Danique van Dijk’s Reviews > Divine Rivals > Status Update

It will always be with you - a shadow you carry in your soul - but it will become fainter as your life becomes brighter. You will learn to live outside of it again, as impossible as that may sound. Others who share your pain will also help you heal. Because you are not alone. Not in your fear or your grief or your hopes or your dreams.
You are not alone. [2]

This has gone longer than I anticipated, but I know what it feels like to lose someone you love. To feel as if you're left behind, or like your life is in shambles and there's no guidebook to tell you how to stitch it back together.
But time will slowly heal you, as it is doing for me. There are good days and there are difficult days. Your grief will never fully fade. [1]

Everyone I care about eventually leaves me, whether it's death or war or simply because they don't want me. They go places I can't find, places I can't reach. And I'm not afraid to be alone, but I'm tired of being the one left behind. I'm tired of having to rearrange my life after the people within it depart, as if I'm a puzzle and I'm now missing pieces and I will never feel that pure sense of completion again.

Perhaps it begins with one person. Someone you trust. You remove a piece of armor for them; you let the light stream in, even if it makes you wince. Perhaps that is how you learn to be soft yet strong, even in fear and uncertainty. One person, one piece of steel. [3]

It takes courage to let down your armor, to welcome people to see you as you are. Sometimes I feel the same as you: I can’t risk having people behold me as I truly am. But there’s also a small voice in the back of my mind, a voice that tells me, “You will miss so much by being so guarded.” [2]

I think we all wear armor. I think those who don’t are fools, risking the pain of being wounded by the sharp edges of the world, over and over again. But if I’ve learned anything from those fools, it is that to be vulnerable is a strength most of us fear. It takes courage to let down your armor, to welcome people to see you as you are. [1]