The Strangeness of Now

 It's strange to have enough separation between past trauma and the present that I can finally see everything clearly.  I've lived my life pressed up close to the pain, not realizing what I was living in, not knowing how it was changing me even then.  I've lived with toxic acid in my eyes, everything blurred, everything messy, relying on stranger's hands to pull me through.  Trusting what they said and did because they named themselves friends.

Now, I've got clearer eyes, a clearer mind, and a few feet between me and the past.  Now I can see things a little better.  I'm not pressed so close that the truth is distorted, I'm separated a little with a better view.  A bigger view.  A view of how much bigger and brighter the world can be outside of the little muddy patch I'd been trapped in.

It's strange to look back at years of what I thought was my personality, at what I thought life was supposed to be, and realize that who I am is a persona that's been pushed on me.  I'm not better, not yet.  But I'm well enough that I can start shedding the skin they put me in.  The skin that never felt quite like mine but what did I know?  I was living with blank eyes and a head full of lying voices that told me to stay soft and mild and quiet.

Now, I can see the road ahead of me.  Not far, but enough that I'm curious about what might come next.  I'm curious enough to want to walk a few week.  Healthy enough to make it a little farther away.  I have a chance to make a new life, make a new self, make a new world.  I have the chance to change, to grow, to heal.  A chance to make my way into that bigger, brighter world beyond the mud patch.

It's strange to understand so much of my own mind.  To have so many thoughts going around all the time.  To constantly pull at the treads in my insecurities and unravel them until I find the source.  I'm a trail of threads, knotted up and tangled and hard to follow.  But I'm learning to be patient with myself, learning to follow one thread and pull and let go until I get to the root.  Until I get to the heart of the problems that sprouted from seeds planted in my heart.

Now I can see the weeds and I can see the flowers.  I can see where the good begins.  I can see the route to make my way out of the tall grass.  It's just a matter of time, a matter of having the strength, a matter of having the stamina.  It's a matter of fighting not only the ghosts of my past, but the doubts in myself.

It's strange to have a moment of clarity after so long, a moment where I can definitively tell that my next move will be the change in the tide.  Now I just have to make it.