“Maybe you’re not healing because you’re trying to be who you were before the trauma, that person doesn’t exist anymore, cause there’s a new you trying to be born. Breathe life into that person”.

It’s funny- you learn all these things about growing about healing and then you read that one quote, you hear that one song, love that one person and suddenly it all makes sense. This quote has defined/verbalised my dilemma and also solved it too.

Who I am- is amazing- but what I am building up towards- is someone even greater. The learning never stops- never- but i definitely want to have a solid foundation and be a storehouse, a lighthouse of love, life and learning. I’m almost there but there are a few key things to learn next and I want to say I’m ready- but I’m not. Instead- I have faith.

Sometimes I wonder.

I wonder through my mind- a endless maze full of mirrors of personalities and disguises that I have used- some for fleeting moments and others held for too long.

It is not time that is measured in my mind- but the marks of experiences. The first time that I…. that I- and I realise there are not a whole lot of “first things” I have done or can remember at least.

But I have felt alot. I have been from the heights of fear to the depths of depression. From the warmest smile to the coldest tear. I have known a harsh tongue and a soft embrace.

I often ponder how my life would be different if I never experienced fear. Fear so fierce that it kept me alive- often barely, but I can honestly say that fear kept me from approaching the arms of death and sealing our union with my first and last kiss.

I think of the exhaustion that fear caused me- it created a new personality- a liar, an enemy to all I loved and held dear- and I was simply an untrained actress in a full-time role called “My Life”. There were no retakes, re-dos or start overs.

The day I took my life back- I prayed. Not out of habit, or instruction, but out of faith. Faith being the opposite of fear- being based on love and not lies. I had seen that I was wondering through dangerous territory.

I ponder on the times I laughed without concern- I miss her sometimes. I miss the careless laugh into the wind, the smile that reached the eyes, the comfort in a hug.

I listen to too many love and heartache songs. I feel my heart constrict, tears threatening to spill and a faltered breath as I think of how sad human love makes me- the words that are said but not felt and actions that always expect.

So in all my wondering I realise that I am- in the end of it all- quite blessed. Loved. Happy. And I am here. I love hard and have no regrets doing so. I am constantly learning and unlearning. I speak to the best of my knowledge- with all my heart. I am always making space when I learn new things, feel and experience all of life.

So as I pass another mirror in my mind- this time I recognise the little girl that was hurt but is so loved- and is now a strong, beautiful woman- a survivor. So even if only I see her- I see her.

And I love her.

Today I was dared and challenged to send that 3 worded message to a random contact and my honey-eyed boy was the one I wanted to send it to.

The three words that emphasise the climax in a novel, words that leave even the brightest minds- dumbfounded. Three words that are both uttered too casually amongst friend circles, but not uttered enough between two personal humans.

Three words that make or break people and their relationships. Words that sounds so light and simple, yet hold a great weight and complexity on our soul.

I’d like to think that these three words will make a change in my relationship and friendship with him- But it being April Fools would only add insult to injury.

So- in saying all this, I might do it tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or next month.

But muchacho- if you are reading this- these three words mean nothing if I don’t show you love first. So just know these words are just words without action. You might not hear the words today, but I want you to feel them in you heart and soul first.

Te quiero muchacho 🌻

She looks at me worried, “When you share truth with someone….. Just be careful- it’s easy to fall in love.”

And I think, I had never thought of truth being so rare that it would be the answer in a world of lies and deception. Truth- so strong that it would shift the deceptive heart in a click. A flash. A twinkle. A breath.

And I think truth, is so hard to find. That is why we write, we sing, we dance, we EXPRESS. Truth is so hard to find that we must dig and search with our heart, mind and soul, our WHOLE BEING, just to create or find that little bit that makes us, us. It is our essence, our footprint, the words we speak and are remembered by.

So when we find that truth and SHARE it with someone, it’s like sharing a piece of your soul. To share means you place value on their opinion of your soul.

And this is where I have fallen- fallen into the arms of love. I have shared. I have been shared pieces of souls that I treasure like the sea does to the shore. I constantly am moved and attracted to it.

Attraction not to a person, but their being, their essence, their truth.

In the words of Lao Tzu “Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses”.

So I hope love catches me- but if it doesn’t- I will just be thankful I can share this journey of life, living, loving and learning with it.

My pupils contract as light streams through to my face. I close my eyes as the sun places her kisses on the freckled span of my cheeks. My eyes soften as my chest raises taking in the cool and still air.

