Light & Dark - Story of my life

Karmina - All The King's Horses

Well, hello there everyone.
I sincerely hope you haven't forgotten me, because I sure did forget myself lately. 

You may - or may not - have noticed my on&off appearance on the blog and twitter this past month. And then my abrupt disappearance and this mysterious tweet.

I thought, you know, I should probably shed some light on the situation.
Because as much as we're a book community - always will be - we're also human beings with real human problems, that unfortunately don't involve any chosen one shenanigans, dragon fighting and prince charming swooping in at just the right moment. 

For me, books are even more real than reality itself.
I love books, I breath books, I live books. Books are everything to me. And I wish they could have been enough. I wish I could read and write and blog and talk to you guys all day long and have an amazing life full of adventures and happiness.
But real life doesn't care about that. Real life is brutal and hard and it surges in. You can delay it, but you can't escape it. You can run, but for how long? You can hide, but where?

There are happy, fluffy, beautiful parts in life.
And then there are the dark, harsh, bitter, sad, angry and unclear parts in life.
Thing about the dark parts is: they feel like they'll last forever. Logically you know they can't, but they feel like it, and that's all that matters to your brain. You feel like it will last for all of eternity and you'll never-ever be happy again. 
Right now, I'm in that bad part in my life.    

I'm an 18 (and a half) young woman (girl, really) who literally just graduated high-school and now needs to get into the world.
Easy enough, right?
No. Not really.
It isn't easy for anyone.
And it sure isn't easy when you add anxiety and depression into it.
And parents who don't understand you and can't really help you.
And the expectations the outside world has of you in the 21st century - be independent, get out, do this, do that, have a job, go study, be an adult, be mature, don't be like that. 

The outside world is scary.
The outside world is plain terrifying.
And nothing - and I do mean nothing - you learn in school or read in books or watch in movies can ever prepare you to it.
And it might be my depression and anxiety talking but sometimes I feel like it's all too much and that I will never be able to do it.
Other times, I wonder: does everyone feels this way? Is it my anxiety? Does it really make me that different? Is there... something wrong with me?  

I think a lot these days about a certain poem we learned at school, called The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood 
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as jut as fair, 
And having perhaps the better claim, 
Because it was grassy and wanted wear; 

Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. I wanted to tell you this, to write you this, because we're readers but we're also people, and I find it important to talk, sometimes, about things other than books. About things that get into books more and more of late - anxiety, depression, mental health issues (there are quite a lot of these), LGBT. I know many bloggers, readers, authors and people in general suffer from mental health issues. And I wanted to share this with all of you - those who know what I'm talking about and especially those of you who don't. We're a community, and a community means being there for each other - both in the good and the bad. It's easy being there for each other when all is good. It's much harder when all is bad. But it's also the bad moments when we find ourselves and others most.  That being said, I freaking hate this state of mine. Being anxious and depressed sucks like hell. It's the most horrible, terrifying, dark and hopeless feelings I ever felt. This is, by far, the darkest post I've ever written. I didn't mean to pour everything out like that, but once I started writing... I couldn't stop myself. It all just came out. And maybe it's for the best. Because just thinking this horrible, dark feeling is something someone else experiences right now somewhere in the world is enough for me to want to put this post out there. Life is a combination of light and dark. And for me to share the light, I, sometimes, need to share the dark too. Life is like a Colleen Hoover book. Thing is, you can't just skip chapters as you will. Everyone is the main character of their own story, and that means they have to live through every minute of it. No skipping, no reading the ending first. This is life. And this is my story. Well, the dark part of it, that is. Christina Grimmie - I Bet You Don't Curse One of the things I love about books is being able to define and condense certain portions of a character's life into chapters. It's intriguing, because you can't do this with real life. You can't just end a chapter, then skip the things you don't want to live through, only to open it up to a chapter that better suits your mood. Life can't be divided into chapters... only minutes. The events of your life are all crammed together one minute right after the other without any leaps or blank pages or chapter breaks because not matter what happens life just keeps going and moving forward and words keep flowing and truths keep spewing whether you like it or not and life never lets you pause and just catch your freaking breath. I need one of those chapter breaks. I just want to catch my breath, but I have no idea how.   -- Hopeless, Colleen Hoover.