BREATHING IN THE DARK - by Favour Nwaoru

I never meant to write this.Some stories are safer when buried—until they start clawing their way out.I am writing from the shadows,not because I love the dark,but because it’s where I learned to see. It started somewhere between duty and depletion.Long hours in wards where the air smelled of antiseptic and fatigue,faces blurring into one another—patients, mothers, colleagues—each one needing something I wasn’t sure I still had left.I learned early that care isn’t gentle.It demands, it drains, it devours.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000303066.png"/>By the time I began to feel my own body slipping,I told myself it was just stress—until it wasn’t. The exhaustion stopped being ordinary.Sleep wouldn’t heal it. Food didn’t fix it.My reflection became a stranger:skin shifting, clothes tightening then loosening again,cycles coming late—then not at all.Some mornings, I’d stare at the mirror,trying to recognise the person behind the tired eyes.I was a nursing student—I should’ve known the signs, right?But knowledge doesn’t soften fear.When the word PCOS finally landed,it didn’t sound medical—it sounded personal,like betrayal from within.And still, life demanded I show up—for lectures, for patients,for the version of me who still dreams of motherhood,even if her body now speaks in riddles.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000303035.png"/>So I learned to juggle symptoms and studies, duty and despair.To care for others while my own health unravelled.To wear the same smile I gave to patients,even when my hands trembled from more than exhaustion.Between rounds, lectures, and endless documentation,I hid panic attacks behind professionalism,and pain behind performance. No one tells you how heavy it is to be both nurse and patient. This—right here—is my first breath outside the dark.Writing this is my way of saying I’m not okay,and maybe that’s where healing begins.Because silence, though it looks like strength,has been my heaviest burden.For too long, I’ve mistaken endurance for peace.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000303005.jpg"/>I’m done performing survival. I am writing from the shadows, but not forever.Because even shadows owe their existence to light.Each word here is a matchstick,a flicker against the silence I once called home. And if my voice trembles on the page,forgive it—it’s still learning how to breathe.

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