I suffered so much.

SO much.

This memory just dropped.

For years and years I used to suffer for days on end, and often throughout the night.

There were hours and hours and hours of restless despair and anxious anger.

I was almost always suffering, either in silence, while trying to do my thing in the world, at work, outside, or out loud, at home, literally screaming at the walls and the ceiling and the windows.

I suffered SO much for such a long time, that it seems like most of that memory is deliberately hidden from me, as if the full realization of how bad it was would be capable of burning me to the ground.

I suffered and brought my suffering everywhere I went.

Days went by where every second felt like slow torture.

And I felt every second, every single one.

I couldn’t escape.

I woke up at 7 in the morning after a couple of hours of sleep, opened my eyes, and before I knew it the realization of the pain and anguish and lostness flared up, and I knew I’d have to face yet another endless day.

It was as if I’d made a promise to the universe to hang in there, but had totally forgotten why.

An important thing that kept me going was a bunch of routines, stuff I did to be distracted and occupied, and allowed me a bit of time to catch my breath.

Fifteen minutes of not feeling lost was an absolute challenge, but when it worked, it worked.

For fifteen minutes.

I suffered so, SO much.

But the strange thing is… that I can’t really remember why.

There was no apparent reason to be in that inhumane place.

The suffering was a thing by itself.

It was a pulsating, suffocating, toxic concoction of feeling lost, unimportant, meaningless, and directionless.

It was pain without most of the physical part.

It was the knowing of pain, the sense of pain.

The being in pain.

Mentally, generally, universally, in every fiber of me.

I don’t have a fucking clue how people can stand this, but we seem to be able to pull it off.

For me, it was like I’d been drowning in a dark ocean for decades, and was about to die, and die, and die, when the absolute last bit of energy I could find pushed me to the surface so I could breathe again.

The suffering eventually became part of the story, but its shadow probably helped me appreciate the light as much as I do now.

And maybe this has taught me and urged me to shine brightly.

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(Photo by @hisarahlee, for Unsplash)