To Me in 5 Years: We Fucking Made It

Hey you.

Yeah — you.

The one who’s still here when there were a thousand reasons not to be.

I don’t know exactly where you’re sitting when you read this. Maybe on a couch that finally feels like home. Maybe in a car you paid for yourself. Maybe in a quiet moment you once would’ve filled with chaos just to survive the silence.

But I know this much with absolute certainty:

You made it five more years.

And that is not small.

That is not luck.

That is not accidental.

That is fucking monumental.

Five years ago, staying alive was not romantic. It wasn’t inspirational. It wasn’t cute. It was gritty and ugly and exhausting and sometimes fueled by nothing but rage, spite, and the refusal to let everything that tried to kill you win.

You stayed when your brain told you to disappear.

You stayed when the grief sat in your chest like wet cement.

You stayed when addiction whispered lies that sounded like relief.

You stayed when the courtrooms, case files, paperwork, and judgments tried to reduce you to your worst moments.

You stayed when people talked about you instead of to you.

You stayed when love felt dangerous.

You stayed when your body remembered things your mind tried to forget.

You stayed when staying didn’t feel brave — it felt pointless.

And now look at you.

Five years doesn’t erase the past. It doesn’t magically undo trauma, loss, or damage. But it does prove something powerful as hell:

Nothing that tried to bury you succeeded.

This letter isn’t about pretending it wasn’t brutal.

It was brutal.

You lost things you never should have had to lose.

You watched versions of your life collapse that you worked so hard for.

You grieved people, relationships, identities, futures, and the version of yourself that didn’t know this kind of pain yet.

And you did it while carrying shit most people never see.

Mental illness that doesn’t clock out.

Addiction that didn’t come from nowhere.

Trauma layered on trauma layered on trauma.

Loving your kids so fiercely it hurt to breathe.

Being queer in a world that wants neat labels — and taking the long road to self-understanding anyway.

Being strong because you had no other fucking option.

So if you’re reading this thinking, “Yeah but I’m still not where I want to be,” let me stop you right there.

Five years ago, you weren’t sure you’d even be alive.

Perspective matters.

This is for the version of you who once lived in survival mode so long that calm felt suspicious. The version of you who confused chaos with safety because chaos was familiar. The version of you who had to unlearn that love doesn’t have to hurt to be real.

Five years later, I hope you’ve started to notice something subtle but radical:

You don’t have to earn your right to exist anymore.

You don’t have to bleed to prove you’re trying.

You don’t have to destroy yourself to be taken seriously.

You don’t have to explain your pain to justify your boundaries.

You’re allowed to be proud — even if your life still looks messy.

And this letter isn’t just for you.

This is for all of us.

For the people who had legal trouble and still chose to change.

For the parents who lost custody and kept fighting anyway.

For the parents who lost children and somehow kept breathing.

For the people who loved their kids so much it nearly broke them.

For the ones who survived domestic violence — with kids, without kids, while everyone was watching or while no one noticed at all.

For the addicts who didn’t wake up one day magically healed, but kept choosing “not today” over and over again.

For the mentally ill who got tired of being called “too much” for having symptoms.

For the queer people still figuring themselves out — out loud or quietly — and realizing there was never anything wrong with the journey.

For the ones who changed labels, changed paths, changed everything just to stay alive.

For the people grieving someone they loved and the person they used to be.

For the ones silently carrying weight no one asks about.

This is for anyone who hit rock bottom and realized it wasn’t the end — it was the floor.

Five years later, I hope you see that surviving wasn’t you failing at dying.

It was you refusing to let the Grim Reaper collect early.

So yeah — fuck you, Grim Reaper.

Fuck you to the trauma.

Fuck you to the abuse.

Fuck you to the systems that punished pain instead of treating it.

Fuck you to every person who bet against you.

Fuck you to every voice that said you’d never make it.

You didn’t just make it.

You changed.

You learned how to pause instead of explode.

You learned how to sit with discomfort instead of numbing it every time.

You learned that healing isn’t linear and that backslides don’t erase progress.

You learned how to love without abandoning yourself.

You learned how to leave situations that felt familiar but were killing you slowly.

And maybe — just maybe — you learned how to rest without guilt.

That matters.

If you’re reading this and life still hurts sometimes, good. That means you’re human. Healing doesn’t mean numb. It means honest. It means you feel joy deeper because you know what it costs.

And if you’re reading this thinking, “I don’t feel like I’ve won yet,” let me remind you:

You’re still here.

And five years ago, that alone felt impossible.

This letter is proof that survival compounds.

That every choice to stay creates more future than you could see at the time.

So stand up for a second — literally or metaphorically — and let yourself feel this:

You did not give up.

You did not disappear.

You did not become the worst thing that happened to you.

You fucking made it.

And if the world tries to knock you down again — because it will — remember this moment. Remember that you are not fragile. You are battle-tested.

This life you’re building?

It exists because you refused to quit.

And that is worth celebrating loudly.

— The Healing Chaos

“I am not lucky. I am relentless. And everything that tried to end me failed.”