A lyrical disaster.

This is how I will describe myself the next time someone asks. Not because I am an exceptional writer, but because I consider myself a tragedy worth writing about. I am the sprained ankle or the flesh wound. The broken toe, or the sinus infection The little tragedies, where you can always tell that something is wrong, but it’s never been quite bad enough to seek real help. Nothing that can’t be solved with an ace bandage, or a thin latex strip. Right?

I know that you’re probably sick and tired of the same old poems from the same old people telling you how they overcame their difficult times. Well, I’m telling you now because this is the first time that I have been able to. Because the hardest things to write about are the things we’d rather not discuss. Either because it was beautiful, or because it was something we’d rather forget, and I find myself to be both.

Growing up, believing that “I” and “beautiful” ever belonged in the same sentence was more of a distant fantasy than an actual possibility. I based my self-worth off of a reflective piece of glass and a number on a scale because these were the things people considered “beautiful.” Never your sense of humor or your ability to start conversations; It was always where you ranked on a scale of one to ten, and I never gave myself higher than a 4.

To this day, I find myself trying too hard to remove myself from stories and memories because I’d prefer for my past self not to exist. The me that nobody really knew was best described as a fire, swallowing all of the negatives of life and holding them too close. Too devoted to being unhappy and not willing to look for the opposite.
I kept my secrets underneath my fragile skin because, in my haze of self-loathing, a tiny voice in my head managed to convince me that I deserved this. Deserved the struggles and the hardships, and deserved to be destroyed again and again and again. My favorite idea was that I was not worth the beautiful experiences that life had to offer.

The past me is a girl that doesn’t exist anymore.

It’s been 3 years. The girl you see now puts all of her pride in herself because these crushing tides didn’t break her. She climbed her way through her own personal hell and came out of it a better person than she thought she even wanted to be. She spent too long at war with herself, walking thousands of miles with her demons, strapped to her ankles like a child that doesn’t want you to leave just yet. The only thing keeping her going being the fact that she doesn’t want to die with these chains draped around her. She carried them to the end. She made the decision to beat whatever it was that wanted nothing more than to see her fail.

She shattered the mirrors, refusing to let these fragments of her past break the cast she had made around herself. She imagined herself as the smoke from the fire she spent too long inside of, and now, she was going to be okay. Smeared makeup wiped away, aged tears dried up, fractured hearts and empty promises had been put in casts. She made sure that she signed them herself:

“I made it.”