Softly, Slowly, Speaks the Soul

Sometimes I expect too much of myself.

I get frustrated and angry sometimes, because there are moments when I am affected by things which happened in the past - bad things, which hurt me, but which I've healed from, completely, or am healing from, now. Transient moments of feeling unsettled - fleeting, an evanescent glitch in the system.

My mind, my heart - the very layers of personality which make me, *me* - my soul - has suffered injury, in the past. I've been burnt, broken; cut, crushed.

I've worked hard, endured, repaired. The work was long and painful, exhausting.

So when these moments come, when for a little while, I feel damaged still - I have to remember quite how damaged I once was, and give myself permission to not be 100% healed and baggage free. I am allowed to not be perfect. I am allowed to still be healing.

It does not mean that the work was all for nothing. Just because an old injury flairs up like a long-forgotten weakness in a limb during a cold winter, it does not mean the wound is still open and ragged. It's a twinge in the scar tissue. A momentary ache in a bone once broken.

The soul takes time to recover. Nothing can hurry the process, save soft kindness at the right time. And I am wrapped in that, from all the people that I love. I am lucky.

So today, I am celebrating the road journeyed so far. I am celebrating how far I've come - the distance I've travelled, the success I've made of my life. I'm celebrating the person that I am - because I wouldn't be me; interesting, unusual, strange, fucked up and dirty, and all those wonderful things - if my soul wasn't twisted into strange shapes and scarred.

I look at what I have, who I am. And I smile. And nothing and no-one can take that away from me.

Today - I am proud of myself.