The sunlight dances through the leaves, telling me of another Good Morning. The breeze, softly and gently twirls my hair around to tickle my face.

I relax at the contentment of nature. My smile wide as I see once again the effortless beauty of nature. She is beautiful because she exists. She is beauty. There is not one element that is my favourite, but all which work together.

I pull out my journal and just EXPRESS. About love, learning (uni) and life (everything else). Words flowing like the river, my laughter carried into the breeze, my sun-kissed skin basking in the warmth and life of the sun. My heart is content. My soul sated.

• ‘atunga means ‘nature’ in the Tongan language

To say the word lost means that I found it.
I guess that’s the irony of knowing your lost. Is the only thing you found is the word that describes your endless pondering.

To be thrown into depths that always burned.
People always reached down, but that only pointed out to me where I was.
Deflated.

And I guess the thing I never got was that it was me vs the disease. I was never the disease. I have depression like I have a jacket. Sometimes it covered me, filtered out the weather, or hung on my waist. Sometimes when it dropped, it picked up all this gunk from this world. So when I picked it up, I got all the gunk. All the material. All the weight of this concept that was more real than everything else.

When I look back at this excerpt from 2018- I think about the suffering, the inability to breathe, to function simply, the lack of light in my life. I was tortured by constant fear and it manifested physically. I hated travelling alone- I cried the whole way to an appointment I had waited for 3 months. I could barely walk into a building or a hallway without the irrational thoughts of fear convincing me that I could not escape. Fear shook my whole being until I was someone else- someone I couldn’t connect and make sense with. I felt like I would watch her in the back of my mind being scared of absolutely everything. I am only sorry that I did not love myself enough to realise how I broke my own heart and lost my soul during that.

I felt like I was walking around with a plastic bag on my face- I was constantly suffocating from this “artificial material” that was real, but I could choose to remove it. To be patient and understand where and how I was suffocating. See- people think “just take the bag off” because the bag is all they see- but it was never that simple. The bag is tied down to so many ideas and whisperings of false truths I held in my mind, my heart and soul, that if you removed it- I would be stripped of “everything”.

I often have to reflect briefly just to remind me that this new “lease of life” is so different because it is not a new chapter- but a whole new book for me.

This book is called ‘Loved’.

The character is someone who has been reborn with a defying and undying love that conquers all. Love- whos definition does not come from earth, or any substance in it- rather is evident in everything. And this is her truth- God’s love saved her life.

What is greater than fear? Hope- the faith of things unseen. Hope in a love that is selfless, good, kind and powerful to resurrect even the lost soul.

So when I say I am hopeful it is because I know in full effect what being hopeless is. When I say I’m good, it is because I know in my heart that there is no bad that could compare to my previous life- there is nothing life can throw me that God cannot help me defeat in this life. When I speak with intention it is because I do not want to be remorseful of time badly spent. I do not want to miss a raindrop or sunset, the smile that reaches the eyes or the laughter that booms from the chest.

Is it not fascinating that when God rose the Sun, He thought of you too. When He made the great mountain and deep ocean He thought that the earth needed one of you too. So I am thankful that in my small presence I am worthy. Worthy of a love that never fails.

Ofa’anga in the Tongan language, as I have come to understand, refers to ‘your love’. Your, as in the possessive. In english- sweetheart, in fiction- soulmate, and in the language of earth- nature. This had not been a word I heard consciously until about 2 months ago. Ever since I have been plagued to see it constantly- making me wonder obsessively about what it entails and semantics.

Perhaps because this word in the Tongan language expects active engagement and action. If you were to hear this word you would expect a reciprocal and romantic relationship.

The power of language- that is to see that there so many languages with the word ‘love’ and a separate word describing love as an adjective and/or a verb. Love- not as a word, but as an action.

Love is the way the breeze blows. Love is the way rays of sunshine peek through the clouds. Love is the song of the birds, the whistle of the wind, the dance of the trees. Love encompasses like clothes. Love is the air and breath. The rush of the river, the wind beneath your wings, the silence. The pitter-patter drops. The lightning strike. The howl of the wind and the wolf.
But I am holding the windbreaker- you see I don’t want to get carried away.
The visor and sunglasses- I am too stunned. I need to protect the windows to my soul.
The headphones- I’m tuning into another frequency to make me feel out of this world.
The clothes I own by this brand are out dated, tattered and barely there. They’ve been trauma filled, watered down versions.
And I want to breathe- but all my eyes can see is the pollution and fog.

