03/09/2025
This beautiful raw and honest post describes the reality of the dark night of the soul that the healing path demands of so many of us... and often multiple times too. If you are here right now... know that you are not alone... and you are enough exactly as you are. One day it will all make sense and you will see how everything fell apart because it had too... so you could begin to connect to the real 'you' beneath all the masks, all the conditioning and expectations of others. So you could choose you... and never abandon yourself again ❤️
***
"The bravest thing I ever did was tell the truth about my breaking, and stand there while it made a mess of my composure. I learned that courage is not glitter on armor but the sound of your own breath when everything inside you is loud with fear. I learned that it does not look graceful; it looks like a woman on the kitchen floor, hands shaking, heart pounding, saying out loud, I cannot carry this the same way anymore. That was the door I walked through. I did not walk cleanly. I stumbled. But I kept the door open for the next breath, and then the next.
Life, right now, is a chain of heavy days. Misfortune has been persistent, like rain that will not move off the coast. I wake up to unpaid notices, to grief that slips under the door, to memories that arrive uninvited and sit on my chest until morning tilts. I am learning to make tea for what hurts and still keep the water boiling for hope. I am learning that being alive in a season like this is not a performance but a practice: of getting up, of showing up, of telling myself that survival in slow motion is still survival.
There was a day when the box inside me snapped open and everything I had packed away spilled into the light. It was not pretty. My weakest moments rolled out like marbles across a public floor, clattering and clumsy. I thought shame would swallow me. But shame did not win. It stood there, tall as a tower, and I walked past it anyway. I chose to look at what I had avoided. I chose to be the woman who bends to pick up each marble, one by one, and call them by name so they cannot trap me anymore.
Healing asked me to drown first. Down I went, into the cold, into the pressure, into the noise that lives at the bottom. I met the versions of me I had abandoned when the world demanded I be strong. I listened to them speak, to their unfinished sentences and untouched fear. It did not feel like triumph. It felt like suffocating on my own history. But I stayed long enough to grow lungs I did not know I had. That is how I learned that the water that tried to break me could also teach me how to breathe differently.
I came back up not as a phoenix but as a woman with wet hair and salt on her tongue, blinking against a hard morning. The sky did not cheer. The room did not soften. The mirror did not lie. But the air was there, and I took it. I took it into my chest like a vow. I said, this breath is mine, and the next one too, even if I have to fight for each. I stood with my knees wobbling and still chose to stand. Some days, that is the whole victory.
The bravest thing I ever did was refuse to leave myself. I had practiced disappearing for so long that presence felt like a burn. To stay required a new kind of strength, the quiet kind that does not ask for witnesses. I sat with my grief and did not negotiate its terms. I let it cry. I let it rage. I wiped its face and reminded it that we were not enemies. We were two hands on the same rope, pulling toward the light.
I kept living in the smallest, steadiest ways. I washed the cup I had no appetite to use. I opened the curtains and let the ordinary daylight accuse the darkness that had been running the room. I answered messages with honest words: I am not okay today, but I am trying. I made the bed because chaos hates a made bed. I watered the plant that kept reaching for a sun I could not see yet and said, teach me how to reach like that without proof.
I stopped waiting for an audience. There was no choir to sing for me, no expert to declare me worth saving. There was only my voice, rough from crying, but still mine. I used it to draw a circle around my own life and step inside. I said, I am not a leftover. I am not a burden. I am not a rehearsal for someone else’s comfort. I am not a problem; I am a person. And when the world did not echo back, I echoed myself.
Worth revealed itself as something that does not negotiate. It is not a grade you earn, not a medal pinned to your chest by someone who approves, not a bargain struck on your worst day. It is the simple, stubborn fact of being here. It is the drum in your ribs and the warmth in your palms. It is the way the morning keeps arriving even when you cannot greet it. I did not find worth; I stopped arguing with it.
Night has been a long guest. It sits with me and tells its stories too loudly. I have learned to talk back. I turn on a small lamp in my mind and remind myself of each time I survived the hour that said I would not. I write letters to the girl I once was, the one who thought perfection was the price of love. I tell her, rest your shoulders. There is nothing to prove. If the mask falls, the world will not end. If something ends, let it. You are allowed to begin again without apologizing for the rubble.
I forgive the woman I was when I only knew how to endure. I forgive the yes that should have been a no, the smile that covered the storm, the patience that cost me too much. I forgive the silence that kept me safe and small. I forgive the echo of voices that were never mine but lived in my head like landlords. Forgiveness, I am learning, is not a gift to the past. It is a key I give the present so I can open tomorrow.
Some days, progress looks like a river that carries me. Other days, it is a stubborn current that drags at my ankles. I do not measure my healing by distance anymore but by direction. If I move one breath closer to gentleness, that is a day well lived. If I move one inch away from the old rooms where I learned to vanish, that is a map unfolding in my hands.
I let people help me without taking it as proof I am failing. I let a friend hold the story until my throat unclenched. I let a stranger’s simple kindness count as a sign that the world still has windows open. I let the community I did not even know I had bring soup and silence. Needing is not a flaw; it is a bridge. Asking is not weakness; it is a door. I walk across. I walk through.
The bravest thing I ever did was speak my boundary and refuse to translate it into something softer. I said no like I meant it and yes like I loved myself. I changed the locks on habits that kept me captive. I stopped assigning my heart to people who could not carry it. I chose the difficult peace of being honest over the easy war of being agreeable. I signed my own permission slip to live.
I look in the mirror and name what I see: a woman who has sat with pain until it stopped being a stranger, a woman who has learned to turn panic into prayer and prayer into action, a woman who still trembles but does not retreat. I do not need to be invincible to be impressive. I only need to keep choosing the truth when a lie would be more comfortable.
I practice joy without betraying sorrow. They share the same table now. Grief teaches me tenderness; joy teaches me breath. I laugh in the kitchen with unbrushed hair and a sink full of dishes, and nothing about that laughter is irresponsible. It is a sign that the light still knows my name. It is a sign that survival is not the ceiling. There is living to be done above it.
The bravest thing I ever did was decide that my future deserved me more than my past could claim me. I stood in the doorway between what hurt and what might heal and leaned my whole weight toward the might. I do not know every step, but I know the direction: toward honesty, toward steadiness, toward mornings that do not require me to beg to be allowed in.
I keep telling myself the most radical, ordinary truth: I am worth the effort it takes to stay. I am worth the water I drink, the food I eat, the rest I give, the boundaries I build, the love I receive. I am worth the rebuild on the land the storm tore through. I am worth the time it takes to grow a garden again where the ground remembers the flood.
The bravest thing I ever did was start living like my life belongs to me. I write it on sticky notes and on the inside of my hands. I breathe it into the cold air of early mornings. I stitch it into my days with small, faithful choices. I do not wait for permission. I am the only witness I need, and still, I am generous with witnesses when they come.
So here is my vow, clear and simple: I will keep choosing to rise even when the rising cuts me. I will keep choosing to love the woman I am, especially when misfortune tries to rename me. I will keep choosing air after the water, quiet after the chaos, beginning after the ending. I remind myself every day that I am brave, alive, and worthy of every breath I take. I am worth it, and I am not leaving myself again."
-Steve De'lano Garcia
