“I am” is the most powerful two words you can utter. The more you declare and affirm who you are, the more you will teach yourself kindness, empathy, love, power, and independence.
As we venture into the realm of declarative “I am” statements, know that we will do so with grace, forgiveness, an open mind, and strength.
We know who we are so, therefore, we know who we are not. We know that we are more and not less. Declare more while disowning the negative counterparts.
You are someone. You are someone with a journey. You are someone with a purpose. You are someone with a mind. You are someone with a voice.
You are worthy of life, of love, of compassion, of truth, of fulfillment. Your heart lies the universe. Everything that is in you is of greatness and of depth. No matter how much you struggle, remind yourself how much you have inside of you. You have great power in you.
I’ve been awake at night and asleep during the day.
My eyes dried with the stale realization that I don’t matter.
My voice is low with no echo and no significance. Fingers pointing at me because I’m the dramatic one.
My motivation has wasted from its high expectation.
I fall flat on my face with this realization.
I feel broken, shattering into a million pieces, so I try to grab onto the nearest person to me, but they look at me confused…uncaring…whats wrong with you?
I scream but no sounds comes out. I’m sitting alone. I’m holding my knees to my chest.
Pain.
I feel pain.
Invisible damage.
But then…
I see the sun come up.
And still I can’t see who I’m supposed to become.
My life has no meaning.
I write it down so I can see it…
You are a life worth living.
And again…
You are a life worth living.
And while I wipe the pieces of my broken self and realize it’s just shedding ashes from the volcano that just erupted inside me, I get up.
Maybe, just maybe I will begin to see that my life is necessary.
She is becoming and no one can stop her progress. She is transforming, becoming something more than she ever imagined. Like the butterfly, she built her cocoon, but before anyone could realize how long shes been away, she broke out, starting from her mind, her old ways shedding like a snake’s scales, away and left like old news. She is becoming. She has made herself into something great. From the scars of her psyche, to the bruises pounding her heart, she made it. Althought she wanted to sit and enjoy the evergreens of complacency, she got up, and there she started her process…of becoming.
Sometimes she liked the sound glass made when it hit the ground
There’s something about shattered glass that made her crazy seem less chaotic
Her crazy made darkness into indigo and blood blossom into dripping roses
Her crazy dead in the silence of the morning moisture, laying wide eyes under the red white and orange horizon, flat on her back a new cycle of 24, her crazy
Her crazy stiff like paralysis untouchable, unlike the craziness around her,
unique
numbness
How crazy was she that she dreamt and the ideas in her head jumbled into a mush of oblivion beauty, how the meadows were such a fresh green scent, a bed of flowers rushing out of her veins and out of into the concrete, making cities back into forests
The nature in the natural
Crazy
How she saw death caress the goosebumps of the morning fears but life coming to rescue and recreating, the crazy came again, and lately confusion is normality
The thing about crazy is its many masks of reality, like Plato in the cave, our ignorance so bliss we can cut it with a knife, staring at our own illusions and unable to see
The light
The gray in the black and white
She was crazy
She didn’t believe anymore, the ink in the lies, feeding her the spoon of perceived truth, but was it really truth?
She spat out depression and threw up anxiety because deception caused the stigma that she was crazy
Mental illness was what they said caused her hesitancy because her ignorance before walked her down the aisle of matrimony, but reality divorced her, nothing is definite and she can’t trust
Now she is just crazy
The color in the black and white
The unanswerable questions
The abyss of uncertainty
Sometimes she liked the sound glass made when it hit the ground
There’s something about shattered glass that made her crazy seem less chaotic
I couldn’t gather them as I trudged and dragged my exhaustion to class that day
Last October
I carried what I could of last night’s sleep, maybe 3 hours, and the anxiety, a monster growing in the pit of my stomach drowning me till the world seemed like a blurry smudge painting
My last year of college came to me like a ton of bricks delivered to my front doorstep
My life turned into a war since I started to worry
Every
Single
Moment
Of
Every
Single
Day
My perfectionist tendencies paired with the thoughts of deadlines…no motivation…and a fear of tomorrow. It made a nice soup ready for panic, don’t you think?