And I want to say I’ll let it go, but these are the only tools I have in my life-kit labelled ‘love’. Hand me downs, pass alongs. They are tools that have built and built and built and sheltered. I want to learn the difference and break it down while being protected.

Today is the day i turned my windbreaker into a kite. And just like that- I ascended higher with each breeze. I turned the sun into my silver lining. The day I learned to listen and not just hear the song. To recognise the rhythm that Mother and I share. Her song sings to my beat and I sometimes still play out of tune, but her song always carries me.

May the breeze carry you, and whisper the songs of love to your heart.
May the sun kiss your skin and her warmth remind you of love’s embrace.
May the song remind you of the melody and rhythm you share with Mother. May your soul move to the song of the earth and remind you to stay grounded. Love burns. It can mess up our hair, our clothes and the fabric of our being, but she is exists only to ignite the soul and mind into one. Ever-present and evident as the sunrise and sunset.
And I’ll remember each time your words touched my heart, or your hands cradled my soul. Eyes full of wonder that made me feel whole.

So maybe the breeze will blow, the sun will shine and the birds will sing. And I will know.

I spent alot of my young years in ignorance. Later in adolescence I blamed everyone and everything. Eventually the circle came back and all I could point at was myself. I’ve spent the last 6 years in ignorance and unfaithfulness which resulted in my-being being tormented from the inside. Not alot of people know this but I was severely depressed and anxious. I was suicidal and mentally was so unwell, that I physically became really ill and literally my body began to shut down. There were days where I wondered what my voice sounded like because I wouldn’t speak. Even when I did, I was living such a double life and I couldn’t recognise my own voice. Laughter was so foreign. I remember one time I burst into laughter and straight away I hit my mouth in an attempt to cover it- because 1. I didn’t recognise the sound and 2. I couldn’t believe I laughed. I started crying silently. I had let myself become so miserable that I physically choked on the foreign noise. My throat closed up- it wasn’t used to being used. I forgot what laughter was- Who she was and I wondered how I let myself forget her.

During the whole ordeal, I started to seek professional help. Little did I know that it would help me- in all the wrong ways. I was bullied and belittled by the professional. I was really embarrassed and really struggled to open up about what was happening. I could barely talk to myself let alone a professional, so when it happened initially I blamed myself. As he was a family doctor, I started to ask my family about whether he was doing the same thing with them. They all responded in disbelief and anger. I started to cry because I was embarrassed that I had let myself be bullied for so long (it had gone on for a year before I talked to my family). So from then on I started to take my family to witness the insults firsthand. One time with my mum, he commented if he she had noticed my “weight gain” and whether she noticed that- he goes on to explain that he was glad she came because he didn’t want to talk to me alone about it because I was “ignorant”. My mum couldn’t believe it. She talked about the life stresses in our family and he responded that he only noticed the “change” in me- no-one else. I was so embarrassed and my mum just wanted it to end- so she told him not to worry, she would look after me.

There are so many stories to unpack but slowly I’ve trusted again. I’m moving onwards and upwards. I’ve spoken my truth. I’ve hurt. Life has chewed me up and spat me out but I’ve come out stronger. I know now that I’ll never be who I was before life chewed me up.

2019 was the game-changer. My journey in spirituality helped me organise my thoughts and priorities. You see when you put God first, He let’s everything else fall in place- all in His goodness and love. This is my story and testimony. I’m a strong believer in that there are no coincidences- people and things are placed carefully and purposefully in your life. I was introduced to a mentor at uni. She was key in helping me understand and figure out life. Every week we would sit down and talk about life and goals and then would reflect about last weeks discussion. The one thing she said to me that changed everything was “you need to be nicer to yourself”. I was so fixed on beating myself up and trying to make up for lost time by creating all the “super human” goals that I forgot that I still needed me. That statement got my crying and Journalling and singing and talking. I started to tell anyone and everyone. Gone were the days of my lost voice, I needed to be held accountable and I needed to share that I was struggling. Struggling with loving myself. I couldn’t say it then but I know it was true- I hated me. Now when I think of how much that statement changed everything- I smile like a Cheshire cat. Everyday since then was an uphill climb- but just for the view- it was always worth it. I continue to struggle but in such a different way. I no longer worry about my mental health. My motto is- 1. Live, love and learn and 2. Fall down 9, get up 10. Sometimes it’s 9 times in a day, an hour or even a minute- but I know the strength I have in God. I’ve defeated demons I thought were going to be life-long partners. I’ve crawled through hell on my knees and walked out dancing and singing.

I am hopeful. I am loved. I am worthy. I am strong.

This is me 🌻