Growing up I heard 50 turn a phrase that felt like my life story. “Deaths got to be easy cause life is hard” as a child I’d chant this whenever life felt at its worst and I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. When I was at my most suicidal, life makes no sense lows I remember I found music that fuelled that energy and allowed me to burn and rage all my pain in that.
I’m glad nothing I tried worked. I’m glad I’m alive today to type this in darkness because as a nation we just want to see more stars. But mostly I’m glad I get to say it’s a hard hard life and in that hardness there are so many soft spots filled with beauty. Sometimes you have to do a bit of searching in your waste land. You have to find the buttons that are pushing you and push them back.
Sometimes you have to wallow and allow life to be felt. It has to hit you. It has to do whatever it does but all the time you have to be able to know that that is exactly where you are and accept that. Accept that it sucks and it’s painful and I hate it. Accept that death can look attractive, accept that you have those thoughts and really think about it and sit with it and just acknowledge it’s there.
Don’t decide anything, just sit with it. Talk about it, cry over it. Become an artist if the path calls but sit with it and when you’re ready to move, free from the pressure and anxiety of what it could be. Talk to one person about it. Just one. Your safe space. Talk to them as if you were talking to yourself. Then allow them to feel your pain. Allow them to ask questions. Allow them to be worried. Allow them to love love and only after you’ve been loved and in your safe space can you truly find and weigh your options with a better view for life.
You’ve felt the pain, and now you’ve felt love.
I didn’t decide anything from my last failed attempt in the 2000s then COVID brought so much trauma that I clearly hadn’t been dealing with and last year was like an RKO from nowhere.
Last year started like an MVP run and by March life was upside. It ended so much worse than I could imagine, so much death and loss and somehow I pulled through.
Talk about survivors guilt. Somehow and by no doing of my own I am alive and the gratitude for what this life costs is overwhelming. A gift I can only keep learning to be grateful for.
I write this in hopes that you don’t do anything rush. That like me maybe you can sit with it too and someday the gift of gratitude will a take a big bite out of you and it won’t make sense but you’ll be grateful and maybe that will be enough.
P.s the love for natural hair has journey a long way
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