No. 007: To My Younger Self
Frederick Morgan’s Feeding the Rabbits (1904)
"Being needed was the closest we could get to being loved."
To my younger self,
I need to tell you something that no one told us when it mattered most. There was never anything wrong with you.
I know that feels impossible to believe. I know because I carried the opposite belief for most of our life. That we were too much and not enough at the same time. Too sensitive. Too intense. Too aware of things no one else seemed to notice. And somehow still not enough to just belong.
So we adapted. You watched the room and learned what was wanted, then shaped yourself to match. You figured out which parts of yourself got warmth and which ones made people pull away. Piece by piece, you traded who you were for someone the world would accept. And it worked. People liked her. She was helpful. Accommodating. Never too loud, never too different, and never, ever a problem.
But here's what I need you to know. She wasn't you. She was a survival strategy. She kept us safe when safe was all we had, in a world that asked too much of us too soon, reading the emotional temperature of every room, anticipating what people needed before they asked, making sure we were indispensable, because she believed that being needed was the closest we could get to being loved. She was wrong about that. But she didn't know any other way.
And still, she took things from us. Whole chapters of our life got pushed somewhere we couldn't reach. We learned to move through life instead of actually living it.
More than anything, she cost us our voice. Every feeling we swallowed to keep someone else comfortable. Every "I'm fine" when we were drowning. Every argument softened. Every boundary we didn't set. That was her doing her job. Keeping the peace. Managing the room. Making sure no one ever had a reason to leave.
But you can't spend a lifetime swallowing your words without it choking you. They have to go somewhere. Eventually, your body starts saying everything your mouth won't.
We hit a point where staying silent cost more than being seen. The weight we'd been carrying finally became heavier than the fear of putting it down. That's when something cracked open enough to let the light back in.
You are not too much. You were always just right. It was the environment that couldn't hold you.
And who you were before you started disappearing is someone worth coming back for.
We're learning to stop editing ourselves. To say the real thing instead of the safe thing. To let people have whatever reaction they're going to have. It is terrifying. It is also the freest I have ever felt. Every honest sentence peels back a layer of all the years we spent in silence.
I won't pretend that I have it all figured out. I still find old contracts written in your handwriting. Quiet promises you made to the world about who we had to be in order to belong. One by one, I'm letting them go. They served their purpose and we don't need them anymore.
You carried us by learning to be invisible. And now, gently, I'm learning how to be visible again. For both of us.
I love you. I'm sorry it took me so long to come back for you.
But I'm here now, and I'm not leaving again.
Submitted by: M