Why am I so afraid to heal? Why is it that every time I start to get a little better, I let myself slip back down? It's like I'm so conditioned by this state of being that every molecule in my body has been corrupted, a mutation of cells caused by mental illness.
It's hard to explain. What, you may ask? And the answer is everything. Every explanation I try to offer others is a question I have already posed to myself a thousand times.
It's not that I'm sad all the time (I am). It's that even in the moments I feel happy, there's this constant undercurrent just below the surface. The question: how can I be happy and sad at the same time?
I live my life holding my breath. It's a game of breath-play. When it takes over... it being my mind, I hold my breath, waiting for it to loosen its grip. If I can hold on just a little longer, I know it will ease. And like it know it will, it does. But that isn't the problem.
The problem is, even when its nails retract from my flesh, I count 1...2...3... and drag in as much air as I can. But this time it isn't to hold on; it to hold on to. To cling to the moment of okay, because I know, like always, the slip will come and ill begin my slow decent back into the place where I will once again count, 1...2...3... and hold on.
I’m not sure how much longer I can do this. My lungs are tired, overworked, never resting, never given a moment of ease.
And the hardest part is explaining it to others, they say not to carry these burdens alone but when I try and share the load, the weight doubles.
I’ve told my papa I'm tired, I need help, I'm sad. He looked at me and said, “you don't look sad”.
I’ve tried to talk to my mum, but every time I bring it up, she changes the subject, as though my pain is too heavy to hold, even for just a moment.
I've tried talking to my sister, but I can see in her eyes she's tired of hearing it, tired of me circling the same confessions. And I don't blame her. If I were her, I would be exhausted too.
You see, I love my family. I love them so much that I sacrificed myself to keep them comfortable, silenced my needs until I ended up here gasping and drowning in silence.
The thing is nobody made me do it. Nobody asked me to carry that weight. Which means there's no one to blame but me.
And yet, even with all of them around me, I feel loneliest in their presence. The truth is, I feel the least lonely when I'm alone. Thats why I dream of moving somewhere no one knows me. Somewhere with no crutches, no safety nests, no expectations. Just me, stripped back to breath and bone, trying... maybe for the first time, to learn what it feels like to breath without fear.
But then I wonder, would it really be different somewhere else? Or would I carry this weight with me, folded neatly into my suite case, tucked into the lining of my skin? Because the truth is, it doesn't live in my room or my family or even this town. It lives in me. And that terrifies me more than anything else.
Because if it lives in me, then there is no escape. There is no running far enough, no starting fresh enough, no vanishing act that will cut me free.
And yet, somewhere deep inside there's this whisper. Maybe healing isn't about escape. Maybe it's about learning how to stop holding my breath, even when the grip tightens, even when I want nothing more than to disappear into the shadows of myself.
But that's the scariest part, isn't it? To let go. To stop clinging to pain as though it's the only proof I exist. Because without it... who am I?
I'm afraid healing will make me unrecognizable, not to others... but to myself. I've lived so long in this version of me that I don't know if there is anything else beneath the rubble. What if I dig and dig and find nothing? What if the silence that follows the pain is worse than the pain itself?
Still... there's another possibility. What if buried somewhere in all of this, there is a self I've never met before, someone who can breathe without counting, someone who can feel joy without fear of its expiration?
I don't know if I believe in that person yet. But maybe that's what healing really is. Not the absence of pain, but the possibility of discovering myself beyond it.
And maybe, just maybe I'm allowed to take one shaky breath at a time.
This is where the problem complexifies, I don't trust myself I don't trust that I can carry myself there my arms are weak, bones fragile. I fear if I let out one shaky exhale it will be my last.
You see the greatest disappointment in my life has been myself. I've let myself down time and time again and I don't think I will survive the next repeat of this cycle.
What if joy is not a bright flame, but a flicker, and I, clumsy and desperate smother it with my own hands in the effort to hold it?
I think of myself as a house long abandoned. Walls lined with ivy, windows fractured by time. And yet, somewhere deep inside a single lightbulb still hums, quiet, stubborn casting just enough glow to remind me that I'm not only ruin.
And yet, in the same breath I know that my mental health will catch up to me one day, I've accepted that I won't survive it, it's not a matter of if I decide to take my last breath it's a matter of when.
But maybe that's the trap I've built for myself, the certainty of an ending I haven't even reached yet. I talk about it as though its already carved into stone, as though I've already sealed my fate in a graveyard of possibilities.
Maybe that's just another way of holding my breath, of convincing myself there's no point in exhaling.
