You think you know me but you don’t.

You have never even tried.

Not for my entire life.

You see me through a cracked lens.

One that zooms in on the moments I’ve fallen and conveniently forgets the years I stood tall, silently holding everything together.

You talk about what I didn’t do these past eight months, but where were you when my body stopped cooperating with me?

When I was in agony?

When everything I’d relied on collapsed underneath me?

Where were you then?

And where have you been all these years?

You want credit for caring now?

Now that my struggle and pain are real to you?

Something you can no longer ignore and dismiss?

You act like my pain made me a problem, like my struggle made me someone you had to fix, analyze, and blame.

But I am not your project.

I am not your failure.

I am a person who broke, because I was breaking for so long before anyone noticed.

I gave so much

For years.

I bit my tongue.

I kept showing up when I was exhausted.

I pushed through days that felt impossible. 

I carried pain, physical and emotional, in silence so you could be comfortable.

And the second I needed space to fall apart, you turned your eyes on me like I was the problem.

Why am I always the one being dissected?

Why is it always me under the microscope while your mistakes are brushed aside like dust?

Why do I feel like I’m constantly trying to defend my humanity, like I have to justify being overwhelmed?

I am not a villain because I couldn’t keep pretending I was okay.

I am not to blame for things I didn’t do. And I will no longer carry your inability to understand me as my shame.

I fell apart.

That’s what humans do sometimes. And I won’t apologize for being human anymore.

And beneath the anger… is sorrow.
A deep, endless sorrow that feels like it has taken root in my bones.

Do you know what it feels like to wake up and immediately wish you hadn’t?

To lie in bed and ask yourself how you’re supposed to get through another day that feels exactly like the one before it?

Empty, heavy, unrelenting?

There are moments I’ve wanted to die.

Not because I don’t want life, but because this life, in this body, with this pain, with this constant feeling of being misunderstood blamed or discarded… feels like too much.

I didn’t choose this.
I didn’t choose to be sick.

I didn’t choose to fall apart.
I didn’t ask for my brain to short-circuit from pain, or for my spirit to dim from being unseen.

There are nights I’ve lain in the dark, silently begging for something, anything, to take this and me away.

Not because I’m weak.

But because I’ve been so strong for so long, no one seems to see that the strength is running out.

I needed someone to hold me.
Not fix me.

Not question me.

Just hold me in the thick of it and say, “I know this is awful, and I’m not going anywhere.”

But instead, I got silence.

Distance.

Assumptions.

Judgment.

And now I feel like I’m screaming into a void where everyone has already made up their mind about me.

But this is my truth.
I am grieving.
I am hurting.
I am not okay, but I’m still here.
And maybe that should count for something.

-The Aftermath