Some days I find myself praying to God for the simplest things – strength, trust, the will to continue living. Because no matter how badly we wish otherwise, the only way to get over something is through it.
There is no shortcut around grief. No secret passage through pain. You survive it by surviving it. And as unfair as that truth feels, it remains true all the same.
Some days are so full of laughter and warmth that I almost forget certain parts of my life ever happened. I move through the day lightly, speak easily, and smile without forcing it.
And then suddenly, on a random Monday morning, I wake up with heaviness sitting inside my chest again.
But not the way it once did.
Not the kind of heaviness that used to make me search for ways to never wake up again. Not the kind that wrapped itself around my ribs so tightly I could barely breathe through it.
This heaviness is quieter now. Older somehow.
It no longer bangs against locked doors begging to be saved.
It simply sits beside me.
It no longer cries loudly for help because it has learned no one is coming to rescue it.
It feels like being placed in boiling water for so long that the body stops reacting to the burn. At first, I fought it with everything in me. I screamed, thrashed, searched desperately for a way out.
Every wound felt impossible to survive while I was inside it. But life has a strange way of not letting pain end, only deepen.
Just when I would begin healing from one hurt, another would arrive before the scars had even settled. And then another. And another.
Somewhere along the way, survival became instinctive.
Now the pain does not shock me the way it once did. It settles quietly into my bones, familiar and expected. Not because it hurts less, but because I have carried it for so long that my soul has learned the temperature of suffering.
What once felt unbearable now simply feels like life. And I think that is the saddest part of all, not that the water stopped burning, but that I stayed in it long enough to call the burning normal.
That is the kind of heaviness I carry these days.
The kind where I no longer feel like fighting against it. The kind where there is no dramatic rage or urge to end life, only a quiet exhaustion that wonders how much more a person can hold before something inside them finally gives way. The kind where questions still exist, but answers no longer comfort the way they used to.
Growing up, I truly believed life was simple. I thought there were only a handful things a person had to do in order to deserve goodness.
Be kind, and people will love you. Be trustworthy, and people will feel safe with you. Be loving, and people will become softer because of you.
It sounds naive now. Maybe even selfish in some strange way. As if goodness was some kind of transaction with the universe.
But it was the purest thing I knew.
And I tried.
God, I tried, however I knew best.
I loved carefully. I listened deeply. I stayed when people needed someone. I gave people the understanding I wished someone would one day give me.
And whenever betrayal found me, I convinced myself it was only a lesson. God is preparing you for something better, I would say. This pain must mean something.
So many people came and went that eventually I stopped asking why they left. Every person carried a lesson with them, even if some lessons arrived disguised as loss.
Some people taught me love, some taught me grief, and some simply taught me how deeply a heart can ache and still continue beating afterwards.
I truly believed none of it was meaningless. That every goodbye was shaping me into someone I was meant to become. And maybe that is why I carried every pain so bravely.
Because somewhere inside me, I kept believing there had to be something waiting for me on the other side of it all.
After a while, it stopped feeling personal and started feeling like a purpose. I thought maybe my role in this life was simply to make people feel seen. To make them feel heard. To remind them they were worthy of love.
And I remember thinking, what a beautiful thing that must be. Surely God must be proud of me for loving people this way.
But slowly, the little girl inside me – the one who kept pouring endlessly into others, believing someone would eventually pour back into her too – found herself empty.
And I feel sorry for her.
Because I did that to her.
The one soul I was supposed to protect, I couldn’t.
I used to believe I had never intentionally hurt anyone. I always tried to empathize because I knew people carried battles I knew nothing about. Everyone was surviving something invisible.
Where I went wrong was believing someone would see my battles too.
I thought one day someone would notice my silences the same way I noticed theirs. I thought someone would look at me gently and decide, “I will never become another wound this girl has to survive.”
I love love so much. I love people deeply, almost instinctively.
But somehow, love never arrived without pain attached to it. There always seemed to be a cost for receiving it.
At least once in my life, I wanted the kind of love we read about in books. The kind where someone wants nothing more than your happiness. The kind where their world pauses when you cry. The kind that feels safe before it feels passionate.
I wanted to feel that important at least once without having to suffer for it first.
I do not want people to hurt me and then realize they were wrong.
I do not want love that grows from guilt.
I did not want the kind of love that first breaks me into a million pieces, only to then put me back together.
For the longest time, I truly believed there was no universe in which God would deny me gentle love. I thought surely, at some point, life would hand me something soft without asking me to bleed for it first.
But maybe this is what destiny looks like for some people.
And the strange thing is…. I have the love of my life now. I am loved fully. Truly. Yet every time something beautiful happens to me, my mind still wanders back to the price I paid for it, before I arrived here.
And that is where I find myself sitting beside my younger self again, apologising to her quietly.
Because somewhere along the way, she started believing love was something you had to earn through suffering.
Because in this lifetime, there wasn’t much softness left for us.
So sometimes I lie awake imagining another life. Another version of me. A woman to whom love arrives gently the very first time.
Not because she earned it.
Not because she suffered enough for it.
But simply because she deserved it from the beginning.
I feel so full yet so empty at the same time. Too full of memories to outrun them. Too empty to see beyond them.
I’m sorry, little Eika.
Life is simply an experience. And maybe it was never meant to unfold the way we imagined it would. Maybe healing is not becoming untouched again. Maybe healing is simply learning how to carry the ache without letting it harden your heart.
None of this pain will ever take my faith away.
I have always believed in love in a way I cannot explain. Maybe it was never written in my stars to receive it gently, but I still refuse to become cold because of that.
Whoever enters my life, I want them to leave feeling lighter than when they arrived. I want people to feel seen, heard, understood, and loved.
As long as someone has me, I will try my best to make sure they never have to sit alone in a dark room, trying to name five things they can see just so their heartbeat slows down enough to breathe again.
Life can be unbearably cruel sometimes. And in moments like those, I don’t think we need shallow pep talks or pretty words stitched together to sound hopeful. I think we need honesty.
We need to let ourselves break without shame. To cry loudly. To scream if we have to. Not because the world will stop for our pain, but because our hearts deserve somewhere to place it.
I spent days wondering why my fate unfolded the way it did. I lived through things I once thought only happened to other people. And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking the universe for explanations.
Life does not always pause to make sense of itself.
Sometimes all you can do is walk through the fire without letting go of God’s hand.
And maybe right now this feels like the worst thing that could ever happen to you. Maybe it feels endless. I know because some part of me still feels lost, disappointed, and deeply let down too.
I do not want to turn this into a motivational story because that would be dishonest. This is not a story about sudden healing. It is about endurance.
But what I do know is this:
no feeling lasts forever.
Not happiness.
Not grief.
Not even the emptiness that convinces you it will stay forever.
This may be a rough chapter. It may last days, months, maybe even years. But every storm in your life that once felt permanent eventually passed. Every version of you that thought, “I will never survive this,” somehow did.
So if you are reading this now, pause for a moment and ask yourself:
When was the last time you felt this broken?
And did you survive that version of pain too?
You did.
And you will survive this as well.
I know I will too.
I have accepted fate in the strangest way now, not with understanding, not with peace, but with surrender. I no longer demand impossible answers from the universe. I no longer ask life to be fair.
It is life.
And maybe healing is not about escaping pain altogether.
Maybe it is about learning that even after everything, the heart still finds reasons to stay soft.
And for now,
that is enough…
-eika ©
EIKA 