Choose to continue
After all you are the author of your own life
Depression and anxiety are two of the hardest battles one could fight in their lifetime. That feeling of being alone in the darkness is not, in any way, easy to live with. Every day is a struggle for survival and no one seems to realise how hard you’re fighting.
More often than not, we feel that quitting would be easier, that letting go would be a piece of cake. No one would probably even notice that we are gone. Believe me, when I say that this is not true. The people around us do care; they do want us to know that we matter.
However, it’s true most people might not understand what we are going through; we may even have been told to ‘snap out of it’ or to ‘focus on happier things’. That may be the reason why we build walls around us, to keep them out; all of them.
But that isn’t the only way; look around, there are so many others like us, with the same kind of scars and the same stories to tell. Some of them may even have won their battles and they may be standing there, with arms wide open, ready to take us in and make us their own.
So before you give up, stop, stop and consider. Find that last bit of strength to not give up and to live to fight another day, not for anyone else, but for yourself. Let the people around you help you and lead you into the night. And if you think you have no one, if you think you are alone, then let yourself be the driving force, allow yourself to find hope and then cling on to it.
Be your own saviour, be your own guardian angel, because you matter. You are unique, we all are; that alone should be reason enough for us to carry on.
After all you are the author of your own life. Your life is a sentence. Use a semicolon and decide to continue when you have every reason to stop. Live on.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 12th, 2015.
More often than not, we feel that quitting would be easier, that letting go would be a piece of cake. No one would probably even notice that we are gone. Believe me, when I say that this is not true. The people around us do care; they do want us to know that we matter.
However, it’s true most people might not understand what we are going through; we may even have been told to ‘snap out of it’ or to ‘focus on happier things’. That may be the reason why we build walls around us, to keep them out; all of them.
But that isn’t the only way; look around, there are so many others like us, with the same kind of scars and the same stories to tell. Some of them may even have won their battles and they may be standing there, with arms wide open, ready to take us in and make us their own.
So before you give up, stop, stop and consider. Find that last bit of strength to not give up and to live to fight another day, not for anyone else, but for yourself. Let the people around you help you and lead you into the night. And if you think you have no one, if you think you are alone, then let yourself be the driving force, allow yourself to find hope and then cling on to it.
Be your own saviour, be your own guardian angel, because you matter. You are unique, we all are; that alone should be reason enough for us to carry on.
After all you are the author of your own life. Your life is a sentence. Use a semicolon and decide to continue when you have every reason to stop. Live on.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 12th, 2015.