faith unfaded

Sometimes life just gets hard.

I’ve had a rough few days.

The details don’t matter, the confluence of everything going wrong all at once is something most people understand. It is the unyielding rip tide that threatens to fatally drag you under sometimes.

I was left with questions:

Is it best to hide your deepest struggles to spare others the pain of the inner turmoil you are already feeling?

Does sparing them cause the darkness to penetrate deeper?

When do you keep treading water and when do you ask for a life raft?

Am I truly powerless over the mental descent or is my mind lapping up the mayhem?

Will this madness ever stop or am I doomed to be its mistress forever?

Is my newfound awareness and voice for managing my mental health more beneficial or harmful to me?

Is verbalizing my mental needs merely a new form of self-sabotage, its suicide by cop power given freely and foolishly to those around me?

I slice and dice my own mind and its connection to the relationships in my life on the daily.

On the hourly.

Even while the rest of the world sleeps.

As tiring as it gets for those around me, they cannot fathom my exhaustion.

I cannot escape me; I try. I’ve sought solace in books as well as the bottom of a bottle. I’ve hit highways and counted cards. I channel energy into therapeutic projects and manifest success.

Yet underneath it all I’m still there, inescapable no matter how far I go. I’ll never outrun myself.

The irony is, I like me.

This version of me, this new girl…I searched for her for a long time. I couldn’t wait to present her to the world. I was finally the me I’d been destined to be.

I never dreamed that free me would upset so many.

Or that the missteps in my journey would have greater consequences.

This has been one of my hardest life lessons ever.

But it won’t change me; I’ll no longer lessen myself for anyone. Learning to like myself took half a century.

When I stop worrying about how others see me, I’ll know that I’ve learned how to love myself as well.