She wasn’t ready to fly.

She couldn’t open her heart like bursting butterfly wings and throw her pain and fear and jealousy to the breeze like scratchy grains of sand.

Not today.

Today, she needed something else.

So she climbed inside the dark caves of her heart—the places she feared the most—and sat there, explored it, settled in.

She touched the cracks and crevices of hairline fractures, licked volcanic ashes of anxiety, trudged through troubled canyons of despair and catapulted to mountaintops of magnolia blossom joy.

Then she could finally see.

She took a deep breath.

She saw that her pain wasn’t quite how it appeared—it never was.

She saw that trying to let go of vague concepts like jealousy or sadness or fear didn’t mean anything at all.

She saw something much more terrifying and fantastic: the truth.

The truth, yes, the truth—it was shockingly beautiful because it slapped her wide awake for a second.

As she became brave enough to look closer, she saw snapshots of herself, tangled and clinging like mad to her suffering.

She saw herself basking greedily in scorching sunbeams of misery.

She saw herself relying on stinging seas of despair to hold her shaky pieces together.

She saw herself worshipping anxiety like a dangerous, forbidden lover who always made her weak in the knees.

She saw herself reaching out for pure-spun pain every morning and drowning in dark, worry-filled nightmares every evening.

She saw more than she ever wanted to see.

But, she saw, more than anything, that it was futile to forcefully pry her delicate hands from clinging so hard.

Instead, she began to find meaning in those desperate, grasping places.

She saw beauty and light and life of a completely different kind there.

She took a deep breath.

And she invited her demons inside for tea and cucumber sandwiches.

They were starving.

Carefully, she began to unroll the sticky, stained fabric of her heart.

She explored each valley and every hidden fold with soft, gentle hands.

She didn’t rip away any suffering puzzle piece, for she started to see the charm in their sharp, unruly edges.

Eventually, she opened herself, just a little bit, and ushered every drop of pain lovingly inside.

She felt free, even though she didn’t have all of the answers.

She didn’t need them.

All she really needed was to dive headfirst into her own muck.

So with a gentle fire in her eyes and fierce determination in her heart,  she threw on knee-high black leather boots and slogged around in seemingly shitty piles of truth for awhile.

She knew it wouldn’t be pretty.

Still, she smiled, cherishing this moment profoundly.

Because she knew with every fiber of her raw, shaky being, that it was f*cking beautiful.

Author: Sarah Harvey

Editor: Evan Yerburgh

Photo: Pixabay