Random Person: Hey I really like your tie dye- where’d you buy it?
Me: *slightly offended* I made it… I work at a summer camp…
Person: “Really? It looks so professionally done!”
Me: “Well, I’ve been going to camps for like 10 years and I’ve been working at them for 4… so yeah…
Were the chacos, running shorts, and camp tee not enough?!
If someone called me a ten, I'd take it as the greatest insult ever. I'm an infinity. Everyone knows that.
trigger warning: self harm
it’s been a year since I last hurt myself, an addiction that took all my willpower to overcome. I know I can fashion words into something beautiful but there was nothing pretty about all that self-hatred, all that anger, loss and pain. all that pain coiled in my stomach, gnawing at me from the inside. there was absolutely nothing beautiful about scarring a body that works so hard to keep going. I can’t make this beautiful or romantic or wistful. but it’s over now. I can breathe. I just want to let that fact be.
things my abuser has tried to take away from me but failed:
1) Love in the form of sunflowers and surprise dinners and intertwined fingers. Romance and deep kisses, warm and safe. Dancing and giggling with him to Lily Allen. Kissing him and wondering what I did to deserve a body so soft, a love so raw and honest.
2) Love in the form of looking after this heavy body, even when it doesn’t look after me back. Face masks, showers and brushing through my matted hair, knotted like a unkempt garden. Dragging myself to therapy and loving all the charred parts of me. Loving me flawed, loving me regardless, loving me unconditionally, loving the me that survived.
3) Love in the form of a best friend. Nights spent sleeping next to her, nights spent crying into her lap, nights spent singing at the top of our lungs. She loves me silently, knows me when I’m down, knows me when I’m up. She doesn’t love me different, even with all the flaws.
4) Love in the form of family, with their misguided love and tentative support. Love in the form of my mother’s perfume and food she tells me to eat even when I feel I don’t deserve it. Weeks spent in hospital, bringing me my favourite food in the ward. Love in the form of her imperfection and how I wouldn’t change it for the world.
5) Love in the form of music, of dancing around in my room to the anthems of my youth. Of belting it out as loud as my lungs will allow. Songs I’ve cried to, laughed to, kissed to, lost to. Songs that held me up and gave a melody to all the hurt.
6) Love in the form of the poet in me. On my best days, she is all that I am. On my worst days, she is all that I want to be.
7) Love in the form of hope. A love that screams I made it. A love that believes it happened. Recovery has finally, finally begun to taste sweet.