What do you do, when each day seems like a struggle?
What do you do, when you are weary?
What do you do, when you are depressed?
When you are feeling ugly with negative emotions?
And everything around you seems to conspire to make it worse?

What do you do?
When the internal turmoils seems as if they will eat you up alive, from within?
What do you do when the anguish of your pain makes your eyes turn red?
And you feel like having a tiny switch button that you can turn on and take it all away?
So that you can experience blissful silence,
All your blues taken away.

Your vitriolic pain, your shame, your ugliness, your addiction, your anger, your depression, your fear, your bitterness, your mental anguish, your lack….,
All taken away at the flick of a button.

Your family have failed,
Your friends have failed,
The system has failed,
It all doesn’t seem right,
No human love seems enough,
To erase how you feel. That addiction has you in a choke hold, But you lack the will to stop,
That abusive relationship is killing you,
But stay in it you must,
No lover of yours, can fill the empty void inside you,

No booze, no drugs, no sex, no form of addiction, seems to help you out of the rabbit hole,
Hurt and pain of feeling lost are your steady companion,
Your grief hanging like a heavy cloak,
On your bowed shoulders from dawn to dusk,
Further pulling you down.

Yet you wear your smile,
Hiding your struggles behind the mask of your face,
Which is falsified like a clay cast,
You are trying to be strong,
Pretending to be strong,
Losing the essence of your authentic self, as each day goes along,
Pervaded by the feeling that you are not enough,
And that you can never be enough.

You float like a listless buoy, cast on roiling seas,
BECAUSE you seek for constant validation of fellow man,
Forgetting that he or she is equally fallible,
A mere human like you,
Bogged down by his/her own struggles, inner turmoils and pain,
Who cannot endorse neither the wind, nor the dust they were made of.

Ponder on the courage that you have to get up everyday.
The courage to face that job, to shoulder that pain, the hurt, the hunger, the loneliness, the lack, the emotional upheaval, the addiction and all the extra baggage.
Where do you think it comes from?
It comes from no other source; but from within you.
And you can do better
You can build that courage
Into a resilient dam of an over-comer.

BY CHOOSING NOT TO WALK ALONE!
The journey is harder when you walk alone,
BUT WHEN YOU CHOOSE GOD
Through Grace and Mercy
Through Faith and Hope
He leads you to Victory
A step at a time, out of the rabbit hole
A day at a time, to joy and peace
BUT ONLY IF YOU BELIEVE…

BE still and know that there is GOD.

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha