There will always be the days when living in your own body feels like inhabiting a bomb shelter, or being the person that stays inside the burning building when the fire alarm goes off. You are allowed to go out into the garage, lock yourself in the car, and take a few moments to breathe. You are allowed to break down in some shitty, beatup Volvo with the paint peeling off and press the heels of your palms into your eyes and wish there were some whiskey in the trunk that you could use to drown out every tsunami raging in your head, until those waves reach dry land.
You are allowed to skip the party and stay home in your room, listening to Bob Dylan records and singing along to Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, just as much as you are allowed to not believe that everything is alright, no matter how badly you want it to be true.
There will always be the Mondays when the panic attacks hit so hard and so fast you’d think a landslide was trying to erupt out of your chest-you are allowed to blow that landslide to smithereens with a stick of TNT; you are allowed to evict it from the house and yell at it to never step foot in your front door again.
You will have a heavy heart some nights, the kind of heart that takes more than a few professional weightlifters to heft up onto their shoulders. This is not always your cross to bear. So stick a needle in your heart and let some of the pressure out; listen to it deflate like a balloon and revel in the new feeling of lightness appearing in your chest. It’s alright to take a break from your own heartbeat sometimes, to turn the power button off and just soak in some silence once in a while.
Yes, you might never have that thigh gap and you might be getting cellulite or maybe your stomach spills a little further over your jeans than you’d like it to, but one day someone’s going to take your skin in their palms and run their hands over every layer of it, and then some. They’re going to find their way into you and open up all the secret compartments you thought were locked, and then they’ll peel you apart like an orange and you’ll find out there was stardust under all those layers after all.
Yes, you. I am talking to you. You are allowed to decline the invite to go out to dinner with your aunts and uncles and cousins, whom you barely know, on the evenings when every breath feels like a jackhammer plunging into your chest, and even pulling on a sweatshirt is like strapping yourself into a straitjacket. Let them go out to eat and enjoy the cheesy pizza and breadsticks themselves; it’s alright to stay home and eat homemade popcorn in front of your favorite rerun of Friends, curled into a ball.
You are allowed to hate yourself and feel like taking a bottle of pills during class. You are allowed to snap that rubber band on your wrist 24 times during chemistry if you need to, even if the noise is louder than an earthquake, if it means helping yourself feel better.
You are allowed to feel messed-up and shut-down and kicked-out. You are allowed to feel every single flaw so acutely that it’s as if they were pressed into a glass box and displayed for all to see at a museum, like dinosaur bones.
You are allowed to feel shitty.
But most of all, you are allowed to stop when you need to and take a breath. Breathe in. Breathe out.
turnnoffyourmind
baratheonpilled
gracieabrams
snowghoul
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
2087
areudirty
gummygunk
