You can’t always be brave.

To most people, being brave would be doing something bold and scary, like standing up to bullies, intercepting a fight, facing a fear, having a courageous job like being a firefighter, the list goes on.

But to some of us being brave starts when the alarm goes off in the morning and we don’t want to get out of bed, eyes barely open, body aching and brain fuzzled.

We get out of bed, drink our coffee and brush our teeth. WE ARE BRAVE.

What you need to realise is that we aren’t brave for beating laziness today. We aren’t lacking motivation or drive. You need to realise the guts, determination and bravery it takes to live and thrive with mental illness.

We are brave by still getting up, going to work or school and continuing the day. Pushing past the emotional exhaustion and using any energy we can find to convince the world we are fine, we are normal, we are living.

“You can’t get much braver than doing your absolute best to stay alive, to keep going, when every single cell in your body is seemingly screaming at you to stop, to give up, to quit.”

My mind feels like a Jenga game right now, that if one block gets pushed a little too far to the left, it will all come tumbling down. I am putting so much energy into being ‘fine’ and having a normal life, being brave and continuing each day that I am scared if I stop to pause for a second, it will all come crashing down.

Just keep going, I will myself each day. If you fake it today then your one step closer to being better. Keep doing all the things a normal person would do. So I get up, I go to the gym, I go to work, I come home and then by the time it’s 6pm I want to curl up into bed, pushed past the point of exhaustion, past breaking point with tears in my eyes wondering if it’s even worth trying at all. When I press pause, when my mind is less busy I end up being alone with my thoughts, one on one. The black cloud comes closing in, the need to just go to sleep and not wanting to wake up comes in strong and I ask myself again, what’s the point?

And sometimes we feel like just giving up…

But instead, we have to be brave.

That’s the thing. We don’t give up. We continue to wake up every morning and be brave. We continue to fight this internal battle. We continue to practice loving ourselves, loving our flaws. We know this is hard. We know that some days, we won’t be brave enough to get out of bed. And that’s okay too. There is just one thing that we all need to remember:

We are all brave in our own way, and we are going to keep being brave, one day at a time.