To Heal Means You Are Saving Your Life, You Are A Hero, and A Badass One At That.

Do not diminish the version of you who chose to heal. That person made the choice to lay down, so that you could rise.

That version of you showed you what needed to heal, and then they stepped out of your way so you could step forward. Offer compassion, and then let them rest.

You were always worthy of being loved, you told yourself this when you decided to heal, and you were right.

The challenge of healing and connecting to your authentic self will push you to the edge of yourself, in what I can only describe as absolute despair while coming to the realizations of the loss of self and potential. You do not need to die in order to be in hell, this is hell, and it ravages you. Your body and mind betray you by being patron saints to everybody who has abused or mistreated you in the name of "love" from your earliest memories, all the way up to the moment you begin to heal. You will feel as if you are betraying yourself by needing to love yourself, because up until this point you have accepted you are unlovable by the decisions you have made while asleep because of the enormous pains and traumas you have experienced. Forgive yourself for this self betrayal, it is not your fault. It was never your fault.

The song of your soul just sounds like an indistinct melody of those who have damaged your voice and craftily interchanged it with their own, a manipulated mimicry orchestrated to influence inauthentic chords and gaslight you into believing this was your anthem all along.

The same way you build up your defenses and your arsenal, you need to bring down those walls and go through your arsenal in order to be able to move into the direction towards what is true to who you are. It is terrifying to comprehend how accountable we are in all of the choices that we have made to get into the situations we find ourselves in that are harmful to us, and it is terrifying when we come to the realization that we did it all while we were asleep at the wheel. How did we get this far while asleep?

The realizations pour in, and we find ourselves in a state of shock, and then the grief follows, and that grief swallows your emotions until it turns into an enveloping rage, and you need to resist the urge to turn that rage towards yourself. Sickening, disturbing, absolutely demolishing, like a wildfire, it rampages in indiscriminate fury inside of you.

The echoes of grief begin to ring in our minds, contorting around everything we know to be true of who we really are, deluding our perceptions into a hallucinatory nightmare.

This is the reality of waking up and healing. This is what we are faced with when the dissociation fades into reality and the illusion begins to turn into clarity and we become fully conscious of our repressed state of living, our traumas, and our behaviors.

You need to resist the urge to destroy yourself using every hatred spewed and mind-fucking manipulation that has been spoken to you by those who claimed to love you, or miserably failed at doing so.

You need to resist the urge to attack yourself in the very ways you have been attacked, and when you do go on the attack, you need to find self compassion and forgiveness, because it was never your fault. Your body and your mind betray you until you can find your own hand to grab and your own voice to use and you can recognize them as your own. It is not your fault, it was never your fault.

You do not know what you are capable of until you hit rock bottom. Suddenly, you see it all, with nothing behind you to distract from what's in front of you, and then you notice the staircase.

You get to the top of that staircase by taking each and every fearful step. Sometimes you will be too tired to keep going, rest and nurture. Sometimes you will fall, rest and nurture. You will look up, you will see more stairs, you will become defeated as your mind tells you that "no, we can't possibly keep going, it is just too much trouble and I do not have what I need to do all of that." You have everything it takes to get you there, one painful step at a time.

Persevere. It will take as much time as it takes, and in the meantime, instead of utilizing your anger as a weapon to antagonize yourself with because you are not "healed in time," offer yourself compassion, you are doing the hardest work that believe me when I say this, most people do not do because of the pain of facing reality and the absolute need to comprehend the form our individual darkness takes, and to accept it, fully.

Nobody understands you better than you. Say it again: NOBODY understands you better than you, and if somebody claims to, they are surely benefiting by using you as a weapon against yourself. Despite what you have been told throughout your life by those who were not capable of giving you what you deserve, which was always unconditional love, you are worthy of it. Who and what are right for your life will not take parts of you away from yourself and fill the space with deceptions. NO EXCEPTIONS.

You are the necessary component to your existence. Your life absolutely without a doubt ALWAYS belongs to you, and absolutely without a doubt was and is NEVER contingent on anyone else to be worth living.

To heal means you are saving your life, you are a hero, and a badass one at that.