09/08/2026
Zo herkenbaar.
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Dear younger me,
I would look at you for a moment, really look at you, and I think my heart would ache a little.
Not because I feel sorry for you, but because I know how many years you are going to spend believing there is something wrong with you when there bloody isn’t.
You are going to question yourself because of the way other people treat you. You’ll wonder if you are too much, too sensitive, too loud, too emotional, too difficult, not pretty enough, not easy enough to be around. You’ll try changing bits of yourself, thinking maybe if you were different, people would treat you differently.
I wish I could tell you sooner that sometimes it was never about you.
Some people will make you feel small because of what is going on inside them. Some will blame you rather than look at themselves. Some will make you doubt your own gut and even what you know happened. And for far too long, you’ll carry their behaviour around as though it says something about who you are.
It doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean you’ll get everything right. You won’t. You’ll make mistakes, say the wrong thing, trust the wrong people and stay in places far longer than you should. But getting things wrong does not mean there is something wrong with you.
You were learning. You were trying. You were doing the best you could with what you knew at the time.
And there are some really hard bits coming.
Bits I wish I could take out of your story altogether.
There will be loss. There will be fear. There will be things that happen so quickly you barely have time to take them in. There will be times when you wonder how the hell you are supposed to carry on like everything is normal when inside you feel anything but.
Some things will change you.
Some will leave marks nobody can see.
There will be nights you cry until your head hurts, mornings when getting up feels like enough, and times when you look at yourself and barely recognise who you are anymore.
But even then, there is still nothing wrong with you.
You are just going through hard things.
Please don’t mistake struggling for failing.
And don’t let anyone make you feel ashamed of the parts of you that had to fight to get through.
You will lose people too, and that will teach you just how precious the ordinary days were. The cups of tea, the stupid conversations, someone shouting from another room, sitting around a table without knowing that one day you would give anything to be back there for five minutes.
So don’t rush it all.
Be there while it is happening.
Say what you feel. Take the photos. Stay for the extra cup of tea. Laugh at the stupid stuff. Stop assuming there will always be another time.
And please stop being at war with your reflection.
One day you’ll look back at photographs and wonder why you were so hard on yourself. Your face will change, your body will change, life will leave its marks, and eventually you’ll realise those marks don’t mean you lost anything.
They mean you lived.
You’ll become stronger too, but thankfully you won’t become hard.
You’ll still care. You’ll still feel things deeply. You’ll still give people chances you probably shouldn’t sometimes. But eventually you’ll learn that being kind does not mean accepting being treated like s**t, and loving someone does not mean losing yourself to keep them.
You’ll learn boundaries later than I wish you had to.
You’ll learn that you can walk away without hating someone.
You’ll learn that forgiving something doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t hurt.
And most of all, you’ll learn that the way someone treated you was never proof of what you deserved.
Some people just did not know how to treat you properly.
That was theirs.
You carried it for them for far too long.
There are good people ahead too. People who won’t make you question every word you say. People who won’t need you to become smaller so they can feel bigger. People who will know the messy, stubborn, odd little bits of you and never make you feel like they need fixing.
And when you finally feel what that is like, part of you will ache for the younger girl who thought she had to work so hard to be accepted.
You didn’t.
There was never anything wrong with you.
You were young. You were human. You were figuring things out while life was throwing some bloody huge things at you.
When I look back at you now, I don’t see somebody weak or damaged.
I see someone who carried blame that never belonged to her.
Someone who survived some really hard years and still kept her heart.
Someone who kept getting back up, even when she didn’t realise that was what she was doing.
And more than anything, I see the girl who carried me all the way here.
I wish I could tell her all of this sooner. I wish I could save her some of the tears, some of the doubt and all those years she spent wondering what was wrong with her.
There was nothing wrong with you.
Some people made you feel there was. Some things that happened made you believe there was. And you carried that around for far longer than you ever should have.
You were never the thing that needed fixing.
So come here.
Let me hug you.
Let me hold you for all the times nobody did, for all the times you had to pull yourself together when actually you just needed someone to say, “I’ve got you.”
And I’m sorry.
I’m sorry I was so bloody hard on you too. I’m sorry for every time I looked at you and saw what I thought was wrong instead of seeing everything you were already surviving. I’m sorry it took me this long to realise just how bloody incredible you actually were.
But we know now.
We know who we are.
We know what we deserve.
And we’re not spending another bloody minute apologising for taking up space in our own life.
So wipe your tears, grab my hand and come with me.
We’ve done enough surviving.
Now let’s go and kick some bloody arse. 🌿💕
Love you always ...... me x
