What does it feel like inside a human restricted, constricted, oppressed, and suppressed? It feels like a pain that is never ending. Like you have to be strong, so you don’t just fall over dead from the daily beating of just being alive. Then you throw in the rest of the world and the struggles that it provides. How did I ever survive?
If normal people struggle with surviving and end their life, what do we have to be made of to be able to fight all that is within us and those things exterior to us that carry pain like a random whisper in the wind? Where is our mental break? What is it like to just be able to be, to exist, to breathe, and every moment isn’t lathered in pain? Many of us never get to experience that.
I remember breathing. I remember being in a crowded room and being alone all at the same time, I knew I didn’t fit in anywhere. I tried to play it off and be what, “I was supposed to be,” I think that just reopened the wounds and maybe even drove the pain deeper inside me. I remember trying to drown out the world. I used to lay on my floor in my bedroom and put the speakers from my stereo on each side of my head and just blast the music in my ears, so I couldn’t hear or feel anything else, it overpowered my emotions and the sounds of the pain, I loved music, always have. There were times, when the music just played right into my pain, the songs, they covered my wounds when they needed to breathe. There were days that my tears ran out and even my Mother never saw one of them gliding down my cheek. I hide so much. I hide myself, my laughter, my being, my personality, my love…my love. My love was shifted and contorted into something else, I tried to let it out, but how do you share love when all you have recycling within you is constant pain. Constant pain that felt like pressure in your head, worse than a migraine and like a light with a migraine, the world just made it worse. Even the pressure in my chest that never subsided, they said, it was anxiety, but that wasn’t true, it was a broken heart never able to heal. So much pain, I just remember so much pain and all my memories are scattered from the drugs I used to try and numb it or end it, because I couldn’t pull the trigger. Slow death it would have been, but something had to stop the pain, anything.
I sit here in wonder, how the fuck did I survive this? What the hell am I made of? No god ever came to rescue me, no god ever eased my pain, if anything this god I was taught about and these people that associated with him made it worse, far worse than it was in the beginning. I still tried, I tried to fit into their box, I tried to believe and I did, with all that I was, even though it was like a constant knife digging deeper into my soul. They said, it was love and they said, I was broken and this god could repair all that was wrong with me, just believe, and I did, I believed with everything, with all of me. That god never showed up. I prayed for death, and that god never showed up. I thought, I was born in pain, I’ll die in pain, and it’s up to me to determine how long I stick it out. How much strength does one person have? When does that strength just dissipate, how much longer do I have?
Then two years ago, I let go. I let go of religion and my attempt to please those around me. I let it all go. I dug so deep for information to prove all that I was taught about religion was true, I dug for years. Then one day I realized like Santa this is not real, it’s a fairy tale to ease the minds of the weak and torture the minds of the strong. It’s a device that allows people to be closed into a box that gets smaller and smaller the older you get. It suffocates what the human being could be, it restricts the beauty and resilience of a life that could be well lived in so many ways. Oh, but to be free! There are no words to express the transition of where I was, who I was, and all the pain I went through, to finally being free. There are no words deep enough or descriptive enough to even come close to the way I feel today verses how I felt the majority of my life. I can only simply say, I am free. I know what it’s like to love myself, now. I can smile without faking it, now and even my eyes smile too. I am whole and beautiful. After 35 years of life, of endless pain, of dying, of dread, of fear, of self hate, of religious hate, religious manipulation, of suppression, I AM FREE.