Read This On The Days You Hate Yourself The Most

I read once how the first few moments of each day when we wake up are often the only time we are granted freedom.

You wake up in the morning and for just a few seconds, you are not your problems. You are not the person crying themselves to sleep time and time again because they had to face another day living a life they are not happy with. For just a moment, you can forget about the self-hatred that has plagued you for what seems like an eternity. Before you have to open your eyes and face the world in the body you have never been comfortable in, you can relish the time where you finally feel at peace. You are rested, you are whole, and for just a sweet second, you do not know your pain.

I wish we could bottle that feeling and hold onto it for the times we needed to be reminded of all that we are outside of our suffering. I wish I could tell you that remembering a life without pain is an easy thing to do, but I can’t. Once you have experienced the lowest of your lows and seen your rock bottom, it can be so difficult to ever see anything more for yourself. But I promise you, it is out there.

The darkest parts of ourselves like to wrap themselves around us during our worst times. They wait for those moments when our vulnerability hits its peak and then they strike. They provide us with a false, smothering sense of comfort, telling us that we deserve the pain we are feeling, that we deserve to lose our light.

Soon, you begin to forget what lightness looks like. You fall asleep in darkness, and most of the time it feels like you’ve never even woken up. Except what you are feeling is not a dream, it’s a waking nightmare. You go from having small moments of sadness to an overwhelming depression that you just cannot shake. Your physical appearance is changing, and you can’t even recognize the person staring back at you in the mirror. You begin to wonder if there was ever even a person there in the first place.

There was. I promise you that you have always been here and that you deserve to be. You deserve to live a full, beautiful life, no matter what the bad days tell you. You are not your bad days, and you are not the sadness you see reflected back at you in the mirror. You are not the extra weight you have put on or the unwashed hair or dirty sheets. You are a human being, a wonderful, complex person who deserves a life brimming with light.

Even when you cannot remember a time when the depression wasn’t all that you could feel, you will always have that sweet, short moment of blissful ignorance each morning before you truly wake up. Maybe our bodies give us that time as our real wake up call in life; maybe we are supposed to take that moment and run with it. Maybe we are supposed to close our eyes and go back to that place every time we begin to feel the weight of our problems try to bring us back down again.

Your peace and happiness are not a mistake or a coincidence. If you are capable of feeling them for just a few seconds, then you are capable of feeling them forever. No one’s life will be sunshine all of the time, but life will always give you small glimmers of hope. You just have to let the light in. You just have to let yourself indulge in the moments where life gives you hope and then you have to tuck that hope away for the next time the worst times come calling. Because trust me, they will always come calling.

I hope you cherish these small, intimate moments. They are the ones that can save you.