the crushing weight of it all

it feels final, but rarely ever is

I’m so happy you’re here, thank you. this means to me more than you’ll ever know <3

It’s a rather poignant realization that getting better and recovery does not arrive with such pompousness. Because when despair visits, it brings the full orchestra. You know, with the dramatic lighting, the crushing certainty that this time it will surely be the one that eats you alive. You lie there convinced the weight against your heart will beat so fast it will jump out of your chest, your ribs will turn into powdered bone and that sadness has real mass and malicious intent to voraciously consume you.

For those wondering how it can all feel so dramatic, I wish I could answer with something other than a shrugged shoulder and “I’m an over feeler, what can I say?” because the truth is far more embarrassing. Every feeling arrives wearing the costume of permanence, each emotion convinced it's been hired for a lifetime position rather than a brief internship. Always overstaying it’s welcome. It was never welcomed to begin with.

Just as I hold my knees closer to my chest and assume some fetal position on the floor, another hour rolls around, the charcoal midnight sky turns into some orange and pink gradient as the dawn arrives and anchors me back to the absurdity of the human existence.

This is how every setback has felt. Almost like being buried under immovable stones, each one precisely calibrated to my exact breaking point. The weight feels so absolute that I find myself making peace with the idea of suffocation and finality, thinking at least this time it will actually be over. The peculiar thing is how wrong I always am about the finality of it all. I’m starting to feel gratitude for that. I will say, this dramatic tendency does improve somewhat with age, though seventeen-year-old me would have laughed at this comment.

I sometimes wonder what it's like to possess one of those carefully calibrated emotional thermostats other people are issued at birth. To observe my own dramatics from a distance and think, "Wow, it really is not that deep." God, I am so envious of this alter ego of mine.

For now, however, the worst of my days will eat me alive and spit me out the next morning. I write this from the vantage point of having spent some time with my thoughts on what feels like just another Monday. It strikes me with sudden clarity that the weight I was certain would flatten me has somehow failed in its mission. Here I am, functional and upright, which feels mildly surprising given last week's conviction that I was surely done for. There's something rather magnificent about this resilience. All that drama, all that certainty of ruin. Surviving your own emotional weather is perhaps the most ordinary miracle there is, and I’m slowly learning that this is not something I can list on my resume or gloat about at dinner table conversations. It’s a quiet win, for me and myself.

“to live for the hope of it all.” “this is me trying”

There’s situational evidence for the same: my bedside table has maintained its position through both catastrophe and recovery. my toothbrush stands vertical in exactly the same spot whether I'm having an existential crisis or eating my second meal before 12 PM with contentment. That neglected yogurt continues to stay patiently uneaten in my fridge, indifferent to my emotional weather patterns. I remain precisely as loved on the days I'm convinced I'm unlovable as I am on the days I remember my own worth. For that, I’m grateful. I will keep living, I will keep loving, I will keep trying and I will keep writing.

I hope you’re here to stay too. I imagine we would feel a sense of togetherness and mutual gratitude for our persistence with someone who understands the weight of that choice. The choice to stay and get better, despite it all. I fantasize about us virtually hovering over the kitchen table some two decades later, exchanging one of those meaningful looks that says everything without words, but if the words would slip, they’d say “I’m glad I stayed, I’m glad you stayed.”

To quote Kafka himself, “Dearest, I beg of you, sleep properly and go for walks.”