I resolve to take back the remnants of my life, and then it happens- in the shifting swiftness of everything, cyclone-like, pulling me into the center of the chaos without a chance to grasp on to myself- I plummet, head-first, all too often, into the lives of everyone, patching their open wounds with fragments of myself, oblivious that this is in fact my choice to wear their scars inside. I look for pieces of me, familiar things that I’d recognize to grab onto, like an amnesiac trying to recall who they are, but I remember only me in relation to them; so little of me anymore and so much of them. I promise that this is the last time and I brace myself against the next storm. Temporarily the whirling stops and for a moment, I forget that this is my life.

There’s an important difference between giving up and letting go.
–Jessica Hatchigan