Once, I thought I had chosen the study of mental health to become a healer of broken souls

but I discovered that in fact I did it to find a cure for my own.

I quickly learned that there is no healing for the wounded. Only how to live with it—how to smooth over the ragged flesh so that it becomes as invisible to you as it is to everybody else.

They don't tell you how sorrow never really leaves.

How it lingers in the air you breathe, like an invisible weight pressing against you, constricting your lungs.

How it sounds in the mourning of the night, creeping through the silence to fill your head with phantoms of the past.

How it falls in the raindrops, drifting into your soul like mold thickening in the walls. How it trails along the windowpane like the tears staining your face.

In twenty years, I've learned to make a list of all the feelings I found after emptiness, to count every day that I didn't reach for a blade, and name it a victory.

I patched together the void without the use of thread and scissors, but with every embrace that felt like home, and each song that made me cry for something other than sadness, and every heart that could hold my secrets and did not leave.

The thing is, words are not enough, and love is not the charcoal that can absorb all the poison in my soul. But I can trace the atlas of my scars and see them healed.

I can know that I survived through black days, and that there were also days when the sun broke through a little, and that here I am, hundreds, thousands of days beyond what I had ever thought to live, so maybe, maybe I can live for one day more.