Hi everyone! It’s been a long, long time since I last wrote in this blog.

What’s kept me away?
• I started school and became a full-time student (I made honors last semester!)
• Willow and I left the shelter and moved into our own apartment.
• Willow turned TWO.
• I’ve been taking on more responsibilities at work and I’ve been working hard in school.

There are a lot of days that I’ve been happy and hopeful and staying afloat with a lot going on.

There have also been a lot of days that I’m busy all day. When I wake up early and stay up late and I’m exhausted and stressed. And that has been hard.

But I’m also staying afloat, in fact I’m doing well, too. Not all the time, of course, but still, I’m not giving up. If this were a few years ago, normally in a time like this, I wouldn’t be ok. I’d run at the slightest feeling of defeat, self-destruct then hide away.
At a time like this, I would be doing the worst I’d ever done, again.

But, I’m not. I’ve been doing better than I remember being for a long time. And I’m so grateful for that. I feel like I have found who I always was underneath the things that glued me to the floor.

Every so often though, I feel scared. Scared because I know I have so much at stake, and because I know I have come so far.
I wonder, sometimes, why am I ok? I wonder not if but when I will fail?
Then I remember the same things that scare me also help me be ok. They motivate me, support me and remind me to keep working. I think about the things that make me want to be ok.

I think about Willow, about being able to do more than just function, about being hopeful for our future, about school and my job, and I think about peer support. I think about the things I went through, the journey of shifting between the fine lines of patient and peer. About getting to speak with people who I understand, people who are struggling through high school with depression or anxiety or while fighting with their family every night. I think about how much peer support and the opportunity to use my story to better empathize with others, which have helped me be ok in times like this.

And I even though sometimes I feel scared, anxious, or doubtful – I feel good about continuing to move forward. I don’t feel tempted to stop, or give up, I feel excited to see what comes next; that fills me and keeps me going forward through fear and doubt.

I feel I am one of those few people who do not fear the concept of death and dying. As it stands, I would not be afraid to leave this lifetime at any given moment. Sometimes, I like to picture myself having a conversation with the spectre of Death, asking “what if..” and “how come…” but these, of course, are questions I will never have answers for.

Unless, well, you know–

I believe that death is not a defeat, and death is not a concept people should be scared of. It’s natural, it’s plain and simple and part of our reality. However. Talking to him as often as I do, making up scenarios and lifetimes I don’t often have the chance to come into contact with, it would seem to others I’m not even living at all; I’m fraternizing too fully with dying.

Someone in therapy once told me, “Don’t flirt with death too much, Fallyn. Or you’ll forget to live.”

For a long time I feel I forgot to live. Or even HOW to do so. But after awhile, Death and I just continue to be good friends. I wish to live and thrive, to be unburdened; I don’t want to die. But I don’t fear it either.

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