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Dear you,

I've left too many books unfinished to feel complete. I've left too many stories that I've written unfinished to call myself a real writer. I've left bits and pieces of me scattered everywhere that I feel I'll never ever feel complete.
I often wonder if we're supposed to feel this way in the first place; after all, isn't this incompleteness what pushes us forward in life? To do the things we dream of doing?

Today at work I went to an empty room, sat alone and cried. I just wanted out. Out of everything. Out of myself. Out of my words, my thoughts, my feelings. Out of my soul. I wanted out. But I was stuck, still am stuck. I don't know how to leave these thoughts, and I keep begging them to leave me, in the middle of nowhere; I don't care. All I want is to feel free of any shackles that mess up with the person I used to be.

--

When I think about the positives I have in life, I know I have a lot. I know that I'm a good writer and that I have a heart that wants good for everyone, and even when I feel that my nafs doesn't want this, I try so hard to let go of bad thoughts because I do want people to be happy. I know that I have a fiance that I wouldn't have thought he existed even in my most colourful dream. I know that I have a beautiful family whose love for me goes beyond the traditional ways. I know that I'm different and that I'm not a copy of the herd I see every day. But it's how often, I remember these things, that matters the most. It's how often I remind myself that I'm not that terrible, not at all terrible, to want to just end my life with every obstacle that comes in the way.

I know I'm good. I know I am. I just need a daily reminder, deeper than words, deeper than silence. A body language that would make all the difference in my life and make me feel alive again.

Yours faithfully and sincerely,
N.

There's Comfort..

Dear,

There is always comfort in knowing that nothing lasts forever. Nothing good or bad lasts for eternity. Life goes on faster than we think. Next thing we know is, it's been years and years since we saw the ones we truly loved. It's painful and comforting at once. And I'm hurt.

I know that the next couple of months will not be the easiest. And I know I have already made my fair share of mistakes, and that I'm so at fault and full of flaws. I just wonder if I can make it through the days every day of my life.

I thought I wouldn't be able to handle many of the things that I recently went through. I thought I would never be strong enough to face my fears; worst of all, I was scared of facing them with the ones I loved. Ironic as it is, it always feels a huge burden to face your fears with the ones you love, lest you cause them an embarrassment of sorts.

It's one of those days when I felt like every nice word would make my tears run down my cheek and down to my lips. One of those days I felt like I just could've been a better person, and I could've just made everyone a little bit happier. I don't exactly know what I did or why I feel this bad. But I know that I should've handled things a little easier. And that I was always the one to keep things inside, and it made things goo smooth. But what I don't get lately is my utter failure to bottle things up. As crazy as it seems, it's hurting me more than letting everything out. I'm literally in pain because I'm letting out what's inside of me. Sometimes I think it feels like detoxing, which I'm sure feels like shit. Other times I just think I'm ok. But I'm not.

That feeling of not being able to go on, I want to get over it. I'm so tired of being so vulnerable it literally hurts. I do nothing other than fear. Fear is the monster that's a little younger than my anxiety.

Yours faithfully and sincerely,

N.

Forgetfulness Is Double Edged

Dear,

Today I met an old friend, or a colleague, whom I always remembered to be an active person. She reminded me of so many things that I forgot to appreciate about myself. She reminded me that I was (probably still am) a person who does not sleep at night with hundreds of thoughts, but with thousands of thoughts in my head. She told me that she always saw me do things that I love and go out of all the comfort zones I knew in life. She reminded me that I especially looked for the comfort zones in my life to get out of. I forgot that.
I also forgot that I have had many achievements in the last few years that I took for granted and never truly appreciated. I forgot that I always wanted to do things, different things, and to have many hobbies and interests. I forgot that I really was something special. And I hope I still am.
The conversation took exactly 4 minutes of my time, but stayed with me for the whole day.

We forget that we are special. This is exactly why people are there, to remind us of how special we are and of the potential we have, that most of us take for granted. We let our drained energy exhaust us and delude us into believing that we are no longer capable of doing this and that of the things we really loved.

Here's a prayer to never forget the things that are most important to us, and a prayer to never stop believing.

