I was playing crib with my best friend of 15 years this evening. We were reminiscing on the times we’d spent in our “dark days”. You know the ones. The ones that make you feel some kind of ick from the inside. The ones that make you question your sanity, your livelihood, your strength, your success, or y’know, the mere fact that you’re fu**ing alive.
It dawned on me that there are people in this world that had a significant impact on my survival. Some, many in fact, of which that I no longer even know where they are today.
What a circumscribing factor. To consider the concept that those who quite literally factored into my physical ability to continue on this earth are the exact humans that I cannot for fact tell you are still present in this world.
Gratitude. It can tear to you absolute hell.
Let me tell you about a little bit of hell, my friends (I don’t care that you did not request this over-share, thank you)
Once upon a very long lifetime ago, there had been a moment in my life where I had either a strong lack of care for my survival, or I’d genuinely believed that I was incapable of losing such a life. “I will always survive“. I remember that term well. It is engrained in my mind, it still slips out, I still lose sight of just what kind of significance it holds. My adolescent mind was incapable of understanding the mere sacrifice of what giving up would look like to my family, friends and even strangers at such an age. The 13-year-old girl who had nearly been shot in the mouth at gun-point did not seem like such a possibility at the time of such a process. N’or did the 13-year-old girl whom was nearly abducted by taking a ride from a stranger for cigarettes, or the 13-year-old girl who’d walked through East Hastings and slept there only to be nearly stabbed to death, or the 13-year-old girl whom lived in a trash home and was nearly murdered by a lady searching for drugs.
I don’t recognize this girl. At the time, she’d felt that life didn’t have a consequence to her failed choices. However, she had a grateful plethora of humans who’d taken responsibility for the survival against such consequences.
And I genuinely cannot thank them enough for doing so. She cannot thank them enough for doing so.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and make the assumption that for many of you reading this, this may be one of the first time’s you’ve heard a mere depiction of these stories. This isn’t something that I speak of lightly. The decisions that I’d made as a young child were as such of one who’d opted to choose insanity over stability. This was a girl who didn’t think that her life was of value, that did not believe that she was loved. This was a girl who many of you may not know belonged in my life.
But these people knew her.
Hell, they knew her well.
They knew her well enough to know that regardless of what devious actions she’d take to risk her life or gain some sort of endorphin, some sort of adrenaline… Anything to feel the same high that she’d felt to destruct her state of constant chaos. They knew that she loved to love, that she was capable of listening, of understanding your soul. That she’d hurt, and felt hurt, saw what hurt looked like to you. They knew her so well from the countless hours spent helping them resolve their inner conflicts, taking the entire weight of your problems onto her shoulders. Yet at the same time; talking her off of the ledge, talking her out of a bad decision, picking her up from countless back alleys and highways. They knew where to find her, where to help her and how to save her. They’d watched her break, fall, cry, lose her fu**ing mind and simply get up the next day only to watch her do the same again. And again. And again.
But they didn’t leave.
They’d always show up. Time and time again.
And these people… these people hadn’t even held a fragment of her attention back then. Up to this day, they hadn’t with myself either.
I ask myself whether it was due to my lack of gratitude for losing touch with them, or if it was due to my stringent effort in destroying every possible avenue of my “old” self. I wonder if it was sobriety that pulled myself away from them, but to be quite honest with you, I wonder if they’d left the moment I’d seemed to have a grasp on survival because of the trauma I’d inflicted by being the person they’d picked up so many times from the trenches of hell.
A piece of me believes that this was their decision. But the version of myself that I am today realizes that it was likely myself who’d left them once they’d no longer served a purpose. I was a selfish individual in my previous life, I don’t recognize her, I don’t know her today. I often forgot to give thanks to the people that helped her, I often forgot that they were even a piece to her survival – let alone the sole reason that I am currently sitting here today.
Ultimately, it is with unequivocal doubt that these people are the reason that I am alive. Regardless of my instinct, angst and outright strength… I would not be here today should they have not been there to protect her.
And I can’t even tell you if they’re still alive.
The amount of guilt that I’ve come to realize that I hold for the girl that I used to be weighs heavily on my shoulders today. The amends that I am looking to hold true to that girl. The one that forgot to say thank you. To genuinely look these people in the eyes and say “thank you for protecting me from myself when I didn’t know who I was or what I’d realized I should be living for. Thank you for being someone that made me feel capable of feeling like there was a purpose to staying on this earth.”
… Now there is something to feel “ick” about.
I say this with peace in knowing that I still have time to share my gratitude with these people. I say this with excitement, not with regret. I am grateful for these people. I am sure you have the same ones in yours.
I don’t think that I have to say this aloud, as I hope that this rings true to your mind as well, but I am not going to hesitate to find them. I am going to say thank you to those seemingly distant strangers who’d pulled her out of her depth of darkness.
I promise you that they haven’t forgotten about her as I feel she had them.
And I promise you that she wouldn’t have survived, and I would not be so fortunate to have this amends today.
Neesh Media 