Through the Fog

Category: Uncategorized

  • The Weight of Belonging

    I don’t know how to live in this world.

    It moves too fast,

    asks for masks I don’t know how to wear,

    demands a kind of certainty

    I’ve never been able to hold.

    I watch people move through it

    like dancers who know the steps,

    while I stumble at the edges,

    always a beat behind,

    always out of rhythm.

    The rules confuse me.

    The noise overwhelms me.

    And sometimes I wonder

    if I was meant for another place,

    another time,

    a gentler existence where my heart

    would not feel so out of place.

    But I am here.

    And even in the not-knowing,

    I am learning small things:

    how to breathe when the weight presses down,

    how to stand still when the ground shakes,

    how to let softness survive in a world

    that worships hardness.

    Maybe I will never know how to live in this world

    the way others do.

    Maybe my way will always look different,

    slower, quieter, stranger.

    But maybe that is its own kind of life.

    Maybe not knowing is still living.

    Maybe it is enough to stay,

    to search,

    to keep reaching for light

    in a world that feels too dark.

  • The Quiet Survival

    No one ever talks about the quiet survival.

    The kind where you wake up,

    not because you want to,

    but because your body betrays you

    with another breath.

    No one speaks of the war it takes

    just to stand,

    to sit,

    to pretend you are alive

    when inside you are unraveling thread by thread.

    There are no parades

    for the nights you do not end,

    for the days you drag yourself through the motions,

    your smile cracked porcelain,

    your voice rehearsed.

    The world only praises the dramatic victories,

    the visible resurrections.

    But no one claps for the silent battle —

    the choice not to pick up the bottle,

    not to open the drawer,

    not to vanish.

    Quiet survival leaves no scars anyone can see.

    It leaves you hollow-eyed,

    aching,

    wondering if endurance is a gift

    or just another kind of punishment.

    Still, it happens.

    Night after night.

    Day after day.

    An uncelebrated persistence.

    And maybe that is what makes it so brutal:

    that the hardest survival

    is the kind no one ever sees.

  • The Darkness

    The darkness is not just the absence of light.

    It is weight.

    It is silence with teeth.

    It is the place where time loses its shape

    and thoughts echo too loudly.

    I have known its language.

    The way it whispers,

    convincing me I am alone,

    convincing me I am unworthy,

    convincing me there is no way forward.

    But the darkness is not only destruction.

    It is also a mirror.

    In its depths, I see the parts of myself

    I tried to bury,

    the shadows I tried to outrun.

    It forces me to face what daylight lets me hide.

    Some nights, it feels endless.

    Other nights, I catch the faintest glow —

    a reminder that even the smallest flame

    can hold its ground

    against all that emptiness.

    The darkness teaches me this:

    it is not here to kill me,

    but to show me how badly I want to live.

  • A Thousand Quiet Fractures

    No one tells you that you could break your own heart.

    I always thought heartbreak would come from someone else—

    a lover walking away, a betrayal, a silence too loud to bear.

    But I learned it was me.

    It was the choices I didn’t make,

    the dreams I abandoned out of fear,

    the way I turned my back on the parts of myself

    that needed care the most.

    I broke my heart every time I settled,

    every time I swallowed my truth

    because I thought it was too heavy for others to carry.

    I broke it when I believed the voices

    that said I wasn’t enough,

    when I convinced myself

    that survival was the same thing as living.

    There was no great explosion, no dramatic ending—

    just small fractures,

    a thousand tiny betrayals of my own making.

    And by the time I looked down,

    I was standing in the wreckage,

    cut on the glass I’d been dropping for years.

    But here’s the part no one tells you either:

    the same hands that break it

    can learn how to hold it,

    to piece it back together,

    to love what’s left.

    And maybe that’s the hardest lesson of all—

    that healing doesn’t come from someone else,

    it begins the moment you stop breaking

    your own heart.

  • Unfamiliar Face

    I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror to try and find out where I belong.

    Some days I recognize the face staring back; other days it feels like a stranger is living in my skin.

    I trace the lines under my eyes, the curve of my mouth,

    as if the map of my belonging might be written somewhere there.

    But mirrors don’t answer questions.

    They only echo them.

    And the longer I stare, the louder the silence becomes.

    Where do I belong?

    In the history I can’t rewrite?

    In the dreams I’m still too afraid to chase?

    In the body I’m learning to forgive?

    Some mornings I leave the mirror without an answer.

    Other mornings, I carry the question like a stone in my pocket—

    not an answer, but a reminder

    that belonging is less about where you are,

    and more about learning how to stand in your own reflection

    without turning away.

  • I Am Not of This World

    I walk among the kingdoms of men,

    but my heart does not dwell here.

    The stones beneath my feet are foreign,

    the riches of this earth turn to dust in my hands.

    They build towers of pride,

    they chase after shadows,

    but I hunger for what does not fade.

    I am a sojourner,

    a pilgrim in a land not my own,

    searching for a city whose foundations

    are not built by human hands.

    The world calls me to bow,

    to trade truth for comfort,

    but I cannot kneel to what perishes.

    There is a fire within me not lit by this earth,

    a voice that whispers of home,

    a kingdom unseen yet nearer than breath.

