Mourning takes time, people talk about it all the time but we never understand what all of that's about until we go through it. When people come into your life, you never think about how they'll head out or about how long they are going to stay in there. It's a waste of time and energy when you are starting a new relationship or are making new friends.
A year ago I lost a friend, she passed away in a domestic accident, there was no one to blame or to point a finger at. She was 23 at the time, young in the grand scheme of things. I'd known her since I was 11 years old, half of our lives, and it all went away in a second.
A couple of months before this happened, we met again. We were barely 18 when we stopped talking, we were young, naive and starting to go on different directions. At the time it hurt to lose someone because I couldn't bare to open up more to her. She was going through so much that throwing my problems at her just made the whole relationship burst.
I mourned her then, she was the first person to see something in me, my first kiss, my first crush even. There was something about her. She was one of the prettiest girls I ever met and everyone thought that. Her energy draw you to her in a way I've never seen. There was something beautiful about her.
The day I received a message from her I knew I had to talk with her, she had been such an important part of my life that letting her go completely didn't seemed like the right thing to do. I was so nervous, she was as unpredictable as me, if not even more. We could connect or we could burst once again.
I'll never regret going to see her, everything about us talking seemed right. We chatted for hours, I spent most of my day with her, remembering how we grew, how we developed. I remembered how she helped me come out of my little cocoon and how she introduced me to new things.
We never talked again, she was gone a few days before her favourite of the year, her birthday.The news hit me in a way I didn't expect, she wasn't mine to lose but somehow it felt like a part of me was gone. It took me months to understand what I was feeling and how I was supposed to react to any of it.
And it was when it hit me, she wasn't the only one I was going to lose. My grandma's condition was deteriorating quickly and a year later she said goodbye. I'm not over any of that yet, she was such a big part of my life that even 6 months later I feel like one day I'll come home and she'll be there asking me if I was hungry.
I'm learning to say everything now and spend as much time as I can with people I love, because, after losing both of them, I realised that life is too short to not say how much you love someone.

There's a lot that can be said about families, a few are broken, others are functional, others are truly loving and supportive through everything. We all have a different experience when it comes to living with our family members and for I while I lived in a healthy environment.
Growing up my parents weren't around as much, they would work long hours to give me a home, toys, food and a decent nanny. We didn't have a lot of money, but more than enough. I was a happy kid, there are only a few memories that stick out from that time. It was the childhood every parent would dream to give their kid.
One of my oldest memories from my mum is from when I was about 5 or 6 years old, my nanny would pick me up from school every day, take me home, feed me and make me do my homework, nothing would change because everyone liked me in a schedule. That day everything was going just as planned, the only difference was my mum waiting for me at home.
I was so happy, I was so used to never seeing my mum during the day that it truly surprised me. We spent the day together and I'll always value those precious moments we got to spend together without the pressure of work. They remember me asking to earn less money just so they could spend more time with me.
As I grew I almost resented them, they were never around and just as I started to need help to figure myself out, they fizzled out and became more obsessed with work.  My teen years gave them true headaches from everything I did and how little I regretted of it. Neither of us measured how much all of this was going to break our relationship.
During those years my relationship with my mum broke, we didn't speak for over a year. Unfortunately this happened just as I started to deal with my eating disorder, a problem that would fuel our lack of understanding for each other. Nothing would help us, not even therapy after I tried to end my life, I stopped referring to her as mother and started calling her my dad's wife.
Something switched one day, I had switched disorders and my mum realised how broken I was. She made an effort for the first time that year to understand me. We went to a doctor, she was the one that open our eyes to anxiety, depression, binging and many copping mechanisms that would change the way I would see myself as a person.
We haven't fixed our relationship completely, but with my dad not being able to act as a referee, we've been making an effort for the first time in years to get along. She's my mum and there's no denying that almost everything comes from a good place, from her wanting me to be the best version of myself.
I just wished I'd learned my lesson with her a lot sooner. Being patient and letting her in, in what I'm doing isn't much to ask. There's no denying we'll keep fighting, but I least I know I can give in a little more and she does too.

Love is weird. If anyone were to ask me what's the biggest lesson I've learned this whole year, that would be it. There's nothing that can prepare you to feel like this, there's no way to describe it because it's different for each one of us and it may be one of the feelings I've feared the most growing up.
I'm lucky, my parents were always their ideal counterpart, while my mum is opinionated and will always see the bad side of a situation, my dad is always upbeat, chill and willing to hear people out before forming an opinion on what other people are like. They never came apart, if anything adversity made them grow more as a couple.
But that was them, for me, love wasn't meant to last and after a few disappointments with people, I closed myself to the idea of "true" love. It was a waste of precious time I would rather spend with my friends, family or work. In my mind, there was no way I was going to grow up to find a counterpart.
There was this guy in high school, you could tell there were a lot of guys in high school, but this one in particular was an important one in my life, he swept me off of my feet just as we meet and I saw him as the guy to go out with, no commitment, just sex. Because even at 16 years old I knew, this wasn't my way to do stuff.
One day, when I was sick or recovering from an eating disorder, he took my ice cream from me, knowing well that it had been my only meal of the day. He stood up and told me to buy something else, real food, I brushed him off. Why was I going to listen to this guy that knew just what I wanted him to know about me?
From his lips slipped "I do this because I love you". I froze, not a single word came out of me in a long time, suddenly I was faced with my worse fear, loosing something because of my incapability to commit. Things didn't end well, this would begin a rather childish "breakup" that would go on for months.
You could guess, this wasn't the last time something like this would happen. It'd go on for 7 years with me going through phases of deep self hatred. When someone would ask what the problem was, I would always say that time was a precious thing that I would rather spend working, doing something else rather than cuddling in a bed.
Life proofed me wrong, because as much as I know I have the love of my friends and family, I think I found someone that makes me go crazy in a good way, he tightens my screws every once in a while and has pushed me outside my little bubble. He may be my twin flame. For now all I know is that it works and I'm willing to live it one day at a time.

My dad has cancer. I've stared at this screen for too long to try to find a better way to say but I can't, my father has cancer and a month ago he started chemotherapy. It has been one of the worst, most difficult situations I've to deal with and it broke me, something finally broke me down.

The more I think about the content I want to create and share with you, the more stuck I get. I've seem to have forgotten what's like to write about my life and about my thoughts. Let's all remember that this space was born about 5 years ago at the peak of my depression to help me help someone else and not get stuck inside my little bubble.
A lot has changed since then, I'm not the same late teenager with trust issues and crippling anxiety. I like to thing I've grown and evolved into a person a few people would be proud of, but as with everything in life, the need to keep growing and evolving will always be there and as much as I would like to get stuck in my little bubble, I can't.
For the next few days, during October, I'm going to share with you some of the lessons that life has brought me, from the good, to the bad, to the painful stuff. There are some things I haven't dared to share that can be helpful for people out there. There's no point in keeping them for myself, they'd only create a burden.
Maybe there won't be 24 lessons in here but at least 12 of the most important ones. All accompanied by a little story of why it marked me so much and why it became something I would remember for the next few years as I continue to move on with my life.
I've said it before, way too many times but this really is my time to bring something to the table, to work on it and see what can come out of it. The more I try to stay away from this space the more I am brought back to it and the way it just makes me feel better, so why not come back with something I loved doing from the beginning and make it super special for all of us.
My one hope is that someone out there will read it and feel like they aren't alone, maybe there's more people struggling out there and reaching for help is only natural. We'll see how it goes...