I Don’t Care About Your Inspirational Quotes, Right Now I Just Want To Hurt

It’s today’s culture. Social media. All those inspirational quotes with the oceans and mountains and dreamy sunsets in the background. And it’s everything our best friends say. We’ve been taught to not dwell on negativity, to look to every horizon and see the bigger picture, to look inward and find ourselves again through all the hard times and everything that didn’t go our way. We deserve better, don’t we? It’s a lesson to learn from. We will move forward.

Ok.

Fine.

I’ll do what everyone says. I’ll believe that there’s a bigger plan for me. I will trust my heart and mind. And I won’t wallow in my sadness or anger or confusion. I will mold it into positivity and whatever else I have to do to be that strong, confident, resilient girl that everyone says I have to be.

I will. I will. I will.

But seriously.

Why can’t everyone just get out of my face and let me be for a second? I know I’ll survive. I’ll find my way out of it. I will end up fine. But sometimes I just want it to be ok that I’m so fucking mad. I want it to be ok that I’m so confused and frustrated and my whole life is a wreck and there are so many things that have happened recently that I wish I could change and can’t.

And for right now I don’t want to read some Instagram quote with butterflies and sunshine and autumn leaves floating gently on a river to help get me through the muck of it all. I just don’t.

And I don’t want to hear all the big life things I already know just so I can swallow my tears and nod in agreement and change the subject to something else, because filling myself with these grey emotions isn’t a healthy thing to do, right?

It’s time to move on. You’ll be fine. You are so strong. You’ll learn. You’ll be better because of it.

Yes, I know all this already.

But what if I’m not ready to move on right now? What if I’m not fine? What if I don’t care about being strong for a while? What if I just need more time to learn from it? What if I don’t want to swallow my tears and change the subject?

I feel wrong even saying it. But why should I? I’m not going to do anything irrational. I’m still a good person underneath the mess of it. But I just don’t want to undermine my emotions because everyone thinks I’m being weak or dramatic or self-pitying. I’m not. And nobody has to understand that if they don’t want to. They don’t have to agree. It’s my life. And right now I’m a mess and I’m pissed off and a lot just sucks. Maybe it’s depressing to even admit it, but I don’t want to be like the rest of them—the good liars—who are already too busy trying to move on without ever acknowledging how they’re feeling in the first place. It’ll only end up worse.

How I feel doesn’t scare me. I’m not sorry for it.

And seeing everyone else take the high road doesn’t make me feel insecure. If I want to get drunk and cry I will. If I want to hate the new girl my ex is dating I will. And if I want to curse out everything else that keeps striking so hard against me, then I’ll do that, too.

I’m not a failure just because I’m not envisioning all this meant-to-be positivity right now. I just want to feel how I want to—however dark and miserable—without all these bullshit inspirational quotes trying to cheer me up.

I’ll figure it out, eventually, when I want to, how I want to, whenever I’m ready.

But for right now, just let me be.