I needed to speak to you: lost one. You know who you are, the one who wrote to me for help. You're the one who reached out in those last hours of your life. You are the one who told me your story. You're the one who doesn't go a day without crying. You're the one at rock bottom. The one whose been too far lost now for far too long.
You're the one whose color has drained out of your days. The one who only sees the hamster wheel and the familiar sign posts and knows them all by heart. This cage was never meant to be your path. Life was never meant to be this small, this routine. You were born to be scared, alive in the unknown. You were put here to be surprised and worried at all that unfolds in front of you. The privilege of a lifetime is to surrender to the unknown, to our lack of control, to the free fall that we call 'living.'
You're the one who has forgotten your name. The one who now answers to the role that you play; answering to mother, sister, helper, pleaser. But you've forgotten that there's a wild animal in you that will chew her own arm off to free herself from any trap. So start chewing, dammit. Do whatever you have to do to unleash yourself from the confines of your own making. Scream to the sky gods and ask for help if you have to. Whatever you do, do not lay down. Do not rest here because soon the snow will come and you will drift to sleep. And then you will surely die. Let the wildness in you take over. Fight for your right to be alive.
You're the one who's hurting, telling me that it's about work, about your inbox, about your calendar stacked with meetings. You're the one who doesn't seem to have time to realize that you're barely even breathing. It's supposed to hurt when you live a life that's too small for you. I hope it hurts, so deep and so hard that one day you finally get tired enough of your own bullshit. I hope that one day you step off the hamster wheel, or chew off that arm, or at the very least just close your fucking laptop for two seconds and look out the window. If you can see a tree, even better. Because that tree is not lost.
But you are. You think you're in pain because of the emails, the meetings, the traffic, the stress. That's kind of like saying that a paper cut hurts when you're dying of Stage IV cancer.
Because you're dying here, honey. But you don't have to. You can Change. You can make a new choice. And then another new choice. And then another.
You can choose to live. You can choose a completely different life, a different name. You can move to Ecuador, or Bali, or Alaska. Or go live in a hut somewhere in Africa. You can be anything you want to be. You can walk out the door and never come back. You can refuse to never step on that hamster wheel again. You can breathe in. And then out.
You can lick the wounds until they heal. And then learn to walk on three legs if you must.
You are more free than you've ever been.