I feel little pieces of myself chip off and disappear.
They say that energy cannot be created or destroyed
but it has certainly felt like I am on a slow dissent to madness,
my energy shrinking more and more by the day.

I’ve been doing this thing for 5 years.
I leave home, I go to therapy, I do the work, I feel the pain, I cry the tears
and then I am forced on the journey back home to ground zero where it all began.
Over and over again.
And each time it has been different.

Last summer was the summer I didn’t lose myself.
This summer has been both the fall and the spring and the summer in one
days stretched over weeks into months of the same relentless chip chip chipping away at my sense of self.

And it’s true to say that I haven’t lost myself completely.
With chapped hands I have held the pieces gently,
knowing that someday soon I will be able to put myself back together again.

But this summer was the first summer in a while where I have felt so completely alone.
Like an island that has been lost and then forgotten at sea. And I’m honestly not sure why.
I hear the same words and I let them wash over me but it is not soothing,
rather the hottest of flames scalding my skin and leaving me with invisible burns.

Maybe I feel alone because I have been here for so long.
Or perhaps it is because I have let myself forget.
Or that I have forgotten because that version of my life feels so far away.
Like a pleasant memory rather than a near reality.

I hear myself speak and I watch the words float away.
I check in and out with my friends the ebb and flows of friendship don’t escape me.
These times are ruthless in the damage it has done to so many.

But for the most part I have felt like a relic of a life no longer lived,
a life on pause.
Frozen in ice waiting to be thawed.
But in the meantime, my heart keeps beating and the moments keep passing and I keep fighting even when it feels like the lights are on but no one is home.
Because I know.

I know that somewhere there are people who are fighting for me, rooting for me,
waiting for me to come back to them with open arms and full hearts.
I know that even when I can’t see them or hear them and even when I have forgotten their faces my family, the family I have made is there.
My solitude has felt like an exile of sorts, but I am standing with my hands out catching the chips as they are hammered off me piece by piece.
And when I return to my home, I will put myself back together.

So perhaps this summer isn’t the summer I didn’t lose myself but this summer is the summer I found myself.
I went deep into the recesses of my mind.
I found things I didn’t want to find and spent day’s combing through old relics of a life gone by. And then I forced myself into a rebirth and came out anew.

This fall spring summer mashup has torn strips of me away.
And with what has been left I have gotten back up because somehow the distance doesn’t feel as far.
I have bled and cried and choked on my tears and felt the dreadful inescapable truth that my life is but a dot in a universe of waves.
I have tunneled down to the bottom of the pit within me and seen a dark so deep that I didn’t think I’d be able to come back up for air.
But I did. And I always do.