Journey To Hope

I know this is going to sound crazy, but I think I saw the life I’m living now when I was sixteen. I think I saw it in a flash of insight, only to forget the specifics of it a moment later. Like my future self knew what I was going through (because they remembered), so they showed my old self, at my lowest low, to show me that it does get better.

I just wish they also told me that it can get so much worse before it does however.

I always felt that I was born with a state of longing. As if the moment I was born I knew deep down that this (gestures to the world), was not my home. This feeling of nostalgia, a deep homesickness, is one of the first feelings I remember holding in my body. It would sit there, all encompassing. Often it would consume me to the point that would cry as if I lost something dear to me. Being a social outcast didn’t help either. Not that I wanted that of course, it’s just what I was. From a young age I just did not know how to fit in. To connect. Labelled dumb from my teachers (sorry that I can’t do times tables, guess my life is over), and named weird from my school peers (sorry that I prefer books and music over throwing a ball around), this feeling of being an alien felt backed up by sound evidence that I didn’t belong here, for there was no where to fit in.

High school was no better than primary school, if anything it was worse, for that’s when the first bout of depression hit. I was in grade 8, I remember it, the feeling in my body when I woke up, like it was time to go home. Like the homesickness I felt for a place and time and people that didn’t exist in this reality finally caught up. That same day I got picked on by my relentless rugby team (turns out joining the team didn’t make me more popular, who’d have thought). The same night my alcoholic Dad picked a fight with me (it was my fault that he lost a bunch of money gambling that night apparently).

I remember laying in my bed that night, up late crying, thinking about how I wanted to go home.

It was the same night I had my first suicidal thought.

For my 16th birthday I had the audacity to have a little birthday party. I shouldn’t have because no one turned up.

The same year I had my first kiss. I also had my first taste of heartbreak two months later (if you can even call it that, isn’t everything we worry about as a teenage just so melodramatic?). The next month I had my first proper, mental breakdown. I remembered a memory from my childhood that I had locked away.

A few months later I tasted death for the first time.

I don’t say all this for sympathy. That’s not my wish, I just feel it important to paint a picture.

I just didn’t see a way out. I didn’t know why I was here and what the point of being here was.

Life was a rollercoaster of ups and downs. Of friendships coming and going. Of great success and many failures. Of great loves come and gone, until I reached a place where I was content. It just happened. I woke up, after everything I have lost and gained, and I felt a contentment with myself, and life. I found where I belonged, at least for the time being. It was February 2020, I was 26 I think (27?), and I felt like life was moving in the direction I wanted. I overcame much to live a life that I wanted to live. And I was proud.

I let go of the past.

But just because you let go of the past, does not mean that it let go of you.

Then came March 2020. And the peaceful life I had built came crashing down around me. Personal tragedy after personal tragedy, with a global pandemic on the side just to make things that much worse.

Trauma feels different when you’re a kind. A child. It’s so distant, so abstract, that when you overcome it, when you heal. It feels like a big, hard cover, leather book that you can slam shut, then put on the top shelf, never to open again.

Trauma as an adult though. I still am not sure how to deal with it. How foolish I was to think that life would never again deal another blow, another cruel twist of fate.

But it did.

And in the strangest way I am grateful for it, as it also showed me what I was made of. It gave me a new lease on life. It made me fight for my right ti be here.

It gave me the ultimate gift - perspective.

For my 32nd birthday I had a wholesome little party. I moved countries 7 months before hand, one of the biggest risks, and best decisions I had even made. It has been an incredible year, and I feel more alive than I ever have. The hardest part was leaving behind my family who, after a long time of being estranged from them in my 20s, I have grown closer with. Maybe not as close as we could be, but enough to miss them. I also have some great friends back home, who I am lucky to have and be able to miss.

Here however, in the new place, this grand adventure, I feel what I missed all those years ago. It was always people. Connection, with myself and others, that I longed for. Maybe I had to taste the hollowness of nothing to understand and appreciate the taste of everything that fills my heart up.

Maybe learning to connect is the whole reason I am here.

Life is great now, maybe it always was in its weird way. Regardless, it didn’t happen over night. It took years, with each one getting a little better, with each one where I became better. Some of them were worse than others, but still, each one helped me settle into this earthly skin I wear. Into this role of myself that I get to be.

Perhaps learning how to live is the whole point of living. Perhaps the sole reason that we are here is for us to learn how to love; ourselves and others. To love life.

Maybe that’s why I felt so alone growing up. I had to start from that place in order to grow into who I am now.

For what was it that I felt that I was missing anyway?

I think maybe that what I were missing were the souls I would eventually meet along this winding path we call life. We might all come from somewhere else, where or whatever that place is that we come from before we are thrust into the life kicking and screaming. That does not mean that we are not supposed to be here however. We all belong here for the time that we are given here. What a terrible tragedy to leave this gift, this great adventure, before we get a chance to enjoy it for all it is worth.

Maybe we had to walk the paths we were walking separately in order to all meet. Some people come and go, sure. For all moments are temporary. But where ever I go now there I am, and I am happy for the company I bring to myself.

Maybe we are just here to learn. Therefore how could I possibly learn if I had everything from the start. How could I learn to live here and love it if I never missed somewhere else.

Or maybe home was within me all along, and after the trials and tribulations of life. The challenges I faced and overcame, the goods things I’ve done and the mistakes I’ve learned from, maybe after all that, I became a home unto my self. Maybe I was out here just to learn to love myself no matter what.

I think my future self told me all this when I was laying there on the bathroom floor. Bloody wrist leaking into the drain. Knife just out of reach for one more cut. Dipping in and out of continuousness, my eyes closing, that was when I saw them. When I saw me, and all the amazing things that I was yet to do. All of the people I would yet to love, to all the moments I would experience; the big ones and even more importantly, the small ones. I may have forgotten it then, but it left me with a feeling of hope, or rather, a knowing that if I keep going, things will get better.

And you know what? They god damn did.

The life I once thought impossible at 16, I am now living. In fact everything that 16 year old me wanted, I received. There was hope all along, even when, especially when, I didn’t know it.

If we weren’t supposed to be here, we wouldn’t be, and yet we are. Never forget that.

Never stop trying to learn and live.

And never, ever, ever, give up on yourself.