Somewhere along the way
I started pretending I wasn’t quite as broken
as I knew I might have been
because if you don’t tell anyone
about the shambles
they won’t even be real
and haven’t I always still had more
than so many others?
Is more than others not enough?
Some things, maybe, don’t just roll off your back
but
if you cover up your cracks enough
you can walk back out into the world
and no one will be the wiser
for a long long while
and if you find just the right combo
of numbing agents
you will forget too
until one day a wave of panic
or sadness
or fury
sweeps fiercely across your make-believe
and you’ll start to see
you weren’t
okay
after all
you can’t just opt out of recovery
no matter how much privilege you still carry around amongst your disarray
other people’s struggles don’t negate your own
and a few good days don’t heal all the hard ones away
sometimes we believe the lie
that we can control our life
if we just do everything right
I’ve seen that lie blow up time after time
but I still fall for it
trying to make everything seem tidied up
because surely that will be enough
to keep trouble at bay
keep the dark things away
but there’s something precious
in the darkness
in the midst of all your rawness
the willingness
a reckless need
that if you turn it towards the light
just sets you free
I’ve spent too much time
measuring the rightness of my words
concerned with how they’ll be heard
I’m going to have to let that go
I’m no where near
all healed
and I need these words
to work their wonder
they’ve festered in my caution far too long
scared of what could happen if someone reads them wrong
but
pretending I don’t have anything to say
isn’t working anyway
so…
How the light at the end of the day 