Covered In The Bruises Of Good Intentions by M.A. Canlas at Inkitt

Story Notes

This book is true. Not in every detail, not in every word - but in everything that matters. It came from a real place, lived in a real body, and was carried for a long time before it became something written.

I wrote it because I needed somewhere to put what I couldn’t say out loud. Because the people who love me most have also, without knowing it, been some of the loneliest parts of my life. Because depression doesn’t always look the way people expect it to - it doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like someone standing in a kitchen, answering questions, smiling at the right time. Sometimes it looks completely fine.

If you are reading this and you recognize yourself in these pages - not as the parents, but as the person trying to survive them loving you - then this was written for you too. You are not alone in this specific, strange, painful kind of loneliness. Someone else has sat in it. Someone else has felt exactly this and not known what to call it either.

This is not a story with a resolution. It does not end with healing or hope or a lesson tied neatly at the close. It ends where I am - still here, still in it, still going. That is the most honest ending I have.

Summary

"Covered in the Bruises of Good Intentions" is a raw, unflinching account of living inside a depressive episode while surrounded by people who love you but cannot reach you. Told in second person, it follows one person through the exhausting daily performance of being okay - the mask worn for parents who think they understand, the hollowness beneath a joyful exterior, the anger that turns inward, the future that cannot be pictured, and the particular grief of feeling invisible inside a family that is trying its hardest. It does not offer recovery. It does not offer hope in the traditional sense. It offers something rarer - the truth of what it feels like to be broken and unseen and still, somehow, here.

Genre: Young Adult

Author: M.A. Canlas

Status: Complete

Chapters: 8

Rating: n/a

Age Rating: 16+

A Letter To My Parents

⊰════════════════════════════⊱

Mom. Dad.

I know it’s hard. I know being around me is hard, and helping me is hard, and that loving someone like me - someone who can’t always receive it the way you give it - is one of the most exhausting and thankless things a parent can be asked to do. I know that. I have always known that, even when I couldn’t say it.

Thank you for trying. Thank you for every version of trying - the attempts that landed wrong, the ones that didn’t land at all, and the ones you made anyway without knowing whether they helped. Thank you for wanting good things for me. For building what you could and offering it with both hands. I see that. Even on the days it doesn’t reach me, I see it.

I’m sorry. I mean that in more ways than I know how to list. I’m sorry for how difficult this has been. I’m sorry that from the outside, it can look like I’m not trying, or not getting better, or not meeting you halfway - when the truth is that trying, for me, sometimes just looks like getting through the day. Sometimes it looks like nothing at all. I’m sorry that the gap between what I feel and what I can show you is so wide. I’m sorry I haven’t found a way to close it yet.

Please don’t see me as a disappointment. I know I might look like one. I know the distance between who I am and who you hoped I’d be can feel enormous. But I am not giving up on myself out of laziness or indifference. I am someone who is carrying something very heavy, and I have been carrying it for a very long time, and I am doing the best I can with what I have. That best doesn’t always look like much. But it is everything I’ve got.

What follows in these pages is not an accusation. It is not written to make you feel guilty or to assign blame. It is written because I needed somewhere to put the truth - the whole of it, not the edited version I hand you each day. It is written because I love you, and because love, I think, sometimes means letting someone see the parts of you that are hardest to look at.

I love you. I have always loved you. Even in the chapters where it’s hard to find me - I am there. Still yours. Still trying.

I’m sorry. And thank you. Both things, equally, always.

- Your daughter

⊰════════════════════════════⊱