It is June 29, 2022
Currently 1:36 AM
My name is Ashley Elizabeth Greenlaw
I am 20 years old.
After graduating high school, I felt I had lost touch with myself even more. I was rushed to get into college, and at the time, I knew that I wasn't ready, but I ignored it in the hopes that maybe I could forget and make those around me forget as well. I was wrong.
I ended up rooming with a shitty person I was acquainted with in high school; my anxiety went through the roof, and with it, my depression. I isolated myself and stopped attending class. I experienced homesickness for the first time in my twenty years of living. I started to realize that all the trauma I had stuffed away wasn't gone. I dropped out and had to explain to my adopted parents what a failure I was.
Having to admit you cannot do something, is one of the worst feelings. It's full of hopelessness and self hatred. For me, it was such a low feeling, as if I weren't worth the time or effort. My adopted parents took it with ease. I beat myself up for months before, wondering how I was going to tell them. When it came down to it, I just, talked. I told them everything that I was feeling, I expressed how disappointed in myself I was. All they said, was that they were sorry my first year in college had to be that way.
At first I was shocked, I thought surely at any moment they would start yelling at me, or tell me to get lost, so when they were just sitting there, sadly smiling at me, it almost felt worse.
I don't have a clue at where I will go from here. There are so many things, so many possibilities that I never had access to. It's scary in a way, because i'm walking around blindly in a world so full of opportunities and I cant pick a single one.
I keep reminding myself, that the only reason i'm still breathing, is for those around me, for those that I love and for the ones that love me. But the older I get, the more I realize that there are actual things I want to do, that I want to achieve. It's an odd feeling, and it actually scares me to think that I may have a future. I want so badly to just give up, because, wouldn't that be easier?
I have had so many people in my lifetime, come up to me after hearing what I have been through, and say, "I wouldn't have survived, I wouldn't be alive". But something they don't understand, is that, I am only surviving. I haven't had the chance to live. There were many times, when surviving just wasn't enough. Many times when I looked death in the eyes and begged him to take me. It was only the coward in my soul, that kept me from making that final fall. I was, and am, scared of death.
I often say that if it were death beyond my own hand, I would accept it in a heartbeat, and I am afraid that statement will always be true.
I feel so powerless in a world where everything I do ends me back in this position. I wish I could do more for my brother, I wish I could do more for my sister, my mother, I wish that I could show myself that its okay to do nothing, because there is nothing I can do. But I can't. I so badly, want to change things. To make them better. It is an endless cycle of letdown.
There are a million things I wish to say and just not enough words to say them. With each day I survive through, comes the endless realization, that my life, will never be lived, and even worse, i'm not sure its worth living at all.
That brings me to the conclusion of this rant,
Keep going. Because at the end of the day, you don't know a damn thing. So why not try and figure it out?
