Still, I rise.

The morning feels sweet and bitter, asking to me rise even as I shiver; it’s the dead of winter. I view my life lately in the same way I view the morning before the dawn sets in; quiet with anticipation, yet painfully slow and exhausting. I’m ready for the sun, just as I am ready for the start of my next beginning. I watch the clock; waiting, hoping, longing.

In the waiting, I miss the moments that ask me to breathe. The moments that hold me in my shivering, that whisper, “it’s okay to feel pain.” I cringe at the thought of a life lesson at 4 in the morning, but 4 in the morning is when I need it the most. Would I learn the lesson at 2pm on a Tuesday, maybe. Would it require the same level of surrender as 4 in the morning, not quite. In the darkness of the winter morning, I just want to sleep and exist in the warmth and safety of a bed that holds me in my fragility.

And yet, how beautiful that my body in its duality, also asks for the pain of the early winter rising. It wants me to know safety and also strength. It asks me to allow a harsher thing to hold me and to find safety in the uncomfortably.

So I breathe.

With shaking limbs that have feared uncertainty; I rise.

With a heart that is beating so fast, that has in the past only known a disregulated nervous system: I rise.

With a mind that has only ever sought to protect me with its defensive tactics, telling me all the ways I will fail; still I rise.

I rise and I breathe, because that is what the morning beckons of me.

To teach me that safety is not found in fragility, but in consistency of overcoming winter.