The tassel was never the hardest part.
I come from two people who built a life out of almost nothing, no inheritance, no cushion to fall back on, just stubborn, exhausting love. I watched my mother go without so I could have. I watched my father carry worry silently so I wouldn't have to. I left home young, carrying their sacrifice with me every day since, like a weight I never wanted to put down because it meant so much.
I crossed an ocean for a dream. Nobody warns you how lonely a dream can feel once you're actually living inside it.
I recently earned my master's degree. I should be celebrating. Instead, I'm sitting with an exhaustion I don't have words for, the kind that lives in your chest, not just your mind. I gave everything to get here, and now that it's spent, I'm left in the silence after the achievement, realizing it doesn't pay rent, and it doesn't heal what the last few years quietly broke inside me.
I need therapy. Not someday - now. I am not okay, and I've spent so long pretending otherwise that admitting it here, publicly, feels like ripping open something I usually keep sealed shut. Right now, getting consistent care and simply staying afloat, rent, groceries, the basic cost of existing, is the most urgent thing standing between me and getting better.
There's more sitting underneath this, quietly. Education loan payments are starting to come due. My parents are retired now, and I know it's becoming my turn to hold them the way they once held me. I'm not asking for help with everything at once, I'm asking for help getting steady enough to face it.
I have never asked for help like this before. It feels like standing in front of strangers with nothing left to hide behind. But I am done pretending I'm fine when I am not.
This fundraiser is mainly to cover therapy and basic living costs while I stabilize with anything beyond that helping toward loan payments so I'm not drowning on two fronts at once.
If you can give anything, thank you, it will reach further than you know. If you can't, please just share this. Sometimes being seen is its own kind of medicine.
I'm not writing this because I want pity. I'm writing it because I'm still here, still standing, still soft despite everything trying to harden me. And some days, that's the bravest thing I do.
