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I feel like I’m coming apart at the seams…

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… and until you’ve quietly planned your exit from this world in secret silence only to stay at the very last minute… because the thought of hurting the people you love in any way becomes its own kind of suffering…

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… until you’ve given up your entire self physically, emotionally, repeatedly—just to keep everyone else stable, happy, intact…

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… until someone has taken everything from you—

including your child—

out of hurt, out of spite, out of the desire to remain in control…

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… until you’ve poured your entire mind, body, and soul into someone

you believed was your soulmate

only to watch that reality fracture in ways you never could have imagined…

prison for unimaginable things…

leaving behind a grief and betrayal that’s too painful to even name…

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… until you’ve spent your life trying to be a kind, giving, nurturing person

and do right by the people you love

only to feel consistently dismissed, minimized, and treated like an inconvenience…

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… until you’ve lived most of your life without a support system because emotions are hard and alcohol and avoidance are easy…

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… until you’ve felt like you were always seen as too much for the people who were supposed to hold you and love you unconditionally…

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… until you’ve learned to repeatedly silence your own needs just to keep the peace…

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… until you’ve questioned your own reality because no one else validated it…

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… until you’ve carried everyone else’s emotional weight while drowning…

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… until you’ve become the strong one for so long you don’t remember what it feels like to be held…

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… until respite feels unfamiliar… and survival feels automatic…

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… until you’ve realized that being needed is not the same thing as being loved…

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… until your nervous system has been shaped by trauma, neglect, and layered pain to the point where simply existing feels unbearable…

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… until you’ve had to bury who you are just to survive… just to make sure your children are safe…

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… until you’ve stayed in a relationship that is empty

no warmth, no touch, no connection

because leaving came with consequences you couldn’t carry…

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.. until reaching out for help

starts to feel like you’re just repeating yourself to people who stopped listening a long time ago…

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… until you’ve prayed until your voice disappeared,

cried until your body gave out,

shaken until there was nothing left but silence…

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… until you’ve spent years writing your truth hoping, quietly, that somewhere out there someone might finally understand…

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… and until you’ve searched for meaning everywhere for 25+ years—

in books, in therapy, in meditation, in Native American sweat lodge ceremonies, in various and countless healing modalities, in clinical diagnoses, in travels across the country in search of life after death—trying to make sense of a life that keeps asking far more of you than it gives…

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… until then, I’d never expect you to understand.