Two Things Can Coexist

I want to scream.

Not because I am falling apart. Not because I have lost. But because I have so much living inside of me at once, and nobody ever told me that was allowed. I have grief and anger and hatred and love and sadness and happiness all sitting in the same room inside my chest, and they are not fighting each other. They are just there. Coexisting. Breathing the same air.

And we do not talk about that.

Life has a way of making you feel like you have to fight for peace. Fight for happiness. Earn your way to the light. But what I am learning, what I am really learning, is that you have to fight for your anger too. Fight for your sadness. Fight for your grief. Because those moments are not the enemy of your healing. Those moments are the evidence of your living. Every single one of them matters.

We have been taught that anger is ugly. That sadness is weakness. That hate is ungodly, unspiritual, low vibrational, something to be ashamed of and suppressed and prayed away. But here is what nobody is saying out loud: hate that goes unnamed becomes trauma that goes unhealed. It becomes sore spots that people created in you, wounds you carry around and do not understand because you never gave yourself permission to look at them directly.

When you learn to sit with your hate and ask it where it came from, everything changes. I hate this person. Okay. But why? What did they take from me? What did they leave behind? That is not darkness. That is excavation. That is the most honest thing you can do for yourself.

Same with anger. We suppress it because we believe we cannot be angry and still be good. We cannot be angry and still be spiritual. We cannot be angry and still be a woman who has it together. But under anger lives a little girl who was silenced. A little girl who was handed survival tools that were never hers to begin with, told this is what you do, this is how you live, this is how you make it through. And she obeyed. She swallowed it all down and called it strength.

We have every right to be angry.

I am twenty seven years old and I have so much grief in that. People say you are still young, you are still a baby, you have so much time. And maybe that is true. But I am twenty seven years old and I am still healing wounds I did not create. I am still untangling patterns that were handed to me before I was old enough to refuse them. And I hate that. I own it, I am not sitting in it, but I hate it, and I think it is important to say that out loud.

I hate that I spent years not loving myself. I hate it. I will be the first to tell you I learned the most beautiful things in that season, but I still hate that I had to go through it. I hate watching my siblings live their lives through their wounds because we were raised by parents who were emotionally unready, who were doing the best they could with what they had, but whose best still left marks on all of us. I have this knowledge now. I have done the work. But I cannot hand it to them. Everyone has to walk their own road, and I am watching them suffer on theirs, and I hate it.

I hate who survival made me be. I hate how not feeling enough made me choose people who confirmed that. I hate that I stayed in rooms and relationships that were too small for me because I had not yet learned I deserved more. I hate it.

And I want to tell you where it started, because it did not start with me.

I learned young that in order to survive, I needed to be whatever everyone else needed me to be. That was the lesson. Not who are you, not what do you love, not what makes you come alive. The lesson was perform, shrink, stay out of the way, and you will be okay.

My father was distant. He was not kind. And instead of something in me saying this is not for me, I did what children do. I chased his love anyway. I made myself smaller so he would not scrutinize me. I stayed quiet so his words would not tear me apart. I learned to move through a room without taking up space, and I called that survival, because it was. I was a child who just wanted to feel worthy of something. And in trying to earn that, I forgot who I was before I ever really got to know her.

My mother carried her own grief. She stayed longer than she should have, not because she did not love us, but because she had generational tools handed to her that she could not put down. Tools her mother gave her, and her mother before that. She did not know how to leave because nobody had ever shown her she could. And in her staying, in her silence, in her not yet understanding her own worth, we suffered alongside her. She suffered. We all did. And there is grief in that too, grief that is not anger at her, but grief for all of us, grief for what we all deserved and did not get.

I did not get to be a child. Not really. I was the responsible one. The one who read the room. The one who managed her own emotions so nobody else had to manage theirs. I was a weird kid, a big personality, full of something, and none of it was nurtured. I was never told your difference is a gift. I was never given permission to just be free and whimsical and wild and carefree. I had to be responsible before I was ready, and when I became an adult I did not know how to put that down. Responsibility had become my identity. Surviving had become my personality.

And I hate that. I hate that the years where I was supposed to be soft and free and unbothered were the years I was learning how to endure. I hate that my big bubbly personality, the one people love, the one that lights up rooms, is in part a reflection of the childhood I never got to have. I carry her with me everywhere I go, that little girl who just wanted to play, who just wanted somebody to say you are free, you are safe, you do not have to perform today.

I want to put it down one day. I want to just be. I want to sleep without the weight of responsibility sitting on my chest. I want one day where I am just a child again, carefree and unbothered and fully held.

I did not get that. And I hate it. I hate it a lot.

And do not get it twisted. I am also grateful. Deeply, genuinely, spiritually grateful. But gratitude and grief are not opposites. Gratitude and hate are not opposites. Two things can coexist. That is not confusion. That is not contradiction. That is what it actually feels like to be human and healing at the same time.

I let it live beside me. I do not let it live inside of me. There is a difference between acknowledging what you carry and being consumed by it. I can say I hate what happened without hating who I am becoming. I can grieve the girl I was without abandoning the woman I am right now.

But I will not pretend the grief is not there. I will not dress it up and make it palatable. I will not tell you I am only love and light when I am also anger and shadow and everything in between.

I am all of it. And so are you.

That is not something to fix. That is something to finally, finally feel.

Kayla Maryam | becomingherrss.com