Do you drown out your sorrows
with whiskey, cocaine,
a 3:00 a.m. panic
and a prayer for change?
Do your hands shake
when the silence gets too loud,
when your heart forgets
what calm feels like?
Do you chase peace
the same way you chased the high —
desperate, trembling,
half alive, half gone?
Because I do.
Every night I beg the dark
to let me start over,
and every morning,
I wake up still burning.
Grandparents are the foundation —
the quiet strength beneath generations.
They are the hands that held the family together,
the voices that carried stories through time,
the hearts that gave love without asking for anything in return.
They teach us patience by living it.
They show us resilience not through words,
but through the way they kept going
even when life gave them reasons not to.
When I think of my grandparents,
I think of steady hands, warm kitchens,
and a kind of love that didn’t need to be spoken.
It was in the way they looked at you when you walked through the door,
in the meals they made without asking what you wanted,
in the way they remembered the small things you forgot to say.
They built a world for us —
brick by brick, sacrifice by sacrifice.
And even now, when some of them are gone,
I still feel their presence in the quiet moments.
In the smell of coffee at dawn.
In the songs that remind me of home.
In the parts of me that still believe love can last forever.
Grandparents are the foundation —
of our stories, our strength, our becoming.
And no matter how far we go,
a piece of us will always be built from them.
You stay by my side while I’m working on me.
And that means more than you’ll ever know.
Because this version of me isn’t easy to love.
I’m messy. Guarded. Sometimes distant for no reason.
I disappear into my thoughts, into the weight of everything I’m trying to fix.
And still — you stay.
You don’t rush my healing or ask me to hurry back.
You don’t fill the silence; you sit in it with me.
You remind me that love doesn’t always need words — sometimes it’s just presence, patience, quiet belief.
I know I’m not who I want to be yet.
But I’m trying.
And your staying gives me the strength to keep trying.
Because maybe that’s what real love looks like —
not rescuing someone, not fixing them,
but holding their hand while they rebuild themselves, piece by piece.
So thank you —
for seeing the good that still flickers underneath the chaos,
for standing next to someone who’s still learning how to stand on their own.
You stay by my side while I’m working on me.
And that… that’s love.
I spent years believing I was unlovable.
Not because anyone told me outright, but because life showed me in small, cruel ways — the way people left without warning, the way silence always followed honesty, the way I kept giving pieces of myself and watching them be forgotten.
I thought I was somebody nobody could love.
So I learned to disappear before anyone could confirm it.
I became the friend who laughed too loud, the lover who didn’t ask for much, the person who said “I’m fine” even when I was anything but. I built walls and called them boundaries. I called loneliness “strength.”
The truth is, I didn’t want to be loved — not really. I wanted to be seen and still chosen. I wanted someone to stay after finding out who I really was beneath the pretending. But when you spend enough time convincing yourself you’re unworthy, love starts to feel like a threat.
I thought I was somebody nobody could love.
But maybe it wasn’t love that was missing — maybe it was me.
Maybe I left myself long before anyone else did.
And now, slowly, painfully, I’m learning to return.
Once, she wrote a poem.
Not for love,
not for beauty,
but because the ache inside her
needed somewhere to go.
She didn’t write to be understood—
she wrote to stay alive.
Each word a pulse,
each line a breath she wasn’t sure she’d take otherwise.
The paper never judged her.
It didn’t tell her to move on
or to smile more.
It just listened
and held her pain like it mattered.
She wrote about the ghosts she carried,
the nights that wouldn’t end,
the kind of loneliness
that made her forget her own name.
And when she finished,
she didn’t feel healed—
but she felt seen.
Even if only by the page.
Now, when she looks back,
she doesn’t just see ink—
she sees survival.
She sees a girl
who refused to let silence
be the last word.
Once, she wrote a poem.
And maybe that was the moment
she began to come back to life.
I Hate Myself
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Quietly. Constantly.
It lives under my skin, humming like an old fluorescent light that never shuts off.
I hate the way I breathe through days I don’t want.
I hate how my body moves like a ghost inhabiting something that isn’t mine.
I hate the weight of existing — the endless cycle of pretending, collapsing, rebuilding, pretending again.
I’ve tried to love myself, but every time I get close, I pull away.
Maybe because love feels like a lie when you’ve learned to survive without it.
