African Daisy

For You, Exactly As You Are

You wake up tired, scroll bad news until it blurs. Answer emails, jaw clenched tight— or can’t even bear to look.

You say “I’m fine” with three tabs open—rent, repair, relief— and one on how to sleep through the stress, or how not to sleep all the time.

You forget. You snap. You soften. You try again.

If you are carrying children, parents, partners— meals, medications, moods— and no one asks how you’re doing, this is me asking.

Not just if you’re managing. If you’re okay. If you’ve been held, or fed, or even seen.

How are you, really?

If your brain jumps tracks mid-sentence, mid-plan, mid-dream— if the dishes feel impossible, if you forgot again and hate yourself for it— please hear this: you are not alone. Not at all.

This world wasn’t built for minds like yours, but that doesn’t mean yours is wrong. It means you’ve been trying to bloom through cracked concrete, drinking whatever rain you could reach, and still—still—you flowered.

If the world was made for standing without thinking, for walking without fear, for climbing stairs without pain, for seeing every sign, for hearing every word—

If holding a pen, a fork, a steering wheel costs more energy than you have, if you measure your day in spoons left, not hours passed—

you are not broken. You are not a burden. The burden is stairs with no ramp, streets that swallow wheels, silence when you ask for help.

If rest feels dangerous, if joy feels stolen, if you’re so used to pushing through you forgot how to just be— you’re not the only one.

The world wasn’t built for you. Not for most of us, was it? But you are here anyway, making it work how you can.

That is not failure. That is survival. That is a kind of brilliance.

You are not failing. You are not falling behind. You are responding to a world that punishes tenderness.

And still— you are kind. You are trying. You are here.

If you wonder whether I mean you, I do. Even if the voice says "not me," I still do.

Come as you are: tired, tangled, beautiful.

You don’t have to fix yourself to deserve rest. You don’t have to be better to be loved.

You already are loved.

Still.

Still.

como se hace la luz dentro del ojo | © víctor m. alonso

“todo se hace en silencio \ como se hace la luz dentro del ojo” [Jaime Sabines]

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Vladimir Nabokov

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“You will never be free until you free yourself from the prison of your own false thoughts.”

— Philip Arnold

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