Reading my old journals feels like opening a window into a storm I once called home. The words tremble with a version of me I barely recognize, yet ache to reach. I want to step back through time, to gather her into my arms, to press something steady and warm into her shaking hands and whisper, stay—just stay. You make it through this. You live.
Back then, I mistook darkness for depth. I dressed my pain in poetry, made a kind of altar out of disappearing, not yet understanding how fiercely life would one day ask to be held. I didn’t know that breath itself is a fragile miracle, that being here—however messy, however unfinished; is something incredibly sacred. And now, looking back, my heart breaks for all I could not see, all I nearly lost. There is grief in it, yes; but also a quiet reckoning with time I cannot return.
I owe the truth its full voice: there was NOTHING romantic about who I was. I was unraveling in plain sight—lost to addiction, without shelter, without direction, trying to outrun a pain I didn’t know how to name. Survival was not graceful. It was jagged, desperate, and often invisible to those who wanted to believe in something softer.
And still, I am here.
There is a kind of awe in that. A quiet, enduring gratitude for the distance between then and now. For the fact that I found my way out, even when I didn’t know I was searching for one.
If anyone ever saw something luminous in me during that time, something worth admiring—I understand, but I must gently undo that illusion. I was not a beacon. I was a flicker in the wind, trying not to go out.
And maybe that is the truest thing I can offer now:
not a polished story, not something pretty; but the honest shape of survival, and the soft, hard-won knowing that even a flicker can become a steady light. ♥️, Lily
