jadedmusings | Why I Write Here

Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.

-Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000), p. 45

Life is ugly. Living makes us ugly by association. There is no beauty to be found in the pain simply existing in this world can bring. I have suffered loss in many various ways, witnessed the agony of a slow death twice over, and battled with my own mind for my sanity. There is no way I can dress any of that to make it pretty or more palatable, nor can I erase the past as though it never happened. It's there in all its horror and it will never go away. To ask me to hide that ugliness is to ask me to deny that which has made me what I am. I don't want to do that anymore. There should be no shame in my admitting that I am a deeply scarred person because I can no more change that than I can change the color of the sky. It simply is.

I think life is terrifying and hideous, not amazing and beautiful. But what I do find amazing and beautiful is that for all the ugliness I have experienced, for all the venom the world has tried to poison me with, and for all the times I have been broken and forced to mend myself again, I still know what it means to love and be loved unconditionally. I still know the joy of friendship. I can still smile and laugh, and I know what it means to be happy. That I have lived through what I have and still want to keep going, even knowing that there is yet more pain to experience, is beautiful, amazing, and absolutely wonderful. That I still believe it is possible to heal is nothing short of miraculous.

This is not the journal of someone who is consistently able to find the proverbial silver lining. My words are not always pretty or even very kind, but they are mine and I write them to remind myself of how far I've come and how far I've yet to go. I share them because I know what it means to feel scared and alone, and I know that sometimes it's life's ugliness that bonds us all together.