First.

An echo of my old self.

Why must I compare?

I was forged in different realms, different planes. Harsher, more livid. Where anger brought peace and suffering meant sacrifice. Held in place by the chains of deprivation - a poverty of wealth, love, and time. Do I deem the restraints broken? Or have I merely learned to walk in place?

They come to me like locusts in a plague. They sting and my throat closes, chest heaving and choking, I hallucinate coughing up blood. My therapist calls them “automatic thoughts”.

And so I imagine my neurons wiring themselves together - forming a ticking time bomb waiting to erupt from my skull on their whim. Or a hitman with a gun, waiting from the rooftops for me to step outside and try to breathe some clean air for once.

”Argue against them,” she says. But God knows how much I debate. It seems in self-argument you are either always wrong or always right. At a standoff with the better and worse parts of yourself. And yet in radical self-acceptance you validate both points of view and here you stand, immobilized.

Inhale, exhale.

Write your worries on the leaf.

Inhale, exhale exhale exhale.

Watch the leaf float down the stream.

Inhale, exhale exhale exhale exhale.

And the leaf disappears in the distance -

What did I write on it again?