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Am I walking through a desert…or am I close?

How to know?

I think it’s a feeling you get. A pattern you broke. An inherited mess you cleaned without harming others.

You realize you’re feeling things the way you did when you were free – like when I was 12. Everything was a daydream and I didn’t care. And I remember thinking how foolish that was.

But then I grew up and I never dreamt. I was afraid to, and that actually did more harm than good. So, you go through tumultuous trials…and land on your feet…missing those days where you were care free. You realize that forcing anything…never works.

Healing can’t be forced, right? Why do we force life? Why?

The need for control, for stance, for power and for what it looks like. Never understanding how much we’re undermining our own existence to fit into the parody that is society.

Then one day, I said, no. To everything and everyone and I just let loose and did not care. I may as well ran naked through my neighborhood. I stopped trying so hard, I stopped caring what people thought of me. I started wearing makeup and clothes I wanted, and I started telling men who didn’t deserve me to kick rocks.

Then there was a quiet, an awe. It slowly started to unfold and really it’s still doing so – like a water lily blooming upright through muck. Pristine as it opens.

But in order for it to bloom, it has to go through muck.

So now, I can see the horizon. I’m so close, I could have tea there. My thoughts?

Tears?

Fucking tears. I keep crying happy tears.

All because I stopped giving a fuck and allowed myself to heal.