Lessons That Healed Me Then - Writing

you go through life for a long time believing no one has ever suffered the way you have.
and then, one day, you read something. or you hear something.
and you realize your suffering does not isolate you. it is your bridge.

others have suffered before you. many are suffering around you. many always will. and all you can really do is bring a little light to that suffering.
just enough light for someone to begin to comprehend it. to live with it. and maybe, to change it. we do not change people.
all we can do is give them the courage to change themselves.

james baldwin

i managed to change my life when I was in high school. slowly, carefully, I picked myself up and began improving the quality of my mental health. a large part of that came from books. books I was lucky to have at home, and others I found on the internet.

at that time, I was devouring everything I could read. I could not wait to return from school, lock myself in my room, and read. I had read before, even when I was younger, but in high school it was no longer a hobby. it was a need. I read as if something was missing, as if I was searching for it between pages. my questions were infinite, about myself and about the world.

the most important realization that period left me with was what finally loosened my own wretchedness and helplessness. it was the warmth and relief of knowing I was not the first to feel what I was feeling. not the first to experience what I had experienced. through reading, I learned that someone, dead or alive, had lived something close enough to my life that my confusion and pain were compressed into lines and quotes. it felt as if they knew me by name. as if they had lived my life before me.

i am not as innocent as I once was, nor as good at recalling emotions deeply enough to feel them again the way I did back then. but I remember the warmth clearly. the realization that my problems with all the complexity were not unique as as I believed. that I was not alone. that knowledge alone changed me.

the mere existence of someone who had been through something similar was enough. everything they offered through their writing was a gift beyond that. I am forever grateful to those authors. some well known. some people I met in life. humble people who were powerful enough to share what they could not say aloud. generous enough to believe someone out there might need their story to feel less alone. what they wrote mattered. it helped me when I needed help the most. it helped me rise from ache. they were only carbon on paper, yet they were light to me. it still amazes me how deeply reading can heal.

as long as I am breathing, as long as I am living, if I can help someone by untangling complexities I once lived through, I will not stop writing. I write in the hope that my scattered pieces might become a piece for a teenager trying to understand themselves. or for a grown man who never learned how to give his feelings words.

someone helped me once. many people did.
this is how I pass it forward.