Yours faithfully and sincerely,
N.

An Escape and the Opposite of It

Dear,

He looked at me with eyes that carried all the worry of the world and said, "Would you please pour your heart out for me?" He knew that once silence got to me, it seals my lips and makes me look burdened with all the thoughts of the world in my head.
We sat in our usual morning cafe, where we sipped coffee and talked about our day in the most detailed ways. My chair was a few inches higher than his, so that there would be no height differences between us. He was over 10 cm taller than myself. I leaned my head over his, in a desperate attempt to pour my thoughts into his mind without uttering a single word. He understood my gesture and smiled. I wasn't sure if that smile meant he read my mind or that he needed that lean himself. I smiled back and immediately turned my face away.
--

Getting back to writing is one of the hardest tasks I had to do. I knew I was running away from all my cliched thoughts and all of the redundancy I felt in my writings. I knew that to get back I needed to think of new and fresh ideas. I needed to remind myself that that's not why I came back. I didn't come back to write the same thoughts. Instead, I came back to set other thoughts free. I came back to imprison these feelings of numbness, or to fight them, or to win over them. I came back to write something new, to pour out my heart and mind, and to even lose myself in the process, in order to get it back. Writing has been and will always be one of the things that I feel pleasure in the pain they inflict upon me. It's both imprisoning and liberating to feel the words get out, and to feel them bottle up inside you the next moment. You get mixed feelings. You feel like a bipolar, a chronic mental state. Someone once said that reading is escape and the opposite of escape. I'd say that writing also is an escape and the opposite of it. I will never understand what writing does to me. And I will never give up the idea that once a writer will always stay a writer. It's only about how much and how hard we try.

Yours faithfully and sincetrely,
N.

An Apology to Writing

Dear,

I've come to realise day in day out that I've been unfair to myself, that I've completely abandoned everything I loved and surrendered to the daily stresses of life. I have been waking up every day with the exact same thoughts, "I want to live this day," and nothing more than that. I've been living my days for the sake of existence not for anything else. And I've missed writing.

I've had a fair share of stresses to come back to writing, that one thing that always forgives me for my absence and disappearance, and for my lack of will. I've walked down the streets and looked people in the eye without having any stories to extract, without feeling any depths they have or any hidden messages they tried to tell me, messages that God Himself tried to send me. And that's how I lived. I just existed. I breathed and I laughed and I cried without feeling the least bit of exhilaration for what I had that not many had. I've lost myself. And I need to know how to get it back. So I chose to write. My only refuge. My only way out of myself and to myself, was to write.

I've abandoned everything I loved, literally, everything, except for him. I just don't know how to go back. I have a constant urge to save myself from something really bad that's going to happen, but I don't know what it is. I'm just scared, and I've spent the last few months scared more than I've ever been scared my entire life.

2016 was the best and the worst year for me. The best because I met him. The worst because I've never cried that much to the point where I felt I was literally losing myself. I felt myself slip away. I felt my soul slowly going into a coma, or a sort of numbness I cannot even explain. Sometimes I thought it was depression, other times I thought it was just a phase, but mostly, I felt it a terrible failure to adapt. I said it to him. I told him all. I told him everything and I've literally cried in his arms and held so tight I was scared to let go because I was afraid of myself and of what I'd be capable of doing at such moments. He was my only comfort, still is, and I have God to thank for sending me someone so amazing at such times. I can never be grateful enough.

I miss words, I miss writing, and I miss the smell of books in my arms and between my fingers. I miss the touch of the papers and the papercuts I got when I excitedly turned on the pages of a really good book I was reading. I miss the feeling that brain-wrecking quotes gave me, and the "a-ha" moments an author offered me, an offering that I'm not alone, and that I'm not crazy either. I wish that, whatever happens in life, words stay to be my refuge, and that even if I can hardly utter a word, I will still be able to write the words I cannot speak. I pray that I never be deprived of the magical feeling that words gave me. I miss feeling the struggles of a writer. 

Abandoning the things we love has always been a mistake we all make. The things that make us happy, the things that make us feel alive; this is a terrible way for handling life. We think we can survive but it's these things that help us survive in the first place. It's the things that we think are not important, are themselves the most important things we need to never give up or give up on.

