Life has always felt like duality. A gift and a curse. There are beautiful moments scattered between destruction. For a long time, I only focused on the chaos. I built a dark world and lived inside it alone, hurting myself and the people around me. Breaking that pattern meant giving up a lot, learning to search for strength where none seemed to exist.
I was hurt. I was broken. In ways I’m still trying to understand. I didn’t deserve the weight I carried. Trapped in my own head, circling darkness with no grip. Consequences didn’t matter, because life itself didn’t matter. It was emptiness, and in that emptiness, I felt gone.
Memory is a tricky narrator. In film and TV, we’re told to either trust the narrator or accept that they can’t be trusted. But a narrator can only ever tell their own version of events… their perspective, emotionally skewed, one-sided, serving the story they want to tell. Until it’s challenged.
My own narrative convinced me I was already lost, and in believing that story, I made choices that pushed me further into that loss. It was self-fulfilling. A way to say, “See, I told you so.”
I don’t trust that narrative anymore. But I am trying to trust myself. My thoughts. My feelings. To be strong enough to stand on my own. Less fragile. Less volatile. Less afraid.
I can’t be good for anyone if I can’t be good for myself. I don’t know exactly how to get there. But I have to figure it out. I have to.
This isn’t just a story of hurt. It’s the story of learning to listen after being my own unreliable narrator. The story of unlearning self-sabotage and rebuilding a life I can stand inside without crumbling.
And maybe, in that rebuilding, there’s room for hope.