Take me back to when life felt good. Maybe it wasn't good or maybe I had a better handle on it. Or maybe I was blissfully naive.
They took my confidence and replaced it with self-doubt.
They took my courage and I became smaller.
I miss when I was bigger, unapologetically authentic.
I walk through life just trying to flow. But I have become so small, so doubtful I am like a little pebble on the bottom of a flowing river.
Sometimes that pebble catches in the right current and I can flow a little easier. Life is a little easier.
But eventually that pebble gets lodged on something, something bigger, stuck for a period of time. Life is frustrating.
And then the right current will catch me again and I can flow a little longer, a little further. Bliss.
But you cannot make a pebble bigger. Rocks wear down to pebbles. And pebbles do not grow. How does a pebble get bigger, less helpless to the current, the flow. Less helpless to the rocks, the lodging points.
They say, try being a little sticky, a little vulnerable. Try a little healing.
But how do I heal and why haven't I tried before I was this small?!
I spent my childhood growing; just a pebble growing into a rock. Just to wear down to a pebble once again.
And now I'm asked, I'm required to heal?! To build again?!
I am tired.
I am tired of learning things wrong or learning the wrong things.
I am tired of emptying myself into things, into people that are leaky.
Why can't they just hold water?!
I am tired!
I have been building, been filling.
Can someone build me? Fill me?
I. am. tired.
I want my confidence.
I want my courage.
I want my peace.
I want to find that authentic self I used to know.
But I am so tired.
I have become so small.
And I can't hold water.
Maybe this version is my unapologetic authentic self.
I am still and have always been my authentic self.
I am just smaller at times, but authentically smaller.
And that is okay.
