This past year, I was breaking.
Over and over again.
Body, mind, and spirit unraveling all at once.
Each hospital stay blurred into the next,
and pain became a language I understood way too well.
The world I’d built collapsed beside my health,
leaving me unsure who I was without it.

Back then, the days were heavy,
the nights darker still.
I truly believed I might never rise again.
But even in that darkness,
something small within me held on.
A quiet, stubborn voice that whispered, keep going.

Now, standing here, I see it all differently.
Every wound served a purpose.
Every breakdown carved space for growth.
Every loss became an opening for peace.

I wouldn’t change a thing.
Not the pain, not the fear, not my mistakes,
not even the moments that nearly broke me.
Because each one led me here.
They stripped away what wasn’t meant to stay
and left me lighter, clearer, free.

Today, I feel alive again.

Better and stronger with every day that passes.
Hope now stirs softly beneath my skin.
I see beauty in myself
and in the world around me.
And I understand now, I see it.
That it all happened for a reason.
Every step, even the hardest ones,
brought me some kind of peace.

You spent years trying to make me small.
To make me doubt what I saw,
what I knew,
who I was.

Before the violence, there was the addiction.
The slow unraveling.
The way it hollowed you out
until the person I needed
was barely there.
If at all.

After I got sick,
you used my pain to feed your need.
To justify, to take, to abuse.
You turned my disease into your source

And your excuse.

Too often, love became your currency.
And not trusting you, became my survival.

I learned too young
that even suffering could be stolen.

Then came the rage,
the fear that filled every room.
I learned early
that love could hurt.
That safety wasn’t guaranteed.
That silence was the best way.

But I’m not that child anymore.
The one who believed every viscous lie
you whispered and screamed.
The one who thought your anger was truth.

I’m becoming proud of myself now.
For surviving, for unlearning,
for finding peace in the spaces
where your echoes used to live.
I see now that what you called love,
was control, wearing a familiar face.

Still, I hope your soul is changing.
I hope you find your own kind of peace
in the places where pain has lived too long.

I hope that you are praying.

I have forgiven you.
But not for you. 
For me.
There are no more monsters from you left in my heart.
The ones you planted
when I was still a child
have finally gone quiet.

I am no longer afraid of you.
I’ve let you go.
And as I move forward,
I carry no hate.
Only a strange, steady love.

The kind that says,

I love you,
but from a very necessary distance.

I used to think
if I could just find the right words,
the right tone,
the right version of myself,
maybe she’d see me.
Truly hear me.
And she’d stop.

But she never did.
She only saw
what she could use.

My illness became her ticket,
my pain,
her proof.

I was thirteen,
and already learning
that love could be a weapon.
Especially with her.

I learned
that love could bruise,
that “no” could be dangerous,
that my sudden defiance
could split skin.
My skin.

Silence was safer
than truth.
It became my survival.

I watched her
rewrite every boundary
until none of us
were real anymore.
Just ghosts
she borrowed
to feed her need.

Over two decades later,
her body is catching up
to what her spirit
decided long ago.

Her heart now damaged,
her skin starting to turn gray,
her words
sharp and slurred.
Every breath
another borrowed second
from a life
she’s burning through.

She has chosen this.
She chose the lies.
She chose to fade
long before her body began to.

Even when she was handed
a way out,
a rare chance,
she said no,
and kept running.
Straight towards the bottle,
towards the pills.

And it hit me so hard
my chest almost hurt.
But I finally accepted it.
It took me years
to see it clearly.
She made her choice
long ago.

A choice
she has always made.
And that choice
wasn’t me.
It wasn’t us.
She blamed us instead.

For over twenty-five years,
she has never picked us.

Now she’s chosen
to die slowly,
to disappear
by degrees.
To keep burning herself
and calling it living,
calling it warmth.

I can’t save her.
I can’t drag her
to the surface.
I’ve tried.

And I refuse
to let her cruelty
and darkness
drag me under
with her.

Never again.

I can only mourn
what could’ve been.
The mother I remembered before,
and the mother I imagined.

Mourn the love
that never learned to stay.

Letting go isn’t hate.
It’s mercy.
It’s survival.
It’s love, rewritten
in self-protection’s language.

My mother
is a brutal storm
I never want
to survive again.

Her love
isn’t what love should be.
It became violent,
vicious,
and frightening
most of the time.

I will always care.
I will always love her.
That will never change,
despite everything.

But I don’t think
I’ll ever stop grieving her
and all that she’s destroyed
over the years.

I had to let her go.
Not out of hate,
but out of self-preservation.

Because love
isn’t meant
to be swallowed
with poison.

