Rock bottom wasn’t what I imagined.
It wasn’t cinematic.
It didn’t come with violins or an audience.
It came slowly.
Like erosion.
Like silence stretching too long in a room you once belonged to.
It came with late nights,
low ceilings,
too many thoughts,
and not enough answers.
And then, one day—there I was.
No more masks to wear.
No more justifications to hold.
No more identities to hide behind.
Just me,
the echo of every wrong turn,
and the dirt.
__
They say rock bottom is the foundation you rebuild from.
But they don’t tell you
that before the rebuilding,
you have to learn how to breathe down there.
Because at first—
there is no vision.
No plan.
Only the quiet terror
that this is who you’ll always be now.
Just a wreckage.
A cautionary tale.
A failure written in the margins.
—
But rock bottom has a strange mercy.
Because once everything falls away,
so does the noise.
And beneath the shame,
beneath the rubble,
beneath the self-hate you inherited and perfected—
there is a pulse.
And if you’re still enough,
you’ll feel it.
—
That pulse is yours.
The part of you they couldn’t kill.
The part of you that never asked to be perfect—just whole.
Just alive.
Just heard.
Rock bottom taught me that I didn’t need to rise yet.
I just needed to stay.
To breathe.
To be.
To touch the pain without flinching.
To sit with the ruins and whisper,
“I’m still here.”
And that, somehow,
was enough to begin.
—
To You, If You’re Still Down There
Don’t rush your ascent.
Don’t perform your healing.
Don’t try to inspire anyone.
Just breathe.
Just rest.
Just be still enough to hear your name
not in condemnation—but in hope.
You are not beyond restoration.
You are not too far gone.
You are not only what broke you.
Rock bottom is not the end.
It’s the place where pretending dies
and something honest finally begins.
You are allowed to live again—
not as a comeback story,
but as a truth that survived the fall.
And one day, when you rise,
you will carry a light
no spotlight ever gave you:
the light that was forged in the dirt,
by a soul that remembered how to breathe.
📜 This is Scroll #7 from the Scrolls from the Ashes series.
🧭 It’s part of the journey called The Fall.
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