I haven’t always been the person
I am becoming now.
I was quiet for a long time.
Too quiet.
And I got to a point where I started to
believe I didn’t have a voice.
It’s a suffocating feeling
to want to hide who I was,
how I felt, even how much pain I was in
from the rest of the world.
And when I started to change,
dealing and coping with my pain
not everyone was eager to see what I was trying to say.
Maybe it was partly my own fault.
People who had known me for years were seeing
a different girl ~
a struggling girl,
honest,
hurting,
introspective,
changing slowly,
wanting to speak about things that mattered to her,
not play games to hide her heart.
There were people and relationships
I had to leave, realizing how unhealthy
and unbalanced they were.
And there were others,
people who turned away from me,
once they saw I wasn’t just a face,
just a patient,
some lifeless person
that would tolerate the pain...quietly... any longer.
But the friends that stuck around,
and the friends who keep in touch,
who have chosen to know and spend time with me,
they are the ones who display true acceptance
for the person I was, I am, and will become.
It’s part of that overused notion: “unconditional,” but it’s true.
Nothing that breathes is constant.
Everything changes us somehow,
and so it is living with pain,
becoming more and more true to myself on the inside
that the world was meant to see all along.
-Suzi
Finding my poetry side again...