I deserve
to live
in a house,
in a world,
not built
from someone else’s destruction.

There are days I know, without a doubt,
that my dog, Milo, has kept me alive.
Through pain, through illness,
through the kind of darkness
that makes you forget who you are.

His love is pure.
Steady and uncomplicated.
He doesn’t need to understand the details
to know when I’m hurting.
He just knows.

When I’m sick, he stays close.
Not out of duty, but devotion.
He lies beside me, his body pressed against mine,
steady as breath.
Something in that simple nearness softens everything.
Most of all the ache, the fear, and
the loneliness that never quite leaves.

It’s as if he knows that being here is enough.
That his quiet presence speaks louder
than words ever could.
Sometimes he looks at me
with those deep, knowing eyes,
and I swear he’s saying,
“I’ve got you. Rest now.”

He senses what I can’t always name,
despair, sadness, pain,
and meets it with love.
One that asks for nothing in return.
There’s no judgment in him,
no hesitation.
Just a calm, certain kind of love
that holds me together
when I start to fall apart.

He has taught me what grace truly looks like.
Not grand or perfect,
but loyal, patient, and real.

Because of him, I’ve learned to stay.
To keep fighting.
To see myself the way he does,
through his eyes.
With love and compassion.
Instead of criticism and hate.

He helps me believe that I’m worth it.
Worth that kind of love after all.
And that has saved me, again and again,
in more ways than I can ever repay.

There are two kinds of exhaustion.
The kind that comes from living.
From early mornings and late nights,
from lists that never end,
and days that run together.
It’s the kind that a good night’s sleep can soften,
that time or quiet can eventually mend.

And then there’s the other kind.
The one that lives in your bones.
It pulses beneath your skin,
weaves itself through every nerve,
and turns even rest
into another form of effort.
You wake tired.
You breathe tired.
You exist tired.

It’s not just in the body.
It’s the dull ache that settles in the mind,
the weight that drags at your spirit,
until weariness itself
becomes your constant companion.
You forget what it felt like
to move lightly through the world,
to wake unafraid of the day.

This kind of exhaustion
starts to shape you.
It drapes over you like a familiar cloak.
Soft but suffocating.
A quiet presence that never leaves.
You learn to function within it,
to smile through it,
to carry it as if it’s part of who you are.

And maybe, in some ways, it is.
It becomes a rhythm in your breath,
a language your body speaks
even when your voice stays silent.
You grow around it,
learn to live beside it,
and still, somewhere deep within,
you keep a memory of lightness.
Waiting for the day
you might feel it again.

But even here, beneath the weight,
there are moments that shimmer through.
The softness of morning light,
the rare steadiness of your own breath,
reminding you that exhaustion
is not all you are.
Somewhere inside,
the quiet part of you is healing,
slowly remembering how to rest.

And that keeps you hopeful and going.

Never giving up.

This past year changed my brain
in more ways than I can name.
Not just my memory,
but how I think,
how I feel,
how I am.

Illness did that.
Hospitals, medications,
the cycles of pain and healing,
they rewired me.
Each flare, each sleepless night,
each time I was woken to be tested, poked,
explained to,
they left quiet imprints
on the way my mind now moves.

My thoughts are slower now,
as if wading through water.
Short-term things slip away.
The word I just said,
why I walked into a room,
what I meant to do next.

But the long-term stays,
rooted deep like old trees
that even the storm couldn’t tear down.

Still, I don’t always feel like me.
It’s strange,
living inside a mind
that no longer feels familiar.

Sometimes I catch a flicker.
A familiar rhythm.
A trace of the old sharpness.
And for a moment I exhale,
recognizing myself again.

Then the fog returns,
soft and heavy,
and I lose the thread.

Once, I could trust my mind.
It was quick, certain,
a place I could rely on.
Now I retrace my steps
to remember what I was saying,
write down reminders
to hold what used to come so easily.

There’s grief in that.
Frustration too.
When focus slips,
when I reach for words
and they scatter like startled birds.

Some days I feel like I’m watching
the person I was
from far away.

But slowly,
I’m learning to stop fighting it.
To see that even in the fog,
my mind is still working.
Different, yes,
but determined.
Rebuilding new paths
where old ones failed.

Maybe this slowing
is its own kind of wisdom.
Maybe this forgetting
is how healing begins.
By making space
for what matters to stay.

My mind is different now,
but it’s still mine.
Still trying.
Still learning new ways
to bring me home
to myself.

And maybe,
just maybe,
this version of me
will grow into something stronger.
More patient, more kind,
more rooted in what endures.

Because even when everything else fades,
there is still something in me
that remembers
how to begin again.