Maybe because hating myself feels safer — familiar, predictable.
I’ve carved apologies into my silence.
I’ve bled forgiveness that never came.
And still, the mirror waits — patient, cruel — asking who I am without the pain.
But I don’t know anymore.
Maybe there’s nothing left underneath it.
Maybe I’ve become the echo of every broken promise I ever made to myself.
And maybe that’s why it’s so quiet now.
Because even my soul is tired of screaming.
It’s more than just the cut.
It’s the moment before it —
when the world feels too heavy to hold
and your own skin feels like a cage.
It’s the silence that builds inside your chest,
the scream you never let out,
the ache you can’t name
that demands to be seen somehow.
People see scars and think they know the story.
But they don’t see the nights you fought it.
The times you cried yourself to sleep and woke up still fighting.
The way you learned to smile so no one would ask questions.
It’s not about wanting to die —
it’s about not knowing how to live
with the weight you carry.
And maybe one day,
you’ll look at those scars and see something different.
Not shame. Not weakness.
But proof —
that you survived every version of yourself
that thought you couldn’t.
Because it’s more than just the cut.
It’s the healing that came after,
the courage it took to stay,
and the quiet strength of a heart
that refused to stop beating
even when it wanted to.
It surprises me how quickly the shift happens.
One moment I’m okay — maybe even a little happy — and the next, it’s like the air changes. The light fades. The room feels colder, emptier. The silence gets loud again.
I can be laughing, talking, even surrounded by people, and still feel that slow pull inward — that sudden drop where everything good starts to feel like a lie. It’s not dramatic; it’s quiet. A quiet collapse inside my chest that no one else can see.
I’ve tried to understand it. I’ve blamed hormones, exhaustion, trauma, the ghosts of everything I’ve tried to bury. Maybe it’s all of those things. Or maybe it’s just the echo of loneliness that never really leaves — it just waits for the noise to die down so it can crawl back in.
Depression doesn’t knock. It doesn’t announce itself. It just… arrives.
It takes your good day and turns it inside out until you’re left wondering if the good part ever happened at all.
And I hate how convincing it is — how real the emptiness feels when it returns. It tells me that I’m too much and not enough all at once. That everyone I love is just pretending. That I’m better off staying quiet because no one really wants to hear the truth anyway.
But I’ve lived enough days like this to know it passes. Maybe not quickly, maybe not cleanly, but it does. The good doesn’t disappear — it just gets harder to see through the fog.
So I breathe.
I remind myself that feeling alone isn’t the same as being alone.
That healing doesn’t mean I’ll never fall back into the dark — it just means I know the way out now.
How can I go from having a good day to feeling so alone?
Because healing isn’t linear. Because memory is heavy.
Because sometimes the heart still mourns the things the mind has moved on from.
And that’s okay.
The sun still rises, even when I can’t feel its warmth.
For My Aunt
I’m so grateful for you.
You’ve always been a strong pillar in my life — steady when everything else was shifting. You’ve loved me in ways that felt like safety, like understanding, like home.
You’ve been like a mom to me — guiding me, grounding me, reminding me who I am when I start to forget.
Thank you for showing up, for listening without judgment, for believing in me when I couldn’t believe in myself.
I know there were times I was hard to handle as a child. I just didn’t understand the different dynamics with you and how it could feel so much like home.
Your strength has carried me through more storms than you’ll ever know.
And I hope you realize that every bit of light I find along the way has a little of yours in it.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to when I was a kid.
Before the world got heavy. Before I learned how to hide my feelings behind forced smiles and polite lies. Before I started measuring my worth by how much I could give, fix, or prove.
I wish I could find that small version of me — the one who still believed love was simple, that people stayed, that being herself was enough — and tell her, you don’t have to try so hard.
You don’t have to be perfect.
You don’t have to make everyone proud.
You don’t have to carry everyone else’s pain just to feel like you matter.
Somewhere along the way, I started believing I had to earn love — that I had to perform to deserve it. But I wish someone had told me earlier that being human was enough. That just existing — messy, emotional, imperfect — was okay.
If I could sit beside that little girl now, I’d brush the hair from her face and whisper,
You are enough.
You always were.
You just forgot for a while.
And maybe that’s what healing really is — remembering what the world made you forget.
Through the Fog 