Letters to myself
An illustration depicting versions of myself.
To the one in the maze
You were free. Free to be whoever you wanted, within limits nobody had explained to you yet, and free to make some genuinely questionable calls along the way, repeating the same patterns in a new font each time. You were a mess and nobody could tell. That was the trick of you, messy and broken and sad, dressed up as fine. A pretty convincing costume.
You didn't understand yourself at all. Your mental health was a maze, and you never once tried to walk it properly. You'd get halfway round, decide the hedges looked easier than the actual path, and just cut straight through. It was faster than feeling your way through, and you didn't know any other way to survive a Tuesday.
Nobody teaches you that the long way round is usually the only way that actually gets you out.
But you were also so cool. You were building yourself into something. You backpacked, got on planes you couldn't quite afford, said yes to strangers who'd turn into friends and once to a guy from Hinge who picked you up in a Tesla and took you grocery shopping, which in hindsight was either very kind or extremely suspicious. Waterfalls and late nights and the particular freedom of being nobody's girlfriend or daughter or friend or employee for a while. Go, go, go, go. Busy. Let's run. It'll all work out. Skanky-zombie mode most of the time, but back in charge of your own life for the first time, which felt like enough.
You told yourself you were more mature than you were. You didn't care for yourself at all, not really, not even when it looked like you did. Top-tier acting, genuinely.
Here's what took the longest to learn: none of it was really your fault, but all of it was your responsibility to eventually understand. Those aren't the same thing, and you needed both. You cut through the hedges because nobody showed you the path through, and escaping was the only tool in your kit. You did the best you could with what you had.
Not ashamed of you. Just wishing someone had handed you a map sooner and glad to be the one handing it to you now.
To the one who ran out of road
Who are you. Where are you. What are you doing.
You went from carefree and ambitious and fun to stripped to bare bone in a matter of seconds. Pain instead of momentum, and no idea who you are without running.
It showed up when you were twelve. Nobody thought much of it then, a young girl complaining, a girl being dramatic, a girl who'd learn to deal with it. So you grew, and it grew with you, quietly, patiently, taking a little more each year while everyone including you was looking the other way. By the time anyone paid attention it was already consuming more than you'd ever realised.
Limbo. Waiting lists and letters and and more waiting, stuck between knowing what's wrong and being able to do anything about it. You've never been good at being stuck. You wanted the finish line, not the corridor before it.
You've failed, you think. You've regressed. You are no longer useful, because you're in pain, and your spoons are running out faster than you can count them, and it all sits tight in your chest and your jaw and your hands won't stop tingling.
The pain is heavy. You are disappointing everyone, and yourself most of all. Rest feels like giving up. Who are you, if not productive? Who are you, if not useful?
Here's the thing nobody told you when you were sprinting: you can't outrun a body. You collected chronic illnesses the way other people collect tacky souvenirs. You tried to keep running and eventually the kilometres just quite literally ran out. You’re on the other side of the world now. It caught up with you and your body is screaming for some forgiveness. Not because you failed, but because it was always going to. It was never a race you could win by going faster.
You didn't deal with any of it. You just ran until you physically couldn't anymore. Now you're stripped back to what's underneath, and it's terrifying, because underneath is exactly what you spent your whole life avoiding.
Maybe it's here for a reason. Not a punishment, not a test you're failing, an unwanted teacher, showing you how to slow down, how to love yourself when you have nothing to prove it with.
I know rest doesn't feel like rest right now. It feels like surrender. But you are not less of yourself for being still. You are not less useful for being in pain. You are allowed to be halfway round the maze with no exit in sight and still be worth something.
To the one who hasn't happened yet
Your hands take care of you first. Not last, not if there's time left over, first.
You sit with the pain now, instead of pushing through it. That's new. It doesn't ask you to fix it or outrun it or prove you're above it. You just sit, and let it be there, it's hard and that's okay.
You don't apologise for existing. The pain is still there, it doesn't disappear just because you've made peace with something, but so is love, sitting right alongside it, taking up just as much room. You get to be loud. You get to be weird. You get to just be you, with no performance, no fixing, no proving.
You look back at the other two with a small smile, not pity. It would have been so boring if it hadn't happened this way. Terrible, confusing, yes but you wouldn't trade it. You needed the maze and the running out of road to get here.
You're not doing this alone anymore. You found people. You say the hard things out loud now, without the old fear that saying them makes you an attention seeker. You just needed to be heard, and that was never the same thing. You heal through art. You heal through connection. It turns out both of those need the same thing from you: being vulnerable, being unmistakably yourself.
You have permission to exist. Not permission you had to earn.
I’m definitely not you yet. I think I'm just starting to be ready to try. I thought I had myself figured out already, more than once, and I was wrong every time and will still probably be wrong a few more times. This is just the beginning of actually doing it, rather than running from it. ANd maybe I will never be this version, it may and quite probably be completely different.
That's why there's a shadow in every version of this. Not because it's a bad thing. The marks on my arms and legs are still there. The maze is still there, underneath the pain, underneath the pretending. There's a purple thread that runs through all three of you, sometimes taut, sometimes coiled tight around a wrist or a waist, but never broken. It doesn't let go, even when you can't see where it leads.
The shadows aren’t shame, they are just proof I was here the whole time.
