Dear Heart,
I know you’ve been at your wit’s end as of late. Things have not gone where you expected them to, you’ve been frustrated, you’ve wondered why it is that every time you think you’re getting somewhere, another obstacle pops up in the way. Two steps forward, ten back – that’s been the theme for far too long now, or so it feels.
You think wasn’t it supposed to all be better by now? You think you’ve tried hard for long enough and that it would be really nice for the universe to drop a life into your lap, neatly wrapped in brightly-colored paper, bow and all. Because you’re tired, because it’s been a long winding road, because your heart sometimes feels like a massive black hole in the center of your being and you think it might start to swallow you whole if you don’t get a shot of happy straight to the beating middle of it all.
It is hard, I know. It’s been hard for a while. But I think you’ve been forgetting something, or trying to forget it, because it’s a rather inconvenient thing to remember all the time and honestly, it’s easier to let these things recede to the back of your mind when things are making you tired and sad and you’d rather just sleep.
This is just the beginning of your story.
This is the time before it gets good.
This is the getting to the good, the part where you slowly began to stand up, stretch, look around you, and marvel at the world.
Isn’t it big? Isn’t it bright? Isn’t it wonderful?
Do you think that sometimes, you maybe miss the point about what you’re doing here? I think maybe you do. Getting out doesn’t happen in one day, one phone call, as much as you thought that perhaps it did. It didn’t happen in the years you spent toiling through school, multiple jobs, bills on your own, living situations that didn’t work out, the insomnia, the night terrors, the sobbing into a pillow case behind two locked doors praying your roommates didn’t hear. Life isn’t neat and you don’t get to phase quickly from one point to the other. It’s a long, winding, messy journey, full of fits and starts and false endings. Life is full of shit sometimes, and it’s all interconnected in one massive yarn ball of connections and turn-arounds and there’s a time when you get rest and there’s a time when you work your ass off and they can come six hours apart.
The point of you being here, right here, on the grass-colored floorboards of this house’s back porch, here on the tiled floor of the back room of your work, here on the rug in front of the fire at your best friend’s mother’s house, hererighthere? The point is not that you’re supposed to be okay, or happy all the time, or opening up a basket of life abundantly that’s been neatly wrapped and presented to you.
This is the time when your character has been built, your walls have been scaled, and you have left into a new life and a new land. This is the time in the after but still the not yet, the in-between, the beginning of the rest of it all. This is the time when you’re learning to live again, not just get through the day, not just slide by, but to truly live.
This is the part where you open up and unfold your arms from around your middle and begin to dance again. Tentatively, one foot in the water and the other out, a bizarre version of the childhood ditty you once knew so well. This is the part where you let your hands fly out and encompass the sky just because that sunrise is so damn beautiful, and there will never be another one like it, and you made it to this point alive, and it’s a good day to breathe the scents of spring.
And you don’t care who sees, because they were not there to see you screaming silence into the dark. They cannot chart the lines between here, now, and there, then, and be proud like you are.
Those who do not know how far you have come can either learn, or stand aside. You are free to be in and of yourself, and it does not matter what they say. You cannot be brought down by it, and isn’t that the best thing? Isn’t it wonderful?
Isn’t it bright, here in this part?
You will still spend some days in bed, swallowing the pills dutifully each day. It will still hurt to breathe sometimes, not all the time, though, and isn’t that good? Isn’t that wonderful, that in the times when it hurts and you feel like each inhale is a stab to the heart, you can remember that perhaps tomorrow, or the next day or the next, you will wake up again and feel less numb and more whole and this will have been a passing moment?
You will remember this one day, with a sentimentality that only distance can lend. I know it isn’t fun in the thick of the bills you cannot pay, the screeching of your car engine that you cannot afford to fix, the almost daily questioning of your purpose and path, and the painful work of figuring out who you are and where you are headed and what you think and feel and what to do about it. It isn’t anything you’d wish on anyone, that’s for sure. But these days will not be like the ones that came before, the ones that distance cannot do anything but dull the pain of. And isn’t that something? Isn’t that something good?
I know it hurts still. I know there was that one night you drove home in tears, blurry streetlights telling you this wasn’t the best idea. You sat in the driveway and sobs shook your car, and you begged God to please, please, please make this hurt stop and stop quick. You were honest, not for the first or last time, when you said that if it didn’t stop you were afraid the sadness inside would become a black hole that would eat you alive. The glow from the lamp along the road touched your head, colored your hair orange, danced shadows across the windshield.
I think my point is this: now, here, this happens less and less. You breathe freely more and more. Every day that you woke up then was another chance to fight the battle to survive; every day that you wake up now is another chance to be happy.
You’ve been wondering where you’re at, and I’m here to tell you: this is the part where you learn to live again.
Congratulations.
Don’t waste it.