To battle is the only way we feel alive....

There's a line from this song...."I fell apart, but I got back up again, and then I fell apart, but got back up again."

To me, this line describes life to perfection. At different parts of our lives, we fall apart. We get back up only to fall apart and get back up again. This describes my life perfectly. Earlier this year, I scribed this perfection permanently on my body in a pretty sick tattoo...At one point, I fell all the way apart. Little pieces of me scattered everywhere and for a while I didn't know if I would ever get back up again. Then someone offered me a hand up. He helped me glue, tape, staple, weld the pieces back together. He was my friend and always had something silly to say, a road trip planned...whatever.

After I got back up again, I kept the darkness under lock and key. Sometimes it slipped out, but I'd quickly stuff it back into its neat little box in the back of my heart and mind.

In 2009, I began writing. It started out as just a little short story, a kind of hey let's write this and see what happens kind of thing. I found the process healing, and when I really got into it, I wondered if it was time to let the darkness out, make some fictional character live it, let them carry it so that I didn't have to anymore.

The result was...is, a woman who gets sucked under by the darkness, so much that it consumes her life for a few short pages until one day she realizes it doesn't hurt quite as much as it did yesterday.

At the end, I realized I didn't hurt as much as I did before. Yay! I thought. I can finally let it go.

Then tonight, I'm editing, fixing, prettifying (lol is that even a word) and as I'm going through, I know it's coming, I'm prepared for it.

Then I'm smack dab in the middle of it and I find myself panicking, crying, worrying. I can't do it. I can't read it, I can't edit it, I can't even look at it.

Why does it still hurt? I don't understand how something that happened almost 12 years ago can still affect me so much. Why does it still feel like it happened yesterday and not over a decade ago.
Is this something I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life?
I suppose it's like the song says..."to battle is the only way we feel alive."