To the ones with white knuckles

This last day is for you. It’s for you as you’re so tired of holding on, so tired of trying to heal in the perfect way. It’s for you as you champion others, terrified they’ll see your own struggle and call you a fraud. It’s for you as you do everything right, every therapy and prayer and medication and humiliating step into admitting you’re not OK, and yet still feel like beneath you’re just as broken as before. It’s for you as you desperately want to be seen, want to be told you’re allowed to not be the strong one for once.

It’s OK if the thoughts of a bitter end still disrupt your days, years after you starting fighting. It’s OK if you write and sing and speak and campaign for hope but still don’t believe some days that it’s true. It’s OK if you doubt every road you’ve ever walked, dissect what you could’ve done differently, wonder if you’d done things better– maybe you’d be well by now.

I don’t know what you could have done differently. But I know that the path into hope is one of surrender, not striving. I know that it means swallowing all our demands on ourselves, all the “I SHOULD be.” I know that to sacrifice our own visions of perfection is, counter-intuitively, the strongest thing we will ever do. And I know that Love and Grace meet us at the utter end of ourselves.

Your moments of faltering imperfection are part of the healing, not counter to it. Your nonjudgmental acceptance of the reality of all you are (resilience and wounds and beauty) is what opens you up to accept the hope so ready to be yours.

In the words of my favorite songwriter, Jon Foreman: “you were born for the dance, not the fight.”

Oh lovelies, performers, perfectionists, those striving– may you dance.