TW: Mentions of an earlier suicide attempt. Please avoid this entry if there is any possibility that it will cause you distress and please know that you matter.
Actually, I cannot claim to have been reborn. But lately I see a hint of the dawn coming. Perhaps it is a sign that the sun will rise somehow in 2024 for me, even if it is at the end.
It's been 9 months since I broke down and tried to take my life. I wish I could say that in the aftermath, I gained strength and healed. But I decided to hide in my bubble of pain and to use connections with others as a way to validate my value as a human. The bubble kept accumulating pain, exploding every few months as inevitably I crashed and burned. Three times this happened and each time I cried and beat my chest at my own naivete that doing the same things would somehow have better results. I failed in my connections, I stretched myself thin. By October, I was so exhausted that I closed every door and burned every bridge I could. But I think I... I think that though not truly reborn, I have learned the quiet joy of being a hermit again. My connections are now limited to the friends who are wholesome and true. The ones that wonder how I am and reach out to check in. The friend who understands my dreams of nooks, and tea and buttered toast. That is enough in the end. Just a quiet sanctuary to breathe the scent of the earth, of yeast, and of geraniums.
Today a pain took over me. It filled every crevice of my soul. A tension ballooning, tightening my insides. It tasted like poison and looked like hubris. I took that pain and I let it grow until it exploded from me. I did not cry a tear. Not for the fears or the lies or the truths or the seething self hatred that took over me in 2024. I didn't feel empty or full or happy or sad after. I only felt my words return to me. Words that, for the last month, stuck in my throat and could not get out.
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
– Albert Camus