It is over a week into the new year and I have yet to write something to even try to sum up 2015, a year that was undoubtedly the worst year of my life-- not just mine alone, but my families on both sides. Only once before had I experienced the death of a loved one a couple summers ago; the following months were filled with many bottles of wine, unknown drugs, turning 21, and verbally abusive boyfriends. But the amount of support, love, and friends surrounding that unfortunate time in our lives, even with sadness tainting the summer skies in shades of him, time went on, and that person remains unforgotten.
This death was different because it rocked the core of my entire family. The amount of emotions I saw pour out of my father in a certain moment still gives me goosebumps till this day. I read a poem for first time in my life outside of a classroom at the funeral and by the time I got to the last words, my lips were quivering and tears were falling onto the crumpled paper where just an hour before I scrawled the words down. After these days, weeks went by in a blur. I'm not sure when her death hit me, loss seems to come in waves. It hits the hardest when you're alone: what is the last thing you said to them? Are they at peace? Will you ever see them again? You go to bars in search of a buzz to numb these questions, take shots in their name with strangers and friends to dull the pain of their absence in your future family portraits.
It wasn't even about my loss-- it was about everyone else's.
You're back in your city and you start seeing a therapist. Your therapist only does her job well enough to rip some skeletons out of your closet from a decade before and your body stays calm. Your heart barely skips a beat; you are in survival mode and you don't even know it. You blame the numbness and despair on a boy who abandoned you that you thought you loved. Looking back now you feel nothing in a different way, were done playing some part in a deranged love affair that was never meaningful from the start. After that initial deflating therapy session, your life begins to fall apart-- literally. Your ceiling collapses and the landlord who you once felt close to abandons all friendliness like he forgot what it was like to know your name.
But survival mode keeps you going. Your body and mind can do incredible things when you feel like you're dying yet are in complete denial. New job, new school semester, new pair of jeans-- you're fucking golden. You can handle anything. You can take on the world and the way it is crumbling around you alone because all you need is yourself and this city. Phone calls to your family are rehearsed, a different voice coming from you telling your father, "Everything is going fine." Who is saying that? The girl having anxiety attacks in Union Square, blending into a crowd of people who would never stop to ask if she is okay? The girl on the train collapsing into herself with the weight of her silence? The girl sitting next to you? The girl who is late to class because she could barely drag herself out of bed? The girl who doesn't dislike you but cannot speak to you in fear of her words sounding like a hushed apology? One unfortunate experience after another and you are drowning in your delusion that things are getting better. The path that society is telling you to take is in front of you and you are walking it but on auto-pilot and in a big city, that is not healthy. It brings you to the surface the moment you are walking through a busy intersection-- the driver of a large car is lying on their horn. You remember the car was red. You were so far away from yourself you walked right into oncoming traffic, luckily into the lane of a person who was aware you weren't paying attention. You go home that night and buy your ticket to Florida, the only place you know where to go and disappear inside the walls safely in hopes to bring yourself back, to give yourself the voice you have forgotten to use. Because at the end of the day, even though it's hard- the truth is hard- all you need is to say what you feel. The elephant in the room is large and if you let it, it can control you and destroy the things you love. If something happened to you, it is not your fault. It is only your burden if you let it be. It is a secret that sits on top of your shoulders that can only get heavier the longer you wait.
Speak. Get it out. Get everything out that you know, everything that has ever happened, everything you've ever seen that today makes you shudder. Because you are not alone. Because it's happened to someone else. Because your voice will set you free and maybe the person next to you. Maybe the rest of the world needs just one person, or a group of people with the same voice, to just speak the truth.
Communication, and I cannot stress enough, is the key to everything. To relationships. To true love. To your truest self, and to real happiness. If you can express and communicate clearly, you have what you need to change the course of your future.
I didn't make many new years resolutions this year because like every year, I throw them out the door like unwanted items in the spring. It is time to stop telling myself, "Be smaller this year."
How about learn to love yourself. How about embracing the way men seem to love the softness of your body, the way your waist curves into your hips like a handle for love making. How about accepting the way the universe made you and to only be healthier, and to be more honest with yourself. Learning to love yourself is the hardest thing most of us will ever attempt to do, and society will never help us along the way. It will tell us to cover up, fix it up, shrink it down-- because that is how the world turns, with the money we keep feeding it by listening to its constructs. Fuck what that magazine says, fuck what your family thinks. Be yourself. Love your skin, love the bones you have grown with all these years. Take care of them. Stop apologizing. Stop making excuses. Trust your intuition. Go to the bars less. Go when you need to celebrate. Eat only pretty things and eat ugly things when your body feels ugly and you're too hungover to leave the house. Appreciate the beauty around you. Find someone who you cannot live without and when they try to leave, fight for them. But if you don't even fight for yourself, no one that loves you will stay with you to watch you fall because it hurts. Go somewhere and live in a place that makes you relax. That is worth your golden footprints. Make friendships that eventually become strong ties and will stay with you forever. Know you deserve love in every form that it comes in. Don't be afraid to accept help. Don't be afraid to laugh too loud. Wake up earlier, for the morning sun misses you. Remember your family misses you, too.
Don't ever let any mistakes or faults or flaws get you down because if you have nothing, or no one, not even a cent to your name- you will always have tomorrow.