Sometimes I wonder, what if survival isn't about strength at all? What if it’s about weakness? The willingness to be soft enough, fragile enough to let air in even when it burns? what if healing isn't a grand victory but a thousand small surrenders. A whisper of a breath when the silence feels unbearable. A flicker of light when the darkness insists its already won.
I know I'm not ivy and broken glass alone. I know I am not just my tired lungs or my spiraling thoughts. I am also that stubborn light bulb, refusing to go out, even when the wires fray and the walls crumble. Maybe I don't need to trust myself fully yet. Maybe it's enough to trust the bulb, the hum, the quiet insistence that there is still something worth illuminating.
And maybe one day, when i stop counting 1...2...3, ill realize I've been breathing all along.
But what if the lightbulb isn't stubborn at all? What if it's just a trick of my mind, a hallucination born of desperation? Sometimes I fear I've imagined the glow, that there's nothing there except empty sockets, rustered wires and the echo of something that once worked but dosnt anymore. Maybe I've been lying to myself, clinging to a phantom flicker because the alternative is unbearable.
I think about how tired I am, not the kind of tired that sleep fixes, but the kind that seeps into marrow, that makes every breath feel like theft from a body that no longer wants to keep me alive. My lungs don't ache because I hold my breath, they ache because I've forgotten what it feels like to breath without dread.
People tell me “It will get better”. But I wonder, better for who? Maybe they mean life smooths itself out for others, the ones strong enough to keep choosing it. Maybe I was never built for that kind of persistence. Maybe I was built for collapse.
Sometimes I imagine myself as rubble already, not a house but the ruins left after fire. Charred beams, blackened sone, the kind of place no one bothers to rebuild. And I wonder if my body already knows the end, the countdown has been ticking silently inside me all along. Not if...when. I can almost hear it in the pauses between breaths, like a clock too quiet for anyone else to notice.
And there's the part I never say aloud. Theres a comfort in it. In the inevitability. In knowing that one day the struggle will end, the counting will stop, the lungs will finally rest. It terrifies me, yes, but it also lulls me, like a lullaby only I can hear. Maybe that's the cruelest thing of all. That the thought of not existing feels more like home than the thought of surviving.
And yet, in the middle of that lullaby of endings, i think of them. My family. The ones who will never know just how many nights ive sat with the thought of leaving, only to stay because of them. They are the reason my lungs still drag in air, even when it feels like poison. They are the anchor that has kept me drifting so far, I can't return.
It's strange, isn't it? How the same presence that makes me feel most lonely is also what has kept me alive. But I understand now... Thats not them. Thats the distortion of perception that mental illness curates, bending everything until love looks like absence and comfort looks like suffocation. They have always been there in ways that I can never repay them.
My papa, even when he says I don't look sad, he's there trying to understand in the only language he knows. My mum, changing the subject not because she doesn't care, but maybe because Shes afraid of saying the wrong thing. My sister exhausted but still listening, still present, still tethered to me when I would have already let myself go.
The truth is without them I would not have made it this far. They don't know the extent of it, the nights where I thought I had already written my ending, but they saved me more times than I can count just by existing alongside of me. Their love is the thread I have clung to, even when my perception twists it into something unrecognizable.
And maybe that's the cruel paradox of it all. The illness tells me that I'm alone, when the reality is I've never truly have been. My family's presence has been my lifeline, even when my mind convinces me I'm drowning.
I think, maybe, that's why I'm still here. Not because I trust myself to survive, but because I trust that they will continue to carry me when I can't carry myself.
So why am i so afraid to heal? Maybe because healing feels like stepping into the unknown, and the unknown has always frightened me more than the pain I've come to know so well. Every time i reach for it, every time i let myself imagine a life not ruled by this constant ache, I feel the ground shift beneath me. It's easier, in some twisted way, to fall back down into what's familiar, even if it hurts.
It's like this illness has rewritten me at the smallest level, carved itself into my blood, my bones, my breath. I wonder sometimes if there's any part of me untouched, or if I am nothing more than the sum of the weight I carry.
I ask myself the same questions over and over, but there's no answer, only echos that return, louder each time until I can't tell the difference between thought and noise.
And so, I live in suspended contradiction. The one that makes me both grateful and broken in the same moment.
I breath but every breath feels borrowed. I exist but always with the suspicion that one day I won't.
Maybe that's all I am, the paradox itself. A body that longs for healing but recoils from it. A mind that clings to pain as proof its alive. A self-stitched together from questions that have no answers.
And perhaps that's the cruelest truth of all. Not that i cannot heal, but that i do not know who i would be without this sickness, this shadow...
This endless counting of breaths.
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