Dearest Ordiceae,
Isn’t it fulfilling to muse on the decisions you’ve made, to question their rightness, to reflect on your present circumstances and, consequently, to mull over the likelihood of determinism? Rest assured, existential creature, that there is more to your constitution than the plethora of matters beyond your immediate control. Admittedly, there seem to be so many setbacks now, but do you think that in five years you’ll have overcome them? No?
Five years ago, you were caught in a raging storm of self-blame, but you didn’t yet admit to yourself it was not your decision to end up where you were, neglected, alone, and so terrified you felt numb. It was not your fault. With nowhere else to go, you sat by the ocean in the midst of a hurricane and stared into its unfathomable vastness. You wondered several times how likely you were to surrender to the urge you had to swim out and away from the shore…and to simply keep swimming until the undertow had its way. You couldn’t fathom anyone would care. Almost none of them seemed to care that you found yourself without a place to stay. You didn’t dare reveal to them either your consequent heartache or your anger. You instead erroneously admitted defeat and shouldered the responsibility for leaving nearly everything and everyone behind you in seeking relief from an ongoing and unbearable anguish. Your thoughts were in a whirlwind. It was a cyclical current of culpability.
Almost none of them knew you found yourself homeless. You seemed so resilient. None of them knew you were losing the will to live. Ordiceae, do you think that in five years, you will look back on this specific day and think anything of it, or do you think it will be among the memories receding within the banal and mundane? Do you feel you will even be able to look back on this day, or do you feel that in doing so, you will be permitting these moments to overshadow or drown out something more memorable? You want to find happiness. You really do, but buried beneath the detriment, engrossed by all the loss, and consumed by the resulting pain, you’ve grown numb. It’s the only shield you have.
Five years from what you’re experiencing as today, though, you’ll feel grateful to have persisted. You will willingly acknowledge it will have been ten years since having to surrender your house, approximately eight years since losing what you knew as family, and five years since contemplating ending your life. It will, however, have been almost five years since finding a place you can call home. It was not your decision to lose everything, but it will be your decision to surmount the residual trauma. You will be able to say, “five years ago, I felt hopeless, but I didn’t realize I would be in a safer place only a few weeks later.” You will not have forgotten, and you will have learned.
The decision you made to escape was possibly the best decision you have made to this point in your experience, but because to you, your only verifiable existence is in the present, you feel stuck. You are in the middle of a storm, but you need to know that you are doing well. You are doing well.
Ordiceae
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