A Letter to Myself

Dear Me,

I know your heart is breaking right now. You feel lost and alone, discarded, like you’ve been cut from the only soil you’ve ever known and left to wither. The grief feels unbearable, and every part of you is trying to make sense of a kind of abandonment that doesn’t fit neatly into anyone else’s story. You are convinced that you are the one that’s broken. You’re not. I promise you, you’re not.

You made the right decision.

Even though it hurts more than you imagined it could, walking away was an act of self-preservation, You couldn’t keep shrinking just to be accepted. You couldn’t keep betraying yourself to be loved. You needed to breathe- to really inhale- and that required distance. You didn’t walk away because you stopped loving them. You walked away because, no matter how much you tried, your love wasn’t enough to make them see you clearly or love you without conditions.

Here’s what I want you to know, and to hold to tightly:

It’s not your job to convince someone to treat you with kindness.

It’s not your failure that they chose doctrine over connection with you.

It’s not your fault that truth, for you, didn’t look like obedience.

You are going to learn that family is not something owed-it’s something built. And you will build it. You will find people who show up, who witness your most vulnerable moments and don’t look away. You will find mirrors that reflect you with tenderness instead of shame. And one day, you’ll realize that you’ve created a home inside yourself that is gentler and more sacred than anything you left behind.

Healing will never involve the absence of grief, but you will expand in a way to hold grief with compassion. Grief will become a teacher. It will soften you. It will teach you boundaries and how to parent yourself in the ways you were never parented.

You will stop blaming yourself.

You will stop trying to make sense of the senseless.

You will stop begging for love that requires your silence.

You will stop hating yourself.

This is the exhale.

There are some very hard days in the years to come, but you will be okay. More than okay. You will become someone you’re proud of-someone free, someone honest, someone whole. And you will look back at this path and be able to hold multiple truths-that choosing you was costly, but it was also the pathway to joy and liberation. 

Keep going. You’re doing the brave thing. You are breathing.

With love,

You 

(From you ten years from now)