The Loneliness of Carrying What Few Can Imagine
Every morning I wake into a body that feels older than its years.
My bones do not simply stretch toward the light, they groan under a gravity that seems heavier for me than for others, as if the universe has quietly assigned me double the weight.
Sometimes my chest aches for air while there is oxygen all around.
My brain, before my feet even touch the floor, is already exhausted.
It feels as though I’ve run an endless race in my sleep, sprinting through memories I never asked for, fighting shadows that refuse to stay in the past.
This is a kind of tiredness most people will never know.
It isn’t the fatigue of overwork or too little rest (although that also factors into it if I’m being honest).
It is the exhaustion of carrying something that cannot be put down.
This is the pain of living in a body that remembers too much some days.
Of being the unwilling custodian of images and sounds that do not belong in any human mind.
No early gray tea will ever touch it.
No night’s sleep will ever heal it.
Every morning is a negotiation with the weight: Rise anyway. Breathe anyway. Create anyway.
And somehow…miraculously…I do, most days anyway.
Rarity in the Darkness
Most of the world will never understand, and honestly, I’m glad for that.
Trauma is often spoken of as numbers…percentages in a study, silly statistics in a classroom.
But there are kinds of trauma so rare they hardly appear in those numbers at all.
To witness what I witnessed is to belong to a hidden fraction of humanity, and yes, some days (like today) I feel sorry for myself.
A membership no one chooses, one with dues paid in blood and shock.
Fewer than one in a thousand people will ever look upon the kind of horror I saw.
And even fewer will be forced to continue living with it etched into their memory.
Sometimes I imagine us…those few, those unwilling…as points of light in a vast darkness.
Scattered stars in a sky so wide you’d never guess how few we really are.
We don’t know each other.
We will likely never ever ever meet.
But I feel them out there, each of us dragging our own impossible story through time itself.
A constellation of survivors, unseen but as real as the stars themselves.
The Work No One Sees
From the outside, my life looks like motion, like creation, like beauty and elegance.
Blog posts pop up daily on all of my social media pages, books find their way to shelves (three of them as of today!), projects emerge from notebooks into living form over weeks, months, years of effort.
To the unknowing eye, it looks like ambition, it looks like productivity mixed with discipline and a dash of drive.
But that’s only the surface.
Beneath, every sentence I write is wrestled out of fatigue, and every single plan for the future is carved out of scar tissue.
What I do every day is not merely “work,” it’s survival dressed up in pretty little paragraphs.
It’s defiance disguised as creativity, it is literally my refusal to collapse turned outward so the world can see something beautiful instead of broken.
We all wear masks I suppose.
They see the fruit, but not the twisted roots grown in dark and damp soil.
They see the output, but not the cost it feels like my soul pays on the daily.
And maybe that is as it should be…because who could ever understand how much each word costs to bring into the light?
I also wouldn’t wish that kind of clarity on another human being.
Words as Beacons
Still…I write.
I spill words like red wine on a white carpet.
They are not just thoughts on a page…they are beacons, each one a flare sent into the sky.
Maybe someone, somewhere, someday will stumble across them.
I’d like to think a soul carrying their own unbearable weight will find themselves in the lines and whisper, “Oh. Someone else knows.” And in that moment, they will no longer feel entirely alone, because I am there with them.
Even if that never happens…even if my words echo only in the chamber of my own survival…it will still have been worth it.
Because in writing, I keep the darkness from swallowing me whole.
My words are messages in bottles, cast into a vast ocean.
Some may wash ashore to reach another heart, and some may drift forever.
But still, I send them.
Because to write is to live.
To speak beauty into pain is to insist on existing in a world trying its best to snuff it out.
The Shape of Loneliness
Loneliness is not always about being alone.
It is not always solved by a crowded room or a calendar full of names.
Loneliness, in its most brutal and unforgiving form, is truly the absence of understanding.
And that is the loneliness I know.
I can be surrounded by love…and I am.
I have a wonderful family. I have a husband whose love is steady, who anchors me when the storm rises inside. I have a few friends who are always willing to weather the storms too.
I am not completely blind to this; I am immeasurably lucky.
I know many would give everything to have what I do, and I really do know it.
And yet, gratitude does not erase memory.
Love does not unmake scars.
I can be held in the safest arms and still feel the echo of that night.
I can laugh, I can celebrate, I can marvel at joy…and still, a part of me lives in a world no one else in the room has ever walked through.
That is the paradox of surviving what cannot be unseen: you exist in two realities at once.
One blessed, one broken.
One full of luck, one full of loss.
And you learn, somehow, to walk inside of both.
Even so, I find some peace in the companions that never demand explanations.
The stars overhead do not ask me to translate my pain.
The plants in my garden do not demand I explain my silence.
They simply exist.
And in their existence, I find a kind of companionship deeper than the word I hold so dearly.
The Dream of Quiet
What I really want is not grand.
Not riches (although enough to pay my bills would really help with some of the anxiety of every day living).
Not fame (definitely not interested in living in the spotlight).
Not applause, I’ve never really been much for external validation.
What I want is peace and quiet.
Silence that reverberates through my soul and caresses my mind.
A quiet life, created not from absence but from fullness.
Mornings where I wake not into dread but into curiosity, afternoons where the miracle of bees inside my sunflowers heavy with pollen is enough to fill me with joy.
Evenings where the stars return to me…unclouded, not hidden by artificial lights…and blink back like patient friends who have been waiting all along.
I dream of the sound of leaves rustling in the evening breeze, of the stillness of a book resting open in my lap, of breathing in beauty and exhaling wonder, of a world slowed to the rhythm of nature, where nothing is urgent but everything is alive.
This is not a crazy dream full of designer clothes and fast cars, but it is genuinely the one I carry around close to my heart.
Not the one I see when I close my eyes, as those are horrors I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Survival as Creation
People may never understand how hard it is that I do what I do every day, they may never see the invisible war behind each blog post, the cost behind each plan.
But I know, and the universe knows. My husband knows, and my friends know.
Survival is not passive, it is not the absence of death.
Survival is an art form, we really made it that way at this point in human history.
Every sentence I’ve written is a brushstroke of defiance, every project I’ve imagined is a sculpture carved from pain, every garden I’ve planted in the winter, every star I’ve reached for, is proof that I refused to be reduced to one night’s horror.
I believe the transformation of agony into beauty is one of the most extraordinary acts of creation there is.
To take what was meant to destroy and instead build galaxies from it…that is survival at its highest form, and something we tend to do beautifully as humans.
The Beacon
So I will keep writing…as if I would ever stop.
I will keep planting words like seeds and sending them out into the world whether they bloom in another’s hands or wither away in the vastness of the internet.
But in truth, I have already done what matters: I have refused to let darkness claim me.
I have taken what was meant to end me and turned it into something beautiful.
And in that act, I am never entirely alone.
For in every word I send into the dark, a beacon glows…and somewhere, in some unseen constellation, I join all the others who survived the unspeakable.
Together, we light the darkness for each other.
