Being Honest

This poem was written after missing a day of writing for the first time after a consistent 37 day period.

It captures the heaviness I was feeling when grief returned after several better days, alongside my frustration that healing refused to follow the timeline I wanted for it.

There is no resolution here.

I simply returned to the page and told the truth about where I was.

I wrote this after missing a day of writing for the first time in 37 days.

Two days earlier, I had felt genuinely good for the first time in a couple months.

Then the heaviness came crashing back.

I knew enough about healing to understand that this wasn't necessarily regression. I knew emotions move in cycles. I knew feeling better for a while did not mean I would never hurt again.

Knowing that did not make me any less tired of it.

“For once it would be nice
For things to just clear
And be done with
Without having to be felt
Over and over again”

There is a difference between understanding that healing takes time and actually wanting to give it that time.

• Sometimes I don't want another lesson in patience.
• I just want the pain to be over.

But emotion does not seem particularly interested in my preferred schedule.

“Trying to schedule grief
Is like asking a tempest
To book itself on your calendar”

I still like the absurdity of that image.

We can make plans around grief. We can decide when it would be convenient to process something. We can set dates by which we believe we should be over it.

But the feeling itself has its own movement.

That doesn't mean I am powerless in relation to it. I can choose how I meet it, what I do with it, and whether I allow it space to move. But I cannot always choose when it arrives or when it has finished.

The poem then makes a turn that initially seems almost unrelated:

“I didn't write yesterday
After a 37 day streak
I just didn't write yesterday
But I'm here writing today
And that's probably
More important”

I think this may actually be the heart of the poem.

For a long time, one of the most useful principles I have carried around habit-building is to never miss twice in a row.

The point isn't perfect consistency.

The point is return.

Missing one day does not destroy 37 days of practice. Feeling grief again does not erase the days when I felt better. Falling back into an old pattern for a moment does not mean nothing has changed.

What matters is whether I return.

There is something compassionate in that understanding that I don't always associate with discipline.

Discipline can become another demand for perfection: never miss, never falter, never regress.

But sustainable change has to account for being human:

• Sometimes I miss a day.
• Sometimes an old feeling returns.
• Sometimes I am exhausted.
• Sometimes all I can do is come back the next day.

The poem itself is an example of that return.

And yet, I don't want to make that observation into a tidy lesson the poem itself refuses to provide.

Near the end, I wrote:

“Sometimes growth is glacial—
And closing old loops
Requires just as much energy
As you invested
Creating them,
Sustaining them…”

And then:

“I don't know what I'm trying to say
I'm just being honest”

That line matters to me.

So much of my writing is an attempt to understand—to find the pattern, articulate the insight, make meaning from what I am experiencing.

This poem catches me in a moment when I cannot quite do that.

• There may be insight here.
• There may be growth happening.
• There may eventually be some beautiful understanding that dawns upon all of it.

But on June 23rd, that wasn't where I was.

“Right now I hurt
Right now I am exhausted
Right now I feel collapsed”

And sometimes honesty needs to come before understanding.

The final lines do not turn toward hope:

“Right now bright futures
Feel impossibly far away”

I think it is important to let that remain true.

Not because I believe bright futures are impossible, but because insisting upon them in that moment would have required me to leave the truth of my actual experience.

So I wrote instead.

I missed a day.

I came back.

I didn't know what I was trying to say.

And I told the truth anyway.

To me, then and now, that seems the most compassionate thing I could have done.