"A restless year.

Four hopeless seasons.

Fifty-two obsessive weeks.

Three hundred and sixty-five sleepless nights.

One poetic journal of change, loss, damage, sorrow, healing, good and evil, chaos and peace, helplessness and hope, summarizing a year's evolution of feelings in fifty-two poems feeding consecutive thoughts day by day."

That's the description of my poetry book. I did it. I published my first book on my own, with some uplifting support but no actual help. I wanted it this way; to be alone, dig up all my secrets, find all my flaws, identify everything that I love and everything that I hate about myself, sort out the parts that are not me, find the shattered pieces that are the most me, hidden from all the cruelty and coldness around somewhere in the darkest, deepest pits of my being, and pour my rawest spirit out onto the pages. I questioned everything I thought I was to rediscover my roots that I'd been torn away from a long time ago. I realized that I have so much to give.

All I wanted was to free myself from this prison that I've always called the necessity of survival, and hell, I even called it life. I just wanted to do what felt right, and I needed drastic changes to get to the point where I felt sane enough to trust myself. I needed to be alone in ways that I've never been alone before, and I had to experience all the different versions of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. Now I have my proof.

I spent this year becoming honest. I started with admitting things to myself; I stopped running from my faults that I've always looked at as unlovable, unforgivable imperfections and anomalies of the soul that can never be healed. Turns out most of them can be fixed with time. I'm not as bad as I thought.

Then my honesty reached my surroundings. I'd never felt so…real and alive. I decided to get vulnerable and share this journey with the world. I am not ashamed. I have nothing to lose.

It's still strange to see the light. I tore my walls down so suddenly that I can only feel the extremes of lethargy and euphoria since. My only wish is for this book to find the right people; the ones who need the same answers as I did and for which I've been searching for in dozens of books for several years, as well as those who are just as much addicted to the dark as they want to get out of it.

To all of those "that are brave enough to read this book as if the words were written on my skin, inked in my blood," as the dedication says.

There's no turning back now.

I am an open book.

Here's to never ever fitting in.