Hey,
I know how heavy it feels. The weight you have been carrying, the way it sits in your chest and wraps itself around your ribs, making it hard to breathe. I need you to hear this. It was never yours to carry alone. It never should have been.
I see you, trying so hard to fix everything and everyone. You thought if you loved hard enough and gave enough, you could make the pain stop. Yours, theirs, all of it. But love is not a cure, and pain does not work like that. You did not fail because you could not save them. That was never your job to begin with.
You learned too young how to hold too much. You wore your pain like armor, believing it was the only way to survive. No one told you it was okay to put it down, so you kept going, pretending you could bear it all, even when it was crushing you.
If I could sit with you back then, I would not try to fix you either. I would not tell you to stop feeling the way you did or to just move on. I would sit with you in the dark and remind you that it is okay to be there. You do not have to run from it or fight it or make it disappear.
You have learned so much since then. You have learned that time does not heal everything, but it softens the sharp edges. You have learned that healing is not about erasing the pain, but about holding it differently. You have stopped carrying what was never yours and started putting some of your own burdens down too. That is not weakness. That is survival.
I know the ache is still there some days. I know you still wish things had been different. That you had known better or been stronger or done more. But here is the truth. You are stronger now than you ever thought you could be. Not because you fixed everything, but because you learned how to live with the things you could not change.
The weight you carried back then shaped you, but it did not break you. And now, you get to choose how to move forward. You get to decide what to hold onto and what to let go of.
So here is what I want you to remember. You do not have to do this alone. You never did. It is okay to rest. It is okay to feel the scars and let them remind you of how far you have come. You are still here, still standing, and that has always been enough.
With all the love and compassion you did not know how to give yourself back then,
Me