dear you

i’ve been thinking a lot about her lately. the younger version. the one who was loved and still somehow absorbed the message that she was a little too much, a little too complicated, a little too hard to hold.

i don’t think she’s unusual. i think she’s most of us.

i wrote this for her. i think you’ll recognize her too.

and still, somehow, not enough felt like the truest thing about her.

nobody told her she was too much. they just didn’t know how to hold all that she was. so she learned to edit. to keep things pretty and neat.

the feelings went in.

and somewhere along the way, she forgot that it was ok to be her. that love wasn’t conditional.

she got very good at apologizing for herself.
at saying sorry for things that were never hers to carry.
at swallowing what she felt to keep the peace.
at going along with a flow that didn’t resonate.
at putting a brave face on.
at taking on other people’s pain to spare them the lesson.

what she didn’t know then was that the feelings were never the problem.

that the intensity she had spent a lifetime managing was the very thing that would lead her home.

that the parts of herself she had set down were the ones she would one day learn to love the most.

that what unsettled her in others was simply herself, asking to be seen.

she didn’t have the tools yet. she didn’t have the words. she just had the weight of it. and the sense that it meant something.

everything she needed was already inside her. she just hadn’t been taught how to trust what she found there.

and now — the remembering.

it’s ok if people don’t understand her. it’s ok if she doesn’t make sense. it’s ok if she does it differently. it’s ok if she forges her own trail. it’s ok if she fails and fails and tries again. it’s ok to move from steady into purposeful. it’s ok to be a different version than the version someone dreamed up for her.

it’s ok to know that her parents did the best they could and that these are her wounds to tend to, not a reflection of their love.

it’s ok to know that what made her different was never something to apologize for.

it was the whole point.

her emotions are not too much. they are her pulse on the world.

and she, the one who learned to edit, to keep things pretty and neat, to send the feelings in…

she is more than enough.
she always was.

pc: ethan sigmon