What if no one understands? What if I open up and no one can respond to it how I hope it would? What if no one takes me seriously? What if I am alone? What if I'm a lost cause?

And I couldn't handle the way I was feeling. I couldn't get myself to write it down. I couldn't get myself to speak about it. I couldn't get myself to come to grips with how I was really feeling. Because it was terrifying. And if I spoke about it, wrote about it, talked about it that would be making it real. And I didn't want it to be real anymore. I didn't want to have the crippling anxiety and the devastating depression. I didn't want to be that person. I wanted the person who I used to be but I literally could NOT get to her. No matter how I wanted to be myself, no matter how I wanted to do the things I used to do and say the things I used to say and think the things I used to think I COULD NOT. Because I was broken and the only one that could put myself back together was me and I did not know where all the pieces were hiding. I searched for them, I did, but they were hidden for so long. Almost an entire year of not knowing who you were to the realest and truest interpretation of that.

I think we don't like to talk about how we feel sometimes, because we don't want to take the chance of opening up and not being able to find someone who feels like we feel. That we won't be able to find someone who has the same soul as us. Someone who knows your pain because at one point it was their own. It's scary. But recently I have realized that sometimes that's what we all need. To have someone be brave enough to open up and be raw and say the things that we already think. To scream out the insecurities and worries and thoughts that we all have had at some point. To say the words that you have lived through. And survived. Because we are humans and we have to survive. Everything we do in this life is to survive. And when you get to the point where survival isn't important to you and you can't survive- what then. So, we survive. And hope that others choose to survive. And we live our lives surviving for ourselves and surviving to help others and to influence others survival.

So- if you're at a point in your life where you feel like you can't get through it. That the pain is endless. That the anxiety is unmanageable. That life is too harsh and too dark. That the depression has taken over your life and become who you are. That you truly believe you can't get back to happiness and hope and who you were at one point- or who you want to be. You can. And you might not believe it  now, but you literally CAN. And sometime you just have to wait. Because time heals. Eventually something clicks. Eventually you find what you need. And you rebuild yourself. Even if it is from ground 0, you rebuild and keep building and never stop. And if you don't get to that point you keep trying. And down the road, think of all the times you didn't think you could make it through. And you DID. Depend on those times. Because we are all survivors if we choose to be. We can do hard things because life is tough but so are you.

xoxo,
Bailey