sanity log #2 (so much for brevity)

This will be short, and I'll expound upon it later. I can't come up with a neat & grandiose way to tie this one up into a hopeful, sparkly little package like I usually can. I wish I could. But the truth is, I've finally woken up. I've untangled my mind, whose synapses were for so long as intertwined as a thousand necklaces in a jewelry box. I know what growing up feels like. It's fucking shattering & scattering & scarring. But it's necessary, and in the end, it's good. The only wisdom I feel like I have the right to bestow upon any of you is this: no one is clever enough to predict the course of their life. Since I was a child, I held close, like a cozy security blanket, the false notion that I would be unaffected by society and time, that nothing could change me, that I somehow, with the power of will, could make everything perfect. You can never truly know heartbreak until you look it in the eye. You can never know pain until you're panting for breath every time a room falls silent, until all the words you try to read or say bleed into an indiscernible pool, until you can't think of one reason to leave your bed in the morning, so you don't, until every time somebody looks you in the eye you count their motives and plan an escape, until your body and your thoughts become separate entities, until you can't stop crying and you don't know why you started, until you can't start crying even though every atom is begging you to, until you're crying for the first time in months in the office of an intern psychologist, only realizing the depth of your pain as the words involuntarily escape your lips, and they stream out, and they won't stop, and you can't turn back. I tried to evade my issues for so long that they melded with my skin, not disappearing, but affecting everything I did. Everything took on the color of my depression. But I've finally found the strength to confront it. And while my peers, my friends, my professors, my teachers, my parents all look at my grades, look at my actions and think "she doesn't give a fuck," "she's not trying," I look at every individual moment and trace how I got here, to this point. And I'm proud of every single one. The only lens that's true and that matters is mine, I know that for sure now. I'm done letting other people define me. I'm done looking at myself through others' eyes. I know who I am and I'm unstoppable. Not because I'm perfect. Not because I have the delusion that I can be. But because I have no other setting. I wish I could have made it here faster, I wish I could have the luxury of sweet retrospection. But every shard is a part of me, and makes me stronger. Makes me, me. I exist. I am. I count. And I deserve to not only exist, but live.