How to get through The Bad Year

 

Come home from school every day and cover yourself with blankets

Shut everything out except your favorite TV show and watch until even Netflix wonders if you’re still there.

Watch the clock count to three while you’re sobbing too much to sleep,

let the screen burn into your eyes until they fuse together with your eyelids as you slip like jello  into the sacred dance of chaotic sleep

 

Let your dreams paint pictures that you don’t want to see,

let your heart find its way into the patterns of your sleep as you experience visions that put a stone in your throat and a tremor in your chest

Wake up every morning with your emotions scattered on the covers

Then go through the day just like you go through anything else:

unmotivated,

emotional, and

 

unorganized.

 

Wear the same hoodie every day.

Spend class periods shaking under your desk.

Realize that you’ve spilled your heart to the wrong people

and now the eyes that see you view you differently,

realize that when we’re emotional we can no longer remain silent,

we can no longer remain private,

 

your heart is just a crinkly plastic water bottle that gets too full and spills over,

your mind is just an overused muscle and right now it’s too tired to be normal.

 

Realize that it’s

okay

to

be

a

mess.

 

Spend time trying to cheer yourself up, because somewhere along the way you lost the ones who used to do that for you.

 

Write inspirational poems that have no substance……………………………………….

 

lose yourself in frantic optimism!!!!!

 

do whatever you can to lie to yourself to keep from shedding more tears

because you can’t help but fear that whatever ocean that’s behind your eyes is on the verge of a tsunami,

on the brink of making a mess that you don’t have the strength to clean up right now.

 

Spend Friday nights going on long walks and shivering in the November wind,

buy yourself a latte and let it get cold in your hand while the loud music in your earbuds makes you cry.

 

Take your notebook everywhere, never stop writing.

 

Go to the library and read bits and pieces of inspirational stories because you heard that they might give you hope, read anything that might give you hope, lose yourself in scrapes of happy stories and motivational phrases and try to wrap them around you like a blanket because you’re just too cold right now.

 

Lose yourself in temporary highs and strangers, open yourself up to anyone who listens and then watch as they walk away.

 

Let this year be a journey you take with yourself because everyone else is gone,

you’re stuck now with just one option, you can be your own best friend or your own worst enemy and you’d better choose to be your own friend because this is the year you get to know yourself,

this is the year you get a good look at what’s really inside,

this is the year you spend days upon days analyzing everything that makes you who you are,

turning over your essence like a prism to try and find the angle where the light shines through to display your different dimensions,

looking at your reflection in the mirror and seeing the hundreds of versions of you that people have driven into your chest like a knife while you look into your own eyes and ask yourself the question none of us ever stop asking: “who am I?”

This is the year you learn the meaning of cut wrists in lonely bathroom stalls,

The year you learn that loneliness is at its strongest in a room full of people who don’t care

The year you’re delusional because you’re hurting when you shouldn’t be

The year you find out that people cry on Christmas

The year you realize that this is what happens when you make someone your true religion

The year you watch everything you used to believe in be flicked away like a flake of dead skin.

 

This is the year you miss thousands of conversations and hundreds of lesson plans

because this is the year you can’t stop thinking

and you’d better think because this is the year you’ll learn how to fight,

this is the year you’ll learn who you are,

this is the year where you become your own everything and if you can’t find the will to spend time with yourself than you have bigger problems than whatever it was that got you here.

 

This is the year to fix it

This is the year you heal

This is a year you’ll remember forever.

 

Because when you emerge from the coma and start letting people in,

when you get out of the silence and talk about your feelings again,

once spring comes and you wake up and smell the flowers,

when you get up to feel the warmer air,

when you suddenly get out of bed with the grit and determination to do your assignments,

when you text your friends and tell them you love them,

that’s when you’ll discover that this is the year you realized you were complete.

This is the year you learned who you are.

This is the year when you discover that it doesn’t matter who leaves,

doesn’t matter what happens,

it doesn’t matter because you’ve been through it now.

 

And when you finally reach the day where it all makes sense again,

you can stand strong

knowing that you’ve survived the year that changed you.