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.
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.
It is the exhaustion of carrying something that cannot be put down.
Of living in a body that remembers too much.
Of being the unwilling custodian of images and sounds that do not belong in any human mind.
No coffee 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.
Rarity in the Darkness
Most of the world will never understand.
Trauma is often spoken of as numbers…percentages in a study, whispered 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.
A membership no one chooses, one given 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 meet.
But I feel them out there, each of us dragging our own impossible story through time.
A constellation of survivors, unseen but real.
The Work No One Sees
From the outside, my life looks like motion, like creation.
Blog posts bloom daily on the page, books find their way to shelves, projects emerge from notebooks into living form.
To the unknowing eye, it looks like ambition.
It looks like productivity, discipline, drive.
But that’s only the surface. Beneath, every sentence I write is wrestled out of fatigue.
Every plan for the future is carved out of scar tissue.
What I do every day is not merely “work.”
It is survival dressed up in paragraphs.
It is defiance disguised as creativity.
It is my refusal to collapse turned outward so the world can see something beautiful instead of broken.
They see the fruit, but not the roots.
The twisted roots grown in dark and damp soil.
They see the output, but not the cost.
And maybe that is as it should be…because who among them could ever understand how much each word costs to bring into the light?
Words as Beacons
Still, I write.
I spill words like lanterns into the dark.
They are not just thoughts on a page…they are beacons, each one a flare sent into the sky.
Maybe someone, somewhere, will stumble across them.
Maybe 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 be entirely alone.
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 on 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.
The Shape of Loneliness
Loneliness is not always about being alone.
It is not solved by a crowded room or a calendar full of names.
Loneliness, in its most brutal form, is 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 am not blind to this; I am immeasurably lucky.
I know many would give everything to have what I do.
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 with both.
Even so, I find solace 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 words.
The Dream of Quiet
What I long for is not grand.
Not riches.
Not fame.
Not applause.
What I want is quiet.
Silence that reverberates through my soul.
A quiet life, carved not from absence but from fullness.
Mornings where I wake not into dread but into curiosity.
Afternoons where the miracle of bees heavy with pollen is enough to fill me.
Evenings where the stars return to me…unclouded, unchallenged by artificial light…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.
It is not a grand dream full of designer clothes and fast cars.
But it is the truest one I carry.
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.
The universe knows.
Survival is not passive.
It is not the absence of death.
Survival is an art form.
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, every star I’ve reached for, is proof that I refused to be reduced to one night’s horror.
Perhaps that is enough.
Perhaps the transformation of agony into beauty is the most extraordinary act of creation there is.
To take what was meant to destroy and instead build galaxies from it…that is survival at its highest form.
The Beacon
So I will keep writing.
I will keep planting words like seeds, sending them into the world whether they bloom in another’s hands or not.
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 creation.
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 night.
