The World Will Wait for You

For a very long time, I felt that I was standing on a riverbank overlooking a river. And that river is everything that I am: every emotion, every like and dislike, every goal, every dream, every experience. My core and my heart. I can never touch the river, I just look and long for it and live my life in shallowness and superficiality.  Until recently. For years, I felt that I had an underbaked personality and identity and that I was just a shell of a person dragging themselves forward.  But something has changed. I spent these past six months staying up too late and sleeping too much and walking a tightrope of practicality and exhaustion and abruptly, I can breathe. There are so many possibilities. Suddenly, it is spring. There are so many flowers and tree and leaves and birds and I hear the spring peepers calling. I can smell the humidity and lilacs and feel the sun and the breeze on my skin and I am myself again and I am more myself than I have ever been. My potential is li...

I have some thoughts after catching up with a friend who has the same mental health issues as I do, and I thought it would be good to write about it. Imperfections and mental illnesses are not things to analyze and squash out one by one. Yes, we should always grow and unlearn unhealthy habits, as should everyone. But we should not strive to be "normal," because normalcy does not exist.  When you have mental illness, there are going to be people that you will never, ever  be good enough for, no matter how you learn and grow. T here are people who will always try to fix us. And maybe we pursue certain people because we  want  to be fixed. But we are not broken. It's easy to feel like a black cloud.  People may scapegoat you and blame you for the issues that lie between the two of you because they refuse to look at their own shortcomings. They may label you, pigeonhole you before getting to know you, and project their own preconceived notions about mental illness o...