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll say it for the rest of my life, until I can go back to some of the things that made me feel alive. Until then, I'm only breathing.

Yours faithfully and sincerely,

N.

The Little Things

Dear you,

I always believed that it gets darkest before the dawn, and that, in the middle of myriad hardships, there will always be something to give us some hope, something good to cling to. And it so often happens. And I gratefully stand before The Maker to thank Him, for all the little things He showed me, to appreciate, to give me hope, and to assure me that He knows. Alhamdulellah.

I am starting to believe that soon will be the end of our letters. You of course know that I've got the letters I've been waiting for for so long, with someone who actually gets back to me, who writes to me and about me. I believe in him. And I believe everyone should believe in the ones they're waiting for, so He can make them come to life.
I also believe that I should get back to writing, as in, my actually writing. I've had this drop for so long now. It's enough.

After all, it wouldn't be fair not to be grateful.

Yours faithfully and sincerely,
N.

Anxiety.

Dear you,

It's disorders like anxiety that make life much harder on the person than anything else. Nothing ever beats that feeling of fear, of not knowing when an attack would kick in, break you to pieces, mock all the brave moments you had in life, in just a few minutes, maybe even seconds.
You wake up, not knowing if it is going to be a good anxiety day or a bad one, but you hope for the best, and you say that you've had as many attacks as you can remember and still survived; you beat it. But what you don't know is, anxiety is changing you; it's making you want to stay away from people, even from those who love you the most; lovers and family. Anxiety makes you want to be alone during an attack's kick-in, because you do not want to embarrass anyone, and because, in reality, you don't believe anyone is ever going to be patient enough with you when you're going through the attack, because it comes slowly, but the impact remains for hours, or at least that's the case for me.

One day you wake up, feel stressed about going out because you know an attack will kick in, but you have to go because it's not something you can postpone for another day. You get out of bed, pray that whatever the intensity of the attack, you just get out safely, without experiencing the worst symptoms. You go out and face the world, and when you're about to close the house door, you start imagining things, but refuse to allow them to overcome your state of "I'm sure I can survive another attack." You might get to a point where going out seems so heavy a burden, so heavy you cannot bear.
When it's time for an attack to kick in, you start imagining all types of scenarios, from best to worst. Do I have to tell you how much it hurts physically? It literally hurts physically. Your muscles start to go tense, and it seems to you that it's the most intense they've gone. You cannot feel them enough to relax them bit by bit. Your hands start shaking, you start losing focus and distract yourself through conversations with people around you, but it never really works, because conversations with people do not easily defeat anxiety attacks. Then, your heartbeats go insane. You try another mechanism to calm yourself down through taking deep breaths; inhale counting to five and exhale counting to seven. It doesn't work, either. Your body is more tensed now. You're sure you'll mess up. You're lucky if your company is someone who knows about all of this. You tell them that you're having an attack, without knowing how you want them to help you. You just tell them so that they understand why you may sound so rude to them. You do not mean to be rude, and that's the worst part about anxiety. It makes you who you are not. You hurt the people around you but you just cannot be nice during these moments. It's hard to know that your mind is playing dirty tricks and games with your body and still feel and look firm. You want a moment of breaking down but you can't, because it will most probably feel trivial to the person accompanying you. At the most intense moments of every attack you end up having one thought in mind: "I want to die; I just cannot take this any longer. My body is collapsing and I'm so, so tired. It's too much." You want to disappear, to leave the person you're with. You want to be alone, completely alone, to shout at your brain to get its shit together and understand that this is not true. It's not true. It's all a trick. Your muscles start to go even more tensed. Your body refuses to act sober enough to let these thoughts go.

When you finally relax a little, you start crying. You cry because it hurts so much to be this weak. It hurts because your whole body was on an attack, at war. The outcome is a body so drenched in sweat and shivering, a heart so weak and trembling, and a mind that is just too drained to think of anything. You didn't die, but you wish this would be the last time.

Please don't leave me. It's out of my control. I'm sorry.

I'm so tired. I'm so tired. God..