Break | Bleed | Breathe
23 days to 23; A Birthday Series Day 17
Break
We grew up too fast to become trauma healers. We have spent a quarter of our lives healing past traumas just so we can get ahead, and most times we have to live with that reality for life. Healing is not depressing, it’s healing while struggling to stay strong that is.
We can no longer be sad or down without linking it to a trauma experience. We no longer watch horror movies or stories because people are already living it, we are now second-hand victims of their stories. We can no longer walk through our streets without mapping out a fight or flight response to the unknown threat lurking in our minds. We suffer daily from post traumatic stress injury (PTSI), from reminders of memories that have refused to leave and now we have to continually visit them, to heal over and over again - the struggle to stay strong.
We are breaking to rebuild our worn out sanity, piecing shards together and making a different art each day.
Bleed
An art that bleeds is bound for everyone to see. The colors we’ve painted on the surface of our lives are too weak to carry us on, they start to bleed.
We bleed on people just as they bleed on us, so be careful who you criticize, be careful who you condemn, because we are not all perfect. The bandaids we thought would help us are falling apart and we are bleeding, yet we are our own pain aids. We can choose to apply another band aid and swallow our pain killers and continue living our lives where we stopped or we can choose to allow the bandaids fall off and bleed.
“Lessons will be learned, patterns should be broken” -
But patterns are turning into puzzles we have to fix to understand them. How then can we break what we are desperately trying to fix?
It’s a never ending cycle often times very unavoidable. It’s give and take. It’s life’s irony.
Breathe
To the person sitting in the middle of a bus packed up with different strangers and scents, who doesn’t know how to breathe because the air flap at the back of their throat is closed, and whose eyes are welled up with tears and a pounding heart…
Breathe. It’s not the first action to relieving the attack but let it out.
If there’s something you need to say, yap all about it, even if your day was the worst thing that could have ever happened to you, say it all. The critics might not be patient enough to understand that you are taking the garbage out, but the few who recognize a bleeding art will allow it to flow freely.
It’s how my grandfather has been living his life till date. Whenever we go to see him, he always tells us about a railway company he worked at years ago… I’m more shocked he remembers it than his age.
Talking is therapeutic and I know because I don’t like to talk but I have to because I need to take the garbage out when it is needed.
This is your reminder that it is okay to break, it is okay to bleed, and it is also okay to breathe.
I wish I could express more than I’ve already written 🫶🏾
This is Day 17!
From my heart and for the journey - Oyin 💕