permission granted
You’re allowed to leave any story you don’t find yourself in. You’re allowed to leave any story you don’t love yourself in.
You’re allowed to leave a city that has dimmed your light instead of making you shine brighter, you’re allowed to pack all your bags and start over somewhere else and you’re allowed to redefine the meaning of your life.
You’re allowed to quit the job you hate even if the world tells you not to and you’re allowed to search for something that makes you look forward to tomorrow and to the rest of your life.
You’re allowed to leave someone you love if they’re treating you poorly, you’re allowed to put yourself first if you’re settling and you’re allowed to walk away when you’ve tried over and over again but nothing has changed.
You’re allowed to let toxic friends go, you’re allowed to surround yourself with love, and people who encourage and nurture you. You’re allowed to pick the kind of energy you need in your life.
You’re allowed to forgive yourself for your biggest and smallest mistakes and you’re allowed to be kind to yourself, you’re allowed to look in the mirror and actually like the person you see.
You’re allowed to set yourself free from your own expectations.
We sometimes look at leaving as a bad thing or associate it with giving up or quitting, but sometimes leaving is the best thing you can do for yourself.
Leaving allows you to change directions, to start over, to rediscover yourself and the world. Leaving sometimes saves you from staying stuck in the wrong place with the wrong people.
Leaving opens a new door for change, growth, opportunities and redemption.
You always have the choice to leave until you find where you belong and what makes you happy.
You’re even allowed to leave the old you behind and reinvent yourself.
Author: Rania Naim
Holding the secrets in silence
all these cramped years of painful habits
Screaming within the internal chambers
of backs and necks and shoulders
Mona Lisa vaguely smiling
echoes of wounds inflicted long ago
clinging tightly to every cell wall
reverberations within the halls of ancestral dna
Cloud walking within the storms of terror
silver linings long stripped of value
Snapshots of abuse caught and carried
all these years of walking pilgrim
feet blistered and road weary
I begin draining the swamps of false imprisonment –
Layer by layer
what have I so torturously considered mine –
and deservedly so?
why have I held so tightly to the belief of self flagellation
as my only deserved birthright?
when did I decide to build memorials of abuse
and carry them as dragging pain-filled weighted-toxic marrow in my bones ?
where did this pain become the outline of my identity
the blueprint of my choices?
will I let it go – Now that I’ve seen it?
will I behead this beast, allow the blood to spill?
will I allow this pain to dissolve into a distant misty memory of someone I used to be?
will I claim a new inheritance of pain-free trust and love?
will I stand within the circle of my own dreams
drawn by my truest, strongest and highest self
and sing hallelujahs to the sky?
will I tap into my own unique beauty and recognize my body’s and life’s extreme value?
will I speak the true truth of the way my life will be and then create it as reality?
will I bring rest to myself each day I am blessed to live?
will I build all of these questions into new habits
Yes, I will
Amen and Amen
💞
Amy Lloyd
life: acoustic & amplified 