Somewhere in the past 5 years, 8 months and 2 days, I have somehow convinced myself that I needed to exist in a 1-dimensional world and that creativity was a distraction I could not afford, so I stopped; stopped writing, stopped speaking, stopped reading and dare I say, stopped imagining. Even my whisper went quiet. I existed solely as a cog rather than living fully. 

There is an exhaustion that comes with shrinking yourself; there are indescribable and undeniable aches deep within the crevices of your soul that words can not fully express. You choose to abandon yourself in pursuit of an unknown.

What no one tells you is how difficult it is to find yourself again; where do you even begin?

No one can tell you who you once were because they only saw a reflection of you but not the true depths, and you only have glimpses in the form of memories of who you once were, the dreams you once had, almost like you have atrophied away. Then you realise that you can never get that person back, because that person only existed in that timeline; they only existed before the shrinking and the dimming. This you, who stands here today, staring at the mirror, is a new version; you need to accept and get to know. You can not build a tomorrow on what once was. 

So the question is, how do you start again? How do you allow yourself to let go of what once was and accept what is? How do you accept that perhaps the dreams you once had have changed? How do you rebuild? How do you let go of the disappointments and the anger that you let yourself become so dim and broken down? 

How do you allow yourself to start again? Despite feeling like you ought to be ahead by now? If you had not let go of yourself, if you had just held on tighter, believed in yourself more, stood your ground and not listened to the voices of others, perhaps your own voice would not be lost, but you were in a screaming match with an orchestra that had a different tone to your life’s song

And so here I am, starting again. But the thing about starting again, though, is that you really never start again; you just rediscover, you relearn. Some things are just innate; they are just part of who you are, no matter how much life beats you down and no matter how lost you feel, no matter how far off course you go and how much of your voice is gone. You are still you. So take it a step at a time, whispering each word as it comes, despite how much it hurts, despite how easy it is to give up, despite the discomfort. Just keep going, because the biggest hurdle has been passed:  the realisation that you needed to start again.

So it has been 5 years, 8 months and 2 days and some change since I allowed my voice to get buried under the lies of survival, and while I am relearning my voice, I have decided to start with a whisper. 

You are allowed to start with a whisper.

STAY SHINING