An Atom

There are things we only discover about ourselves when life leaves us no choice but to learn them.

How much pain our bodies can endure.

How many times our hearts can break without losing their ability to love.

How empty a room can feel, even when everyone keeps telling us we are surrounded by people.

How strange it is to look into a mirror, recognize your own face, yet no longer truly recognize the person looking back at you.

And that sometimes, courage has absolutely nothing to do with fighting.

Sometimes, courage is simply choosing to stay.

But back then, long before any of this, I knew none of those things.

There was a time when hospitals had not yet become familiar places.

Before my scars carried dates and memories.

Before words like survivor became attached to my name.

There was a time when my body was simply my body.

When love still seemed like something that, once found, would stay.

When adulthood felt like a distant country I would eventually reach one day, carrying all the answers neatly packed inside a suitcase.

I had no idea.

I didn’t know that one day I would have to grieve certain versions of myself while I was still alive.

I didn’t know that people could love us deeply and still disappoint us.

That some goodbyes would come without ever giving us real closure.

That the person holding our hand through one ordeal would not necessarily be there for the next.

I didn’t know that I would eventually become intimately familiar with the art of starting over.

Starting over after illness.

Starting over after love.

Starting over after losing everything I thought I knew.

Starting over when I didn’t even want a new beginning.

Life sometimes has a cruel sense of humor.

It burns the map, then asks us which direction we plan to take.

For a long time, I thought my story would be about everything I had lost.

My health.

Pieces of my body.

Relationships.

My certainties.

My sense of safety.

People.

Versions of myself I desperately wanted back.

But loss is a strange sculptor.

It takes away, again and again, until we become convinced that eventually, there will be nothing left.

And sometimes, there really is almost nothing left.

That is when depression settles into the spaces that have been emptied.

At first, it doesn’t necessarily make any noise.

It slips into your thoughts, into nights that last too long, into mornings when simply opening your eyes already feels like an effort.

Then it takes up more space.

Slowly.

Methodically.

Until it becomes familiar.

Until the darkness is no longer merely something you are passing through, but the very place you live.

And when you live in the dark for too long, eventually you forget what the light looked like.

I forgot.

I forgot what it felt like to want tomorrow.

I forgot the girl who could laugh without having to think about it.

The girl who made plans as though the future naturally belonged to her.

The girl who didn’t need to search for a reason to stay because, once upon a time, living had simply been something she did.

In her place, there was this exhaustion.

Not the kind a good night’s sleep can fix.

Something deeper.

The exhaustion of constantly having to convince yourself to keep going.

Finding one reason.

Then another.

And another.

Until one day, searching became more exhausting than the thought of giving up.

Maybe that is what people misunderstand when they look at depression from the outside.

It isn’t always about wanting to die.

Sometimes, you simply want everything to stop.

The noise.

The pain.

The thoughts.

The obligation to wake up every morning and begin carrying a life that has become far too heavy all over again.

And there comes a point when disappearing can seem terribly easier than continuing to search for a reason to live.

I have been to that place.

The place where the darkness takes up so much space that it begins to speak for you.

The place where you can no longer tell the difference between what you truly think and what the illness is whispering to you.

The place where you begin to look at your own existence as something you could quietly step away from.

So maybe loss had won after all.

Maybe it had sculpted enough.

Torn away enough.

Erased enough.

Maybe there truly was nothing left of the person I used to be.

Or almost nothing.

Because somewhere, buried so deeply that I couldn’t even tell you where, something still existed.

Not a flame.

That would be too beautiful.

Not hope, either.

I didn’t have enough of it to call it that.

It was much smaller.

Ridiculously small.

A fragment.

An atom, perhaps.

One tiny piece of who I had been before, somewhere the darkness had not yet managed to reach.

It didn’t promise me that everything would get better.

It didn’t tell me that life was beautiful.

It didn’t know what came next in this story.

Neither did I.

It only whispered something I could barely hear.

What if we tried a little longer?

I didn’t know if I wanted to.

I didn’t even know if I was capable of it.

But for now, that atom was still there.

And this is where the story begins.