He can’t hear me but I have a voice and it is powerful, brave and strong and I stopped using it. It’s still in there though. I am beautiful, I am brave, I am tenacious, and I know what I want.

Sometimes I speak into my own microphone and talk to myself. I tell myself how I can make it. I remind myself how much I have endured and why this is an opportunity to grow and change. Some people insist that human beings don’t change. I have learned, I have grown and I will continue to make great strides toward being the best version of me.

I see you standing there and I don’t have the obligation to heal you. I do want to heal me. That’s what I want. It is necessary that I look inside myself and find the hardest strongest piece of me and hang onto it. Both hands tightly wrapped around this crystallized part of me. My eyes closed, praying, locked in meditation. Waiting for the moment when it is safe to open them. I can do this. I can feel those feelings that used to haunt me, terrify me, and now they don’t scare me.

It doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is that I love who I am flaws and all. The truth is that I matter. For a long time I believed that I didn’t. I sat in a corner and I drew on my arms with black marker so that no one could see me. When I stepped out of that corner, there was a door. It led outside and it was bright, warm and welcoming out there. In the distance I noticed a waterfall. Without thinking, just feeling, I walked barefoot and stood underneath that waterfall. The black marker faded and dripped off of my arms. For the first time in a long time my arms were clean. My mind was clear. My mind IS clear. And that is what I was yearning for, and finally it happened.