The Revelation

There was a time when I believed the world had long since forgotten me. I woke up each day trapped under the weight of my own existence, drowning in the ink-black depths of my own mind. Depression wasn’t just a shadow that followed me—it was me. It seeped into my bones, curled around my thoughts, and whispered lies so convincingly that I took them as truth.

I was broken. I told myself I was unworthy, and that I’d never escape this.

For years, I lived as a prisoner to my own suffering. I wore it like a jacket, convinced that life had conspired against me. I clung to my pain, wrapping it around me like a tattered security blanket, because at least it was familiar. At least I knew how to exist within the sorrow. And that victim mentality? God, it was intoxicating. More intoxicating than the liquor I would drown myself with in an effort to dull the relentless pain I felt. If I was a victim, then nothing was my fault. The world had done this to me. The people who hurt me had done this to me. Life itself had done this to me. This was just the result. The consequences of my mere existence’s actions.

But the thing about seeing yourself as a victim for too long is that eventually, you stop moving forward. You rot in place. And I was rotting.

The moment of change wasn’t grand. There was no sudden epiphany, no cinematic revelation. It was quiet, almost cruelly so—a whisper in the dark: What if you’re the one keeping yourself here? What if I actually wanted to be here?

I wanted to fight it. I wanted to reject it. But deep down, I knew the truth: I was the only one who could save me. No one was coming. There was no hand to reach out and pull me back to the surface. No one could want healing for me more than I wanted it for myself.

So I made a choice. A simple, agonizing, terrifying choice. I chose to live again.

And let me tell you, learning to love life after years of hating it is like thawing after a long winter—you don’t realize how frozen you were until the warmth starts to seep in. At first, it burned. God, it burned. Joy felt foreign. Hope felt like a trick. But I forced myself to embrace it anyway.

I stopped looking at the world through the lens of my past wounds and started seeking beauty in the mundane. The way sunlight filters through the leaves. The sound of laughter—real laughter. The feeling of my own heartbeat, steady and stubborn, reminding me that I was still here.

I learned to forgive—not for them, but for me. Because carrying hatred and resentment only ensured that I stayed shackled to my past. Letting go felt like cutting an anchor from my soul.

I learned that healing wasn’t linear, and I gave myself grace on the days when the darkness still tried to claw its way back in. But I no longer let it claim me. I no longer welcomed it as an old friend.

And most importantly, I stopped waiting for life to give me happiness. I went out and made it myself.

I fell in love with life again, not because it suddenly became easy or fair, but because I decided that even in the brokenness, even in the chaos, even in the mess of it all—this life was still mine. And I was done wasting it.