“I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backwards.”
– Iggy Pop
My life has always been chaotic.
When I think about my past, I can’t think of a time it was easy to focus on the future. During a long time, I couldn’t even think about the future because I didn’t believe that I would have one. I didn’t believe that I would get the chance to celebrate my 18th birthday. I didn’t believe that I would ever finish school or even start working. I didn’t believe that I would ever be able to think past tomorrow. I didn’t believe in anything regarding my future.
The pain was too intense that I could manage to look forward.
And when I look back, I can’t think of a time in which it was significantly better until sometime ago. Of course I had some great moments and phases of happiness, but there was no time in which I was genuinely happy for more than a few hours at a time. I remember a phrase my teachers used to say a lot about me: “They are always laughing, they seem so happy all the time, how is that possible?”
Humor has always been a good coping mechanism for me.
Back then nobody knew why I was always laughing, and almost everyone referred to me as “the person who is always happy.” Laughing on the outside, but crying and screaming on the inside. On every single day. During every single second I didn’t spend on my own. For almost 16 years, constantly. And with every passing day the pain only got worse.
In total my life was more of a hell than a life.
I knew that I would reach the point at which it’s not possible to fake a smile anymore, and I felt the facade breaking from time to time but still couldn’t stop. It was impossible for me to even think about showing it or talk about how I really feel, so I had to continue. Back then I couldn’t imagine how it would feel if I would ever have enough courage to share what’s really going on inside my head with anyone, and I didn’t believe that I ever would.
It was nothing but surviving at the bare minimum.
More than eight years later, my life has changed. I haven’t only got the chance to celebrate my 18th birthday but six more of my birthdays so far, and I’m looking forward to all of my next birthdays. When I turned 18 it felt weird, and the feeling is still there on my birthday every year – even though it’s not that intense anymore – but I’m still looking forward to celebrate. Because I know I survived at my bare minimum, even though I didn’t believe in it at all for most time of my life, yet I’m still here.
I am here, and that’s all that matters.
Of course constant suffering from tons of different problems is still something I have to deal with, even if it’s not that bad anymore on most of my days. The amount of trauma is nothing that heals on its own; it’s something I have to work on, and probably keep working on it in some way until I die. Otherwise I can’t survive, and especially not live my life the way I want to. So I will.
I have huge dreams, and I don’t want to refer to any of them as just a dream forever.
My past was hard, that’s my reality, and being alive is still a weird concept for me on some days. But just because I’m not at my best yet, it doesn’t mean that I won’t get there or that I’m not worth it to be alive and live my life the way I want to. Because I am. That’s something I had to learn in ways I wish I haven’t had to deal with, and it took about 24 years on this earth for me to say this, but:
I’m always worth it.
My past doesn’t define my worth.
What others think about me doesn’t define my worth.
Because I’m always worth it.
And even though I can’t say or even feel this on every day, deep inside I know it’s true and that I’ll come back to this point. It doesn’t matter how long it took for me to reach this point, and I can’t change my past anyways, so why should I keep overthinking why whatever situation happened to me and make myself feel bad because I start thinking that I deserved it somehow? It doesn’t make sense, and now I know it doesn’t. Sometimes I still think about it, mostly because it’s easier for me to look backwards than to keep focus looking forward, but at least I now know I didn’t deserve it.