I stirred myself daily but still seemed to make it to every class, do every assignment, and manage a research project
That’s how I was last year
I sat in a office with a woman I told myself to maybe once a week hoping that my fear of living will transform into something else
That’s how I was last year
When I reminisce and think back, I feel how I felt, that numb yet nervous feeling
I can still feel it there, lingering
Last year, I didn’t want to wake up to the sun rising and I didn’t triumph for completing 3 years of college
Instead…
I dreaded the thought of every day coming, long days turning into long nights, a hungry stomach, and the quarantine I built around my sanity
That was last year
I don’t know how I seemed to make it a whole year later though
In the midst of the strains and labor pains of reality, I managed to give birth to a project
This project spiraled in me October of 2015 until it was born
I named her SparklyWarTanks
I made her to fight back
To win the war
To let my sanity free
Every time I wrote something I saved myself and I took another ingredient out of the soup
I typed, pounded my fingers on my keyboard, to explain the motive for the birth of something new in me
I wanted to save another woman’s life while saving my own too
I wanted to burst out and say:
“Take care of yourself, take care of your mind, and your body!”
“You are important and you matter.”
“You are powerful and worthy, and beautiful. You don’t need anyone to tell you.”
Of course those were messages I needed someone to tell me, but instead I became the billboard
The more I wrote, the more I felt the walls crumbling, the walls crowding and containing my sanity were falling
I found the key to the cage of my anxiety which surrounded my quarantined sanity
In october of 2016, grown into an adult, SparklyWarTanks evolved into a vision, into a foundation for women empowerment and mental health, one project exploded into a space, a place, a sanctuary to be safe
My anxiety transformed its face into the partner of ideas and the employer of a plan, it turned into passion.
So as I write, I write to the woman who hates herself and to the one with depression, I write to the woman with the eating disorder and to the ones living on the streets, I’m writing to the ones going through a midlife crisis and self-realization, I write to the mother and to the survivor, I write to the women who hurt and the ones who are stressed, I write to the powerful women and the ones making a difference, I write to the lawyers, and doctors, and writers, and motivators, and to our future
I write to support our next generation of women
That we stand up for ourselves and never hold our sanity hostage
That we declare our independence from expectation and perfectionism
That we defend ourselves and fight for our will to wake up peacefully and unafraid
If I could sum up how I’ve changed from last year to this year, I would simply say
These words came with tears so I hope you can sympathize. This is depth therapy:
Lately I’ve really been hating my body but through the lens of my mind coming out my eyes. A portal of perspective. Hear me out.
This is not one of those “pick your head up because things will get better” but a “this is a real life struggle kid so learn from it” pieces so look at this…
Just one picture can twist the notion of a once fooled concept of self-acceptance because you thought you began to love “the skin your in” but the reality of it is…
the concept is once you begin it can never regress but my regression looks so good it resembled progression like walking backwards I wanted to say “I love you” but instead I said…
I thought I got over the feeling that my thighs are not the size of the American dream or the white picket fence or the its not what it seems, but its the rugged and thick concept of oppression and prejudice, the judgemental reality that not all words are the truth or not all smiles signify happiness but covering up the reality because the sacred is watching you, you want to see the day where the light is so bright that all this will soon fade away into an oblivious sense of brainwashing…
I thought I would wake up and it would be one of those dreams where you were running from a symbol of your subconscious fears but its not because the tears were real and so were those people
The ones that said that they want you and would stay, but that was just you talking to yourself because you have to really learn to mean what you say in your head like I will start that today and I will end that tomorrow but you don’t…
Instead you give excuses and let your self-talk ruin your self-image constantly digging the hole you call home
But this ends today
The body that was once in ruins under the ashes like pompeii will rise and become the volcano that took you from existence. You are no longer going extinct or becoming a personal museum for onlookers to talk or to taste but you will climb from your ashes into an unknown place.
You will not be scared to be strange or to not fit in because you are the one who is meant to change the existing archetypal skin, the status quo, and the origins.
Today marks a holiday where you declared your independance and come back from war, where you remembered what was and proclaim that your dead exterior will fall and let your new interior reveal itself.
You are not what you were yesterday and tomorrow you will be better than right now. So if you hate your body now, start the process to make that perception change tomorrow.
If you were looking for your purpose in life stop looking because its to be who you are to the people you encounter. There’s no other purpose but to continuously labor on yourself even if that means sleepless night and uncomfortable situations.
Life is not meant to work for others, but to work on yourself in the pursuit to become something that will shatter negativity, punch fear in the face and to help others in that same process.
You have work to do so I suggest you take one day at a time to appreciate all that you are because no one will be ready for the power that will be you in the future.
SparklyWarTanks 