“I found my happy place the day I stopped comparing myself to everyone else and just embraced that I’m strange as fuck and oddly out of place and I kind of dig it that way. My weirdness is my magic!”

-Brooke Hampton

It’s amazing what bearing your soul can do for a person. I’ve done a lot of writing over the past few days, and had some conversations with friends on a variety of subjects, and I feel like it has helped me step over some major hurdles in getting my life back on track. I still have some work to do, but I feel like I can tackle it now without getting down on myself again. I believe I just needed to get everything out in the open to see my truth.

People often love to remind you that things could be better or worse, but I think I reached my breaking point, my rock bottom, or whatever you want to call it. For me, that point was realizing I was happy once, and that I’m the only one holding myself back from being happy again. Closing your heart off can protect you from pain for a time, but I think it ultimately leads to a much darker place if you can’t learn to open it again. Dealing with other people can be shit sometimes, but I think I was choosing to look at how they could hurt me, instead of trying to find the light they might bring. Maybe that’s because I lost that light within myself for a while.

Either way, I was getting so tired of feeling down in the dumps, so I’m glad I’m starting to move past it. The last year or so has been hard in many ways, but I’ve also managed to gain a lot of perspective on my life, so I wouldn’t trade it back. Not everything has gone the way I had hoped, but it’s enough for me right now to have had a good past few days, and I’m not going to let that go.