I have a friend who feels as deeply as I do. She’s messy and real, like me. The best part is she will cut herself open to expose what’s underneath, in a way that is prideful because she’s alive, and that is a celebration.

Never have I felt more comfortable being me. I think most people can’t handle it, or they don’t want to.

How do you answer when someone asks “How are you today?” and the honest answer would have to hold facts about your mental illness and your predisposition to self sabotage? How do you say, Well actually today I really don’t want to be alive but here I am to someone who is just trying to make casual conversation? Or even better, how do you say that someone who actually cares how you are but you don’t want or need a deeper conversation about how you’re feeling – because it just is what it fucking is? The answer is that most of the time you can’t. Most people don’t operate like that.

I feel lucky to know someone who can handle the bullshit just as much as they can live it. To be able to share with another human in a way that makes me feel whole even when I feel broken. And more importantly, to witness someone share the good and the bad, the whole and the broken, with me.

Put your foot on my chair and tell me how shitty your day was, and how disappointed you are in the way life fucks you up, and about the way you are upset with yourself, and the “downfalls” of your life that get a pass because… well because LIFE IS MESSY.

I think that’s the purpose of writing tonight. Life is messy, messy is real, real is what living feels like, and living is fucking beautiful (even when it’s not).