How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

The worst thing about sleeping, after something terrible happens, is that sleeping makes you forget. Which is fine, until you wake up.

Exhaustion is a friend to the grieving.

“It’s the trying that heals you. That’s all you have to do. Just try.”

all I did was just keep breathing, and even that felt like a lot. One breath after another. Easier on some days than others.

when your whole world is ripped apart, it takes a long time before you can see things clearly again. Months. Years, even. The trauma leaves you vulnerable in ways you can’t even feel.

I went through a long, deep period of grief that involved bitterness, anger, mourning, judgment, rage, self-pity, fear, longing, and loneliness—usually more than one in combination, and often all together—as well as nightmares, insomnia, fits of temper, anxiety attacks,

Needing to find reasons to live had forced me to build a life worth living.

“That’s the thing you don’t know—that you can’t know until life has genuinely beaten the crap out of you: I am better for it all. I am better for being broken.”

But you have to live the life you have. You have to find inspiration in the struggle, and pull joy out of the hardship.

More than anything, I know that you just have to choose to make the best of things. You get one life, and it only goes forward. And there really are all kinds of happy endings.