That day will come

That familiar burning

inside your heart

searing every vein

consuming every thought

.

seems like a fire

that will never go out;

seems like a bottomless hole

where you never stop falling.

.

You tell yourself to be brave

to be happy, to smile,

to get up and keep going,

and to just be normal again.

.

You tell yourself that you are enough,

that you are worthy,

that you don’t need to prove

that you deserve to be alive.

.

But you don’t believe any of it

and the words just hang there

mocking you

as you fail once again.

.

So you go into battle everyday,

and sometimes these battles arise

out of nowhere

without any notice.

.

You put on your armour

ready to fight

yourself

in your own mind.

.

You wield your sword of positivity

to banish those negative thoughts.

You clothe yourself in an armour of numbness

so you don’t have to feel anything anymore.

.

You fight

and you lose.

You struggle

and you drown.

You weap

and you dream.

.

You dream one day

you will be victorious

and there will be fireworks

in celebration of you.

.

Where finally you can

truly accept and love

you.

.

Where you can finally stop

fighting to prove

yourself

to yourself.

.

You imagine that day

so often it makes you cry

because you think

that day will never come.

.

One day you will

enter the battlefield again

ready to fight all those familiar

thoughts and feelings again.

.

You will look at the face of the enemy,

your own face,

twisted in all its angst and tears

unlike the face the world sees.

.

But that day, you will surrender,

and put down your swords,

strip off the armour,

and stand there, vulnerable.

.

You will stop fighting,

stop running,

stop judging,

stop hating.

.

You will allow all those thoughts

and feelings to come as they do,

without fighting them

without holding them.

.

You will surrender all control

to stop them,

to make sense of them,

and to get rid of them.

.

You will just allow them

to pass though you

like water flowing

quenching the burning fires.

.

Just as you won’t believe

your words that you deserve love

you also won’t believe

your words that you don’t.

.

They are just words.

You will look at yourself again

beyond the tears and pain,

beyond the made up ideas

of you.

.

You won’t see an enemy.

You will see someone

who you can start to understand

and be friends with.

.

You will see that there

is no victory over yourself,

because there is no enemy

in yourself.

.

There will be no fireworks

but there will be a brief relief,

and a glimmer of

a way out of the bottomless hole.

.

This won’t be the end

but the beginning

to a journey to heal yourself

to truly befriend yourself.

.

Trust that day

will come.