Year 27. A year I’d never thought I’d make it to. To be honest, I’m surprised every year when I turn a year older. It just always feels like an accomplishment, like I survived once again despite the odds being stacked against me.
Year 26 was brutal. Most of it life circumstances, some of it my reaction to those circumstances and the choices I made. I made some less than great choices, had many regrettable days and nights, but I pulled through every time. Every time I picked myself up.
I fought like hell to be here. My entire life, I’ve had to fight just to survive, and this year was no different. If anything, it was one of my hardest yet.
27 is starting off a bit harder that I would have hoped.
I wanted to feel like this was, or could truly be, a new start. You know, the year I reach sobriety (or something like that), the year I do EMDR enough to the point where I can potentially really heal or whatever from some of my past, I don’t know.
I just wanted it to feel good. Hope is the thing that gets me through the most difficult times in my life. I always try to hold onto hope. But after the past few weeks that I’ve had, I feel like I lost a lot of that. I feel like I’ve upset people, I know I have disappointed myself and I just feel deflated.
I’ll leave you with this, a quote from one of my absolute favorite posts, Happy Birthday, written by Jamie Tworkowski.
i like birthdays. i like them more for other people but i’m glad we celebrate them. At the heart of it is the opportunity to tell someone “I’m glad that you were born”, which is also to say “I’m glad that you’re alive.” Those are powerful statements. The world would be a different better place if we lived that way, if we said and showed those things, more than once a year.
Happy Birthday, Jamie Tworkowski
People need other people. The darkness wins too often. Broken things build themselves in silence. People feel alone. I feel alone.
I need people, I need hope. This can still be a year I make better, a year of growth.
If there is anything I have learned in my life, it’s that I can’t do this alone. I can’t walk through this world alone. People aren’t meant to. I know I need hope, I need connection, and I need people. I guess that’s my goal for this year, to allow people in and to just learn to trust instead of pushing people away and running when things get hard.
I’m trying. I don’t know where this year takes me, I don’t know if I can easily (if at all) heal from this most recent trauma, but I’ll keep showing up. I’m not going to give up on myself. Not yet. Not today.
We can do this.
People need other people. Your story is important, and so is mine.