hi beautiful person —
as always, i hope you’re doing super, and if you’re not, i hope you get better soon. remember you come first, but i just wanted to say, thank you for being here.
even if this may not go live immediately, i’m writing this at 12:01 AM on january 31st as i reflect on the first month of the new year. as i mentioned in an earlier article, the first two weeks of january were hard for me because of stress and some other things that all piled up at once.
as i explain what happened in those weeks to myself or to someone who knew what i was going through and was checking in, i reminisce on one fact. this fact is that it’s always so hard to remember that i am stronger than what it might be that i’m going through. especially in the moment of an anxiety attack or when we’re bawling from all the pent-up emotions.
this is important to remember. it’s always hard at the moment. i mean, of course it is. these intrusive thoughts, the overthinking, the fear of feeling not good enough, alone, or not knowing what to do, it’s so difficult.
but what about after? what about after you take time for yourself and slowly but surely recover… however long that may be?
if you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know that i try to make a lesson out of every little thing in my life. so for me, the after was a form of growth. i realized that going through this struggle, phase, pain, or whatever you may want to call it, now will help me at some point later on in life.
it’s almost as if i have the upper hand. because something that would have hurt me later on in life hurt me at this moment so that i know how to navigate it in the future. what the future holds for me, i do not know, but i do know that every experience i have now is another tool in the box i can use in my life.
that’s what i mean when i say the beauty of now. it’s now about the post-cry glow (which let me just say is the best thing ever). it’s about the experiences that i, you, and we all go through in our lives that shape us into who we are. the experiences themselves may not always be beautiful, and a lot of the time they won’t be. but if we learn, when we learn, how to use our weakest moments to become the strongest versions of ourselves, that’s when we become beautiful.
a butterfly needs its own time to spread its wings. it doesn’t act on anyone else’s timeline — only its own. so if you ever have a cocooning moment, take your own time to process it all. there’s no such thing as a destination. it’s only about the journey; what you learn, where you fail, how you succeed, and above all, why you grow.
you are so beautiful already. and if you ever need to remember that, grab ur phone, turn it off, and stare closely at the black screen. then smile because in that tiny little black screen is you. if it can do you that much justice to how simply fantastic you are, just imagine what a fully bloomed butterfly version of you can do.
with so so much love in my heart,
apuroopa