Maybe I’ll Find Her Here

I don't know what I'm writing.

I don't know if this is a paragraph, a poem, a chapter, or the beginning of the book I've been carrying around inside me for years. I just know that I have too many words inside me and nowhere left to put them. They're screaming for somewhere to go, and I've spent too long trying to quiet them.

There are voices in my head that won't shut up, memories I can't put back where they came from, fears that have learned my name, and doubts that somehow always know exactly where to sink their teeth in. Everything feels so loud inside me, and underneath all of it is this unbearable sadness that I can't seem to outrun.

My depression isn't quiet anymore. It's deep and dark and heavy, and some days it feels like it has swallowed the woman I used to be. I miss her. Fuck, I miss me. I miss laughing without forcing it. I miss wanting things simply because I wanted them. I miss waking up without immediately having to fight my own thoughts. I miss feeling like there was something ahead of me instead of feeling like every day is just another thing I have to survive.

And then there's my heart.

My stupid, beautiful, broken heart still loves. It loves people, it loves fiercely, and somewhere along the way, I think I lost myself in that love. I gave so much of myself to other people and to the little lives that came with them that they became woven into the fabric of my everyday existence. I didn't just love them; I made room for an entire world inside my heart. Their happiness mattered to me. Their lives mattered to me. Their absence matters to me now, too.

And perhaps that's why this hurts in a way I don't know how to explain.

Because I'm not only grieving what I lost. I'm grieving the version of myself who existed inside that love. The woman who had begun imagining a future, making space, becoming attached, caring deeply, and allowing herself to believe that maybe this time she could build something that felt like home for all of us. I don't know where that woman went, but somewhere along the way, while I was busy loving and holding everything together, I stopped holding on to myself.

And this isn't only about heartbreak.

That's the part I keep realizing.

The pain didn't begin here. This didn't all start with one person, one family, one "relationship", or one ending. Some wounds are much older than that. Some of them were carried into adulthood by a little girl who learned too early that love could hurt, that people could leave, that sometimes surviving meant becoming someone different from who you were.

There is a little girl somewhere in all of this. A girl who learned to survive things she never should have had to survive. A girl who kept growing, kept hurting, kept loving, kept losing, and somehow kept getting back up. She became a woman who learned how to survive almost anything, but somewhere along the way, she forgot that surviving isn't the same thing as living.

And somehow that little girl became me.

Maybe that's what I'm supposed to write.

Not the perfect version. Not the inspirational version. Not the version where everything happened for a reason and every painful chapter somehow made me stronger. I don't know if I believe that. Maybe some things were simply painful. Maybe some things should never have happened at all.

I want to write the truth.

All of it.

The ugly parts and the beautiful parts. The people I loved and the people who hurt me. The things I survived and the things I did to survive them. The choices I'm proud of and the ones I still don't understand. The pieces of myself I abandoned along the way, the pieces I found again, and the pieces I'm still searching for.

Maybe I don't need to know what this is yet. Maybe I don't need to decide whether it's a paragraph, a poem, a chapter, or a book. Maybe I just need to start putting the words somewhere outside of my head, because they're too loud in here, and I am tired of carrying them alone.

I want my life back.

I want my voice back.

More than anything, I want to feel like me again.

So maybe I'm going to start here. Not because I'm okay, because I'm not. Not because I have figured anything out, because I absolutely don't. I'm starting because somewhere underneath all this darkness, underneath the grief and the depression and the loneliness and all the pieces of myself I can't quite seem to find right now, I know I'm still here.

And maybe if I keep writing, I'll find her.

Maybe if I keep writing, I'll find me.

             💜🫖 JustRealTea