A Thank You To My Mother For Teaching Me How To Heal A Broken Heart

I thank my mom for making me a writer.

In her darkest days and saddest nights, she spun her emotions into words like a spider does a web. Sometimes too low to get up and get a piece of paper, she would tear off pages of her favorite books and write or underline the words that made her feel calm and understood. 

Every year for my birthday, she gives me a book of words that she knows will resonate with the constantly spinning thoughts inside my brain. I used to think it was odd that she made a point to gift me a book every year for my solar return; now, it’s the thing I look forward to the most. It’s our way of allowing each other to understand in a way that we know how. It’s my way of allowing her to read my darkness as art without making it her own. 

All I ever wanted was for my darkness to be seen as beauty; she makes it an actuality. She encourages me to put my ugliest fears, melancholy, and inescapable nostalgia on a page. 

“Maybe other people will feel less alone,” she says. That has become my reason to write when I am so compelled with sadness that I do not feel real. She encourages me not to run from my thoughts but write them down. She taught me how to utilize a pen as a therapist and paper as a means of expression. She taught me how to navigate to the bottom of my heart and discover the dwellings of every chakra, to examine myself enough to help others examine themselves, too. 

She taught me how to mirror her—seeing her reading a book with tears running down her face, utilizing a safe place that only she can understand. 

I understand it now, too.

I now can understand the security that words can bring like a thread to a broken heart and glue to a shattered soul. 

I thank my mother for encouraging me to follow my dream and view my sorrow as a craft and beauty.  

I thank my mother for teaching an outcast how to be a masterpiece.

I thank you, mom, for teaching me how to be like you.