Sometimes I want to be together, I want to sound intelligent, well researched. I want to everything to progress through a series of steps until it reaches a conclusion, my life to be like a well-formed essay.
Sometimes I think I just need honesty.
I am a mess. Like completely. I can’t think of a single area of my life that I haven’t done wrong in some form or another. Though I am trying to be more forgiving of myself and like, accept the fact that I am only human and literally no one is holding me to the standard I’m working towards, I am also aware that I very rarely follow my own advice.
I feel like a hypocrite.
Maybe I am.
I can write pages and pages on recovery, faith, life, what it means to be human. I can parade around declaring the importance of self-love, forgiveness, acceptance, yet I find myself sitting up at night preaching the exact opposite to myself.
I am a hypocrite.
I’m writing to myself because I am a mess.
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I didn’t tell anyone that I was struggling with the whole life thing until I was sixteen, almost seventeen. Prior to that, I’d spent years in silence, my lips sealed shut and twisted into a strange smile. I think I was waiting for things to fall into place, maybe for someone to notice that Britts was not okay all the time, and then I believed that when that happened I’d be done. Things would be fine again. Journey over, I would then be able to speak of my struggles as ‘has been’s.
As I started to begin whispering my secrets, half truths and hints to the few people I trusted, I was waiting with bated breath for something to click. Change. Snap. Better. Different.
Nothing.
///
When I was sixteen I was told that God would use my voice, my story, for his glory.
I didn’t even know if I believed that God actually cared about me at that point, if he was even there, but my cautious heart felt the smallest glimmer of excitement. This was temporary. Soon I’d be done. I would move on.
Things did not get better.
Really, they got messier. More complicated. Another spanner in the works, then a hammer, an entire box of screws, a chainsaw, probably a table saw too, just for fun.
I shut down.
Looking back at the timeline of my life I can see as the lights shut off, one by one, at an ever increasing speed.
I can remember with painful clarity the day the last light turned out.
I lit a few candles from time to time, but they didn’t last long.
Empty, dark shell of a house. Useless. Broken.
Empty.
It’s hard to clean up in the dark, so I guess I just didn’t.
///
I write a lot of words. I talk to younger girls going through life and all it’s wonderful confusions and I say a lot of things.
I’m talking to me.
Straight to me. Every single word of positivity, hope, or downright conviction is just as much to me as to anyone else that might come across it.
Like I get it. Swallowing back the idea that maybe my empty, tired body and brain has a value despite the filth of life layered on top tastes like poison. Tastes like a spoonful of ipecac, I want to throw up every time I try to swallow them.
I think this is what I was missing when I was growing up. I needed words that came from messy people, still living their fight, struggling, but with a greater hope. Not just reflections. Like, this is happening now, but I trust I will be okay. Words from the broken.
I was waiting.
Waiting for my turn to be okay, to be the person that spoke about that one time.
///
I’m twenty now. I’m still waiting.
Soon I’ll be twenty-one, then twenty-two, then older and older and I know I still have a long way to go before I’m not swallowing back the same old hurt with my anti-depressants every morning.
Things are changing within in me, I know that. I’m struggling but I have the skills to cope at least a little better now. My understanding of my Faith is evolving and deepening.
But I’m not finished.
I still have multiple panic attacks every week, I have anxiety dreams every night, I don’t sleep well, I’m obsessive about things that no one else worries about, I could go on. I am mess. Which is hard, but in the end, okay.
///
On this crazy insane journey I’ve been on over the past year one of the most empowering things I’ve learned is that I still have a voice. That I don’t have to speak from a place of perfection to be heard.
Maybe I can be a bit of a hypocrite when I talk to others and tell them to look after themselves, to take care, to ask for help, only to go and do the exact opposite myself. But that doesn’t void the validity of my words.
Sometimes we have to preach to ourselves. (And then we inevitably go and do the opposite.)
So here, out in the open, have some honesty, from Brii to you:
I am a mess. An anxious, self-destructive, lying, hiding, obsessive mess. I am trying to be better. I am trying to love the body, mind, and soul that I have been given. I’m not very good at that. I am trying to do the right thing. I often don’t. But I’m putting in the work. I’m trying.
I am telling my story as it happens, and I don’t know if or when this story will end. I have no idea what it looks like.
I’m talking to me.
We are getting there.
(Come on Britt, listen. For once in your life.)
All my love,
b.
See also:
Sharing your story while it’s being written, Freeing.Faith
britts amelia. 