what if i lose my spark? ⊹ ࣪ ˖

Getting better has its eerie side. At its core is a quiet, unsettling fear: the fear of losing your spark. To some, it might sound strange - almost like a longing for misery, a senseless wish to invite chaos back into your life. But the truth is more complicated than that.

When you grow up in depression, its gloom can settle into the foundation of who you are. It becomes familiar, almost intimate. So when something shifts - when you feel even a flicker of light- it can feel like betrayal. As if you're turning your back on your own story, on your pain, on everything you endured. And if the suffering begins to fade, a question creeps in: did any of it mean anything at all?

But did the pain ever truly have meaning - or did it simply exist?

Living anchored to it, almost revering it, slowly drains the life from you. There's no space left for growth, no room for new experiences, when all your energy is spent tending to what ultimately confines you. Pain can be a teacher - it can shape empathy, humility, even clarity. But when it's kept alive as a present force, when you feed it as though it still belongs here, it becomes a fire that consumes rather than illuminates.

And nothing truly lives in a valley that's still burning. There are no blooming trees, no wandering bees, no easy, unguarded smiles - only ash and heat and the echo of what once was.

Rebirth - around you, within you - begins the moment you let that fire die down. Not all at once, not without fear, but with a quiet refusal to keep feeding it. Even if it's all you've ever known.

The unknown will still feel vast, and strange, and frightening. But it doesn't ask you to understand it, or even to stop fearing it. It only asks that you allow it to exist in your life.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, something will change.

From beneath the ashes, new grass will begin to grow. Small, fragile things will push their way into the light. It won't look like a lush forest at first - it won't be vibrant or full or easy. But it will be alive. And given time, it will become something more.

Every so often, you'll still notice the remains - a charred tree not yet fully returned to the earth. It will stir old aches, old injustices. But it won't burn the way it once did. And when the right time comes, you'll find out you can ultimately turn your gaze from it.

And then people will enter your world.

They will not see the fire. They will not feel the heat that once defined everything. They will see something calmer, something softer - something that, to them, might even seem simple. And there may be a quiet sting in that, a sense of not being fully seen. As if all that depth, all that history, has been flattened into something easier to understand.

But maybe that is part of the truth you're growing into.

Not everything that shaped you has to be carried into the light for others to examine. Not every scar needs an audience to prove it was real. Your history does not disappear just because it is no longer on display - it changes form. It becomes structure instead of spectacle.

And what people see is not the absence of depth, but the result of it.

They see the steadiness you had to learn. The gentleness you chose despite everything. The way you hold the world now - not because it was easy, but because it wasn't. You are not shallow because they cannot see your storms. You are simply no longer the storm itself.

And perhaps the quietest kind of healing is this:
to let what broke you belong to you,
and to let what you built from it be what the world receives.