The Sun is Rising

I used to think that life was something that only happened to you. You just had to survive it. I lived in a state of being on the defense, on high alert, surviving, sometimes barely. It was all I could do.

I have battled my way through pain, through cruel words that gutted me and clenched fists that broke my body. My innocence was stolen from me. At times, I was a girl surrounded by monsters.

The majority of my life I've felt completely alone. Invisible. Trapped. Sometimes in a prison of my own making. Sometimes in someone else's.

I read somewhere that "HOPE" stands for Hang On, Pain Ends. I often wondered if mine ever would. Hope became a light in the darkness for me. I clung to the belief that my life could be more that what I had endured.

I didn't give up, though there were many times where I felt like I was going to drown in the sorrow. Times where the weight of trying to unlearn all the lessons I had been taught felt like too much. Lessons of worthlessness, lessons that convinced me I was ugly, and unlovable, that I was unwanted. That I was nothing.

What I've had to do as an adult, is try to undo and heal the damage done to me and you know what? It's not fucking fair. It's not fair that for years, I could not sleep through the night because of nightmares. That my default has always been to blame myself for absolutely everything. Its not fair that I've spent a life time looking in the mirror and despising my own reflection.

I deserved so much better.

It would have been easy to become bitter, it would have been understandable if I was filled with hate and my heart had hardened. But I didn't want to become like the people who had hurt me. I couldn't let myself be like them.

I clung to that hope. Hope that I would find a way to heal, to grow, to write a new story for myself that was filled with a future of possibilities. I imagined that someday I might be able to live my life instead of merely enduring it.

I'm getting there.

I'm more than getting there. I'm burning through the monsters and leaving their ashes in my wake.