Dumping the Heavy Rocks

You don't remember the exact moment when you decided to stop taking it.

All the bullshit in this life, that is.

When you decided to stop being a good girl or boy. When you decided you had only one life so you might as well live it for you, not for anyone else.

Living as someone else wishes you to – it even sounds silly, doesn't it? Like you would wish that on anyone else. You wouldn't, so why did you force it upon yourself? For money? For love? For respectability? Oh, how confusing our choices get when we are already confused. If we could hug and forgive our past selves, imagine how good that would feel.

Or maybe you do remember. Maybe it happened all of a sudden.

Maybe you took the pushing, the shoving, the piling on, the compression of you, the compression of your soul into some box they wanted to fit you in, a box with sides and a lid and they sat on it and they sat on you, and you wondered how long you could breathe in that box and whether you should poke air holes, and you made excuses for them and you remembered how they had been so nice to you in the past and you thought, "Maybe they will stop. Maybe this is a dream. Maybe they will just let me be again."

Until you realized they wouldn't.

The pressure would always be there. And you were not meant to exist in so small of a box, even with air holes. Then you knew that you could live with yourself only if you stood up and said the things you wanted to say.

The secret things.

The things that burned in your soul. The words that woke you up at night and made you sweat without a barbell or a run. The feelings that, if you did not let them be heard, if you did not let the words rise to the surface of the ocean of you, you knew these words would become rocks.

Heavy rocks.

Like the rocks that lined the pockets of Virginia Woolf when she walked into that river in that heavy, heavy coat and let herself slip under the water. When she stopped holding her breath. And she let the water fill her lungs where air used to be. And her lungs could not use that water. And she sank. And she died.

That could be you.

That would be you.

So you dumped the rocks. You let the words out. You rose to the surface. You breathed again.

And you lived.

And that's when the old you ended. And when you were born again. But not in the way of the church or a religion. There was no white light and no priest. No baptism in a cool pool. No songs by a choir with swaying robes. You were simply and wholly born again in the way of you.

And that was enough.

Because you were born to live, not just exist.