    I am not of this world—

    though I walk its valleys,

    though I taste its sorrows,

    though its storms beat against me.

    I belong to another place,

    and until I see it with my eyes,

    I will live as a stranger here,

    with my heart set on what is eternal.

  • What Do You Want in Life?

    It’s the kind of question that stops me in my tracks.

    What do I want in life?

    For years, I didn’t know how to answer it. I thought the right response was supposed to be about success — the career, the house, the milestones people nod approvingly at. But none of that ever felt like the full truth.

    What I want in life is simpler, and harder.

    I want peace. Not the kind that means nothing happens, but the kind that lives inside me — steady, quiet, a place I can return to no matter what storms rage around me.

    I want connection. The real kind. The kind where I can sit in silence with someone and still feel understood. Where masks fall away, where I don’t have to earn my worth to be allowed to stay.

    I want honesty with myself. To stop hiding, numbing, or pretending I don’t feel what I feel. To live without apology for being human, even when that means being messy, tender, uncertain.

    I want to create. To write words that outlast me. To turn my pain into something that might reach someone else who feels alone in theirs. To leave behind a trail of truth, however small, that someone else can follow back to themselves.

    And maybe, most of all — I want to feel alive. Not just survive my days, not just check boxes, not just endure. I want to notice. To breathe deeply. To laugh without looking over my shoulder. To belong to this life while I’m still here.

    What do I want in life?

    To heal. To write. To love.

    And to keep learning how to stay.

  • Gravity Between Hearts

    It is hard to write about the thing that binds us most without naming it.

    But sometimes the word itself feels too small, too worn, too fragile for the weight it carries.

    So instead, I’ll describe it.

    It is the quiet pull between two hearts —

    a gravity no distance can undo. You can try to resist it, build walls, bury yourself in noise, but it lingers like an invisible thread, tugging gently, reminding you that closeness exists.

    It is the warmth in silence.

    When the conversation fades, and there is no pressure to perform or entertain, the air itself feels softer. Presence becomes enough. The world outside may roar, but here, stillness is its own language.

    It is the courage to be fragile.

    To hand someone the sharp, unpolished pieces of yourself — the fears, the mistakes, the shadows — and trust they will not drop them. Trust they will not run. That is where the miracle lies, in being held not because you are flawless, but because you are whole.

    It is both fire and shelter.

    A flame that burns without consuming, giving light to the darkest corners of your being. A roof that holds steady in the storm, reminding you that even when everything shakes, there can still be safety.

    It is being seen in your entirety.

    Not just the curated version you offer the world, but the raw and unguarded self — the mess, the laughter, the tenderness, the grief. To be seen fully and not turned away is to finally believe you are enough as you are.

    It does not rescue.

    It does not erase pain, or fix the wounds you’ve carried. It will not solve the war inside you. But it sits with you in the fire. It listens when words falter. It steadies you when you forget your own strength.

    It stays.

    And in its staying, it teaches you something you cannot learn alone: that sometimes the most powerful thing in the world is not escape, not defense, not pretending to be unbreakable — but the quiet, stubborn presence of someone who chooses you, again and again, without needing to say the word.

  • Forgiveness

    I can forgive other people easier than I can forgive myself.

    When someone hurts me, I can usually find a way to understand it — to see their side, to let it go, to believe they didn’t mean the damage they caused. But when it comes to my own mistakes, my own choices, the weight is heavier.

    I replay the things I did when I was lost, when I was drowning, when I was trying to numb pain I didn’t know how to carry. The words I said. The people I pushed away. The promises I broke. And even though I know I can’t go back, part of me still tries — as if punishing myself now could undo what’s already done.

    The truth is, forgiveness for myself feels harder than healing. Harder than sobriety. Harder than change. Because it means accepting that I am human — that I was human even at my worst.

    It means looking at the version of me I don’t want to remember and saying, you still deserve to come home.

    I’m not there yet. Some days I’m closer. Some days I fall back into shame, into silence. But I’m trying. Because I know forgiveness isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about loosening its grip.

    Forgiveness for myself is hard. But living without it is harder.

  • Finding Strength in Sensitivity

    For most of my life, I saw my sensitivity as weakness.

    I felt too much, too quickly, too deeply. A passing comment could wound me. A goodbye could feel like abandonment. A song could unravel me for days. People told me to “toughen up,” as if shutting down was the only way to survive.

    But here’s what I’ve learned: what I thought was fragility is actually a kind of strength.

    Sensitivity means I notice what others overlook the tremor in someone’s voice, the sadness behind their smile, the way silence can say more than words. It allows me to connect, to empathize, to create. It’s the reason I can turn pain into poetry, grief into art, loneliness into words that reach someone else’s heart.

    Yes, sensitivity makes life heavier. But it also makes life richer. I feel the sting of sorrow, but I also feel the sweetness of small joys — the warmth of sunlight on my skin, the kindness of a stranger, the quiet relief of being understood.

    Strength doesn’t always look like hardness. Sometimes it looks like softness that refuses to disappear. Sensitivity isn’t about breaking — it’s about bending, carrying, absorbing, and still choosing to keep your heart open.

    If you’ve ever been told you’re “too sensitive,” I want you to hear this: sensitivity is not a flaw. It’s your power. The world doesn’t need less of it. The world needs more of it.