My life would be so different if I didn’t walk into that bar that night. I don’t know if I would be sitting here writing this to you right now. But I am. And that’s truly a miracle. I thought I was so lost. I thought I was nothing nobody would miss or someone incapable of anything. I imprisoned myself within this cage of my own thoughts. As people crossed my path they would feed me their opinions on how this life should be lived. Starving, I ate up everyone else’s beliefs. I never looked within to find life’s answers—my own answers. I never thought that the being within that cage—within that prison—would be the same being writing this to you today. I realized that my thoughts were not the barriers into this abstruse “I.” My heart was my keeper. The moment I began listening to my heart—I broke free from the hell that was my own burden. I question why did I allow myself to live in a cell full of pain and sorrow. Why did I hold on so strongly to the suffering I called my life? I conformed to my state of being. I placed myself within the four walls of my mind and never dared to break free from it. Inside the confinements of my fake reality I found comfort in the knowing. The idea of the unknown was enough to detain me. The whips and chains that hit me every day until darkness fell were cracked by me—were locked by me. I was always in control. It was never the lack of power I held in my hands; It was the lack of courage and strength I held within myself. It was fear that kept me captive. Isolating myself from this false reality, I escaped the misery I sincerely understood to be my life—the “who I am.” I am life. I am not a prisoner to what others manipulate my mind to be. I am someone to someone else. I am capable of anything. I don’t know how I ever conceded in that life—I will never know how or why. But that phase of my life is nevermore. I am here now, writing this to you. I broke free of the prison I called home for over a decade and I don’t know what’s next. I have a full life to live and the journey that I will follow is uncertain. That’s the beauty of it all.  The upcoming chapters in my life are unknown, but I don’t fear the unknown anymore.

Natalia Piferrer