Survival

I don’t think that I believe in a specific god. Or rather, I believe that there is potential for some sort of higher power to have created humanity and the universe, but I don’t believe nor follow the set of rules laid before us in a certain religion. Why does a man who’s been dead for thousands of years have the authority to dictate who we can and cannot love? Why do we have to follow commandments that were enacted at the very beginning of humanity? What religion is so progressive that it has been able to adapt to centuries of change amongst the human race? And I for one, certainly have very little to thank the heavens above for. Why should I be grateful for an eternal sickness for which there is no cure? For permanent suffering, for emotional scars, for a hatred nothing short of rooted in my being?

I have so few things to be grateful for, and they unquestionably did not fall into my lap through some sort of godly plan. Sometimes I believe that if there is a god, they abandoned us a long time ago. I ask for nothing from a higher power, I do not pray towards an achievement nor wish for some celestial being to grant me my deepest desire.

With those words being said, please believe the intensity of this when I say that I pray every single night to someone out there, anyone, for you to survive. For you to be safe, to be at harmony with yourself, to become to nothing less than enchanted by the many journeys that you’ve completed and the ones ahead of you, ones that I would give my all to help you through. My love for you transcends reality, and I would tear this world apart for you. If your entire well-being can be established through any action of mine, I will do it without any reservation. I live with an incomparable hatred of my sickness, but if adding bitter, taxing brutality to my being is what it would take to provide you with a millimeter of healing, I will do it without hesitation. There is not a single act in this world on the right side of my moral compass that I wouldn’t do if it was for your benefit.

As worsening my condition is unlikely to help you, considering I believe that we are most likely alone in the universe, I instead do my utmost to heal. I want to survive because I can’t die before I save someone’s life. I want to survive because I will prove that I can be a force of nature in spite of eighteen years of others telling me I’ll never make it. I want to survive because I believe that I can have more, that there is going to be more to my life than medication and therapies and hospitalization and abuse and trauma.

I want to survive because I want to see you survive as well.

I firmly believe, more than anything, that there will be more to your life than self-injury and cruelty and loneliness and self-hatred.

I believe that there will be many lives saved by your hands.

I believe that you will become stronger, more confident, happier, so in love with the life that you’ve created that you simply cannot wait to start it every single day.

I believe that you are meant for an immeasurable amount more than the harrowed life you lead.

I believe that your success: past, present, and future, is so extensive that it would take a hundred years to capture it in its entirety. You are accomplished. Significantly remarkable. Ferociously strong. Daring. Honest. Determined. Powerful. Lovely. A beauty so rare that there was never one before, and there will never be one after you. There will come a day, soon, when there will be more love, companionship, gentleness, exhilaration, passion, and everything your seventeen-year-old self now only dares to dream of. I hope that soon, something awakens within you and you become overpowered with a desire to endure. I pray that you become captivated by the truly electrifying woman that you are, and by what you will become. There is a daunting yet tremendously thrilling future ahead of you, my sunshine. I promise to do everything that I can to help you achieve it.

And I pray, every night, to anyone out there, that you want to achieve it as well.