As I grow older, I have came to realized that there are a lot of things that will somehow break us apart. In some situations, you’ll be able to bounce back. But there are some set backs that are just too had to go through.
And in my case, four years ago, I have been diagnosed with post-traumatic syndrome, anxiety and depression disorder. The thing with it was that, it took me long enough to realized that there was something wrong with me. I stopped doing my early morning runs, writing literary pieces and poetry. I was aware there was something that ached within me but I didn’t know which part of my entirety hurts, all I know was that it pained me to the extent that I was willing to do anything just to get rid of it. So, I started to harm myself just to divert the psychological pain in to a physical one, some pain that at least I know where it came from.
I think, losing my best friend into a drowning incident made it worst. Everything was just unbearable. I was hopeless and relentlessly restless. The exhaustion was beyond physical. It was too much that even breathing hurts. I also came to the point that I have been crying, kneeling and begging God to take all the pain away ‘cos I couldn’t take it anymore.
I have lost my identity, I have lost a lot of friends. And most of all, it took a lot of me. Until my desperation took me to seek for help. So, I opened up to my parents, and then I started seeing a psychiatrist. And from there, I have started to realized that healing isn’t beautiful. It’s hideous, it was a never ending back to zeroes. It was the endless battles within you. It was messy and consuming. It was an exhaustion that sleep and rest can’t fix. My psychiatry doctor once told me that we can recover from whatever we are going through, but we can never really fully recover from it, like having a bruise, the wounds heal; the scars may disappear but what the naked eye can’t see is that, it was way too different from before the damage. That’s how it is. That most of time, healing hurts way, way more than what you’re healing from.
Now, I am still going through therapy and I am getting better. I am starting to accept all the things that I just can’t change; and change all the things that I refuse to accept. And I’ve learned to forgive myself for letting people treated me less than I deserved. Forgiving myself for all the things that I did not become. Loving myself at my worst, because that’s when I needed myself the most.
And this is me saying to all of you who’s having a hard time. Hang in there. It gets better. Keep going. There’s strength within you that can go through it all.
