I didn't know how to get out of bed. For a good chunk of my life I didn't want to get out of bed, but for the first time in a while, I did. I just didn't know how. How was I supposed to start living my life again when I had spent so long half alive? Half here, half there. Fully riddled with depression, I didn't want to wake up in the mornings and be expected to be a living, breathing, person. As far as I was concerned, I was a dead person who was taking up space on earth.
When I finally gathered the courage to turn my life around, I knew it would be hard, but I didn't realize how hard. It's easy to lay in bed and feel numb to everything. That's not the hard part. The hard part is the feeling. The letting in all of the emotions that have been suppressed for so long. When you don't remember what it feels like to be happy or sad, it's so painfully difficult to finally let all of those feelings come flooding back in.
Feeling nothing is the easy part. The hardest part is the healing.
I found myself struggling to be a 'normal' human. I had isolated myself from everyone and everything for so long that when I finally did start to immerse myself into life again, I didn't know how to. I didn't know how to, but I decided that with everything in me, I was going to teach myself how to live again. I was tired of physically being on earth, but not present mentally.
It happened slowly and with a lot of trial and error. It had been so long since I'd felt my heart skip a beat, since I'd really felt an adrenaline rush, since I'd laughed that hard or smiled that big that I didn't realize it at first. I didn't realize that this is what it feels like to be alive.
This is what people have been talking about. This is why people are so happy to be breathing. There is so much more to life than just mourning over loss and weeping over dead roses. There is singing songs at the top of your lungs and laughing with your friends until you can't breathe. There is eating all the food you can and driving around aimlessly with the person who makes your heart go wild
Life is for the living, and I'm happy to say that I'm finally living it.
