We hurt a lot, I hurt a lot, and I know you have hurt a lot. We tell ourselves we are OK and that our souls can travel through dark tunnels and come out untouched from damage. We are taught strength is positive and weakness is negative. We are taught to chart our emotions on a graph only to conclude that correlation does not imply causation. We can brush off the bruises, scars, and cuts on our soul by averting our eyes away from them. We remind each other constantly that your body is a temple, but we never remind each other that your soul is a temple too. Your soul needs band aids to heal the tiny cuts and detox tea to wash away the dark bruises that linger.

We are allowed to be broken people and hurt about the harsh winters our soul has suffered through. More importantly we are allowed to react and heal ourselves. Throughout our life we are taught to suppress feelings, to not cry when we are upset, and to fight anger when something fuels our emotions. Yet in order to truly control those emotions, we have to look deeper into what makes us react that way. What wounds are on our soul that have created an atmosphere of negativity inside our bodies? In order to cure anything we must first evaluate the injury, and if we do not give ourselves the time to understand where the injuries come from, we won’t be able to heal ourselves. We deserve to heal ourselves, we deserve to respect ourselves, and we deserve to see the beauty of our soul. It's unfair to ourselves to travel on a journey with no direction of finding what brings us peace.

For the first time in my life I have finally listened to what my soul has been screaming to me all my life: You have so much to give to this world and to yourself, so go deal with your sh*t. It is time for me to pull out that first aid kit, and start healing wounds that only got hollow and caused my vision to blur. Suppression is a cliche tactic to face who I am because it hides who I should and who I can be in my true form. People do damage us and places do break down who we are. Things get buried inside our souls and eat us alive. But that baggage is our responsibility, and it’s our choice to carry it with us or to dispose of it. It’s time we start embracing the concept of accepting ourselves for all that we are because each of our souls is a map carrying many dark cities with numerous melancholy stories. So, it’s OK if sometimes you just feel like crying and the world feels too heavy because in this case correlation does imply causation.