A Letter From a 24 Year Old

Dear 24 year-old-me, *releases a huge breath of air* I think this might be the hardest letter I write to myself. As I’m typing this two days before turning half a century, I’m already tearing up. I’m tearing up not just because I’ve read my previous letter to myself, but because I’m being quite honest with myself this has been the hardest year of my life that I’ve felt so far.

I have never felt so utterly broken down by the world.

I have never felt such utter heartbreak and pain that each day feels like I’m living with shards in my chest that keep poking me, bleeding me out.

I have never felt so devoid of life, that all I want to do is lie on the floor each day to feel as lowly as I feel.

I have never felt so angry at the world, angry at the circumstances I was forced in, and angry at myself for how much I feel responsible for everything painful that’s broke my heart.

I feel have never felt such loss for people and places that I can no longer be at the moment or see.

And every day feels like I’m living through the pain of memories of people and places that I loved and made me feel happy, and having to face the nightmare of a reality I don’t want to live. And it’s so achingly hard to convey the utter pain that facing each day feels like—to do the very thing that hurts me or brings me sorrow.

It’s funny how in my letter last year, all I hoped for myself was peace and that I felt like I could breath.

That’s the exact opposite of what being 24 brought me, unfortunatley.

Being 24 years old felt like drowning in the Mariana Trenches, being sucked down daily by the chaotic storm with no end. I felt like I kept trying to fight currents to get my head above water, but nothing could keep me from sinking, sinking, and just succumbing because fighting has become so hard. So incredibly hard. And it’s so hard when I feel like most of my life I’ve had to be a warrior—someone who constantly fights. I’ve always had to fight for things that may come more easily for others—-family, friends, my work, happiness, and myself. I never wanted to be a warrior. I never wanted to be a fighter. I never wanted to feel like I constantly had to put up walls and defenses to protect myself from the very people who I thought would love me or from the places that I thought I would be welcomed back. I’m tried of fighting so hard. I’m so tired of having to “be strong.”

Everyone tells you in your most trying times, to “be strong,” or “you are strong,” or “you can get through this.” But no one ever asked me if I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to break so catastrophically that strength had to be the only option. I don’t feel strong. Sometimes people tell me they think I’m strong, but gosh, I don’t feel it. I feel utterly weak. Unless strength is letting the tears leak from your eyes at every instance and every small thing that feels like a big thing, then I don’t think I have been strong at all.

I let myself be weak.

I let myself sink this year.

I let myself fall into the abyss willingly.

Because what do you do when life keeps trying to pull you under, under, under, and under, a relentless pull?

You fight, you give it your all, you lose.

I lost.

I lost so much this year, that being twenty-four will forever be tied to a really depressive memory for me. And I hate that. I really do. I never wanted to feel this pain—no one really does—but I do.

I feel like I lost everything I ever loved and every person I every loved and their still out there, and I’m grieving the memories every single day.

“Grief isn’t weakness. It’s remembrance in motion.”

– Jamie Herzog

I read this quote today, and it just stuck with me.

I’ve been living in grief sayings since March.

I never thought grief was a weakness, but one of the most complex and painful emotions that I would never wish upon anyone if it brings about the amount of pain I feel daily. But I often think about how maybe my grief is vast because my love was vast—-that my grief feels insurmontable because my love was great. And if I have loved deeply, then honestly, this grief was worth the pain. But also, gosh, is this kind of grief that type that feels unbearable even if I know that this grief comes from the greatest love.

But I loved the sentiment that grief is remembrance in motion.

Grief often feels trying your best to keep going when your whole world stops, and then finding things that remind you of the places, people, or time you are grieving.

I distinctly remember a day in June or July where I was trying to clean up my new place I live in. I had a pink and white striped duffel bag sitting on a a gray plastic container filled with jackets that could not fit in my closet. On the strap of that duffel bag was a blue hand sanitizer bottle with the green up and up logo, most likely from Target. And gosh, did I lose it. I just started crying out of nowhere, holding my chest to feel if my heart was still there because a freaking hand sanitizer bottle on a bag shouldn’t make me this emotional, but it did. You see, one of my student I had this year gave it me. I didn’t think she was serious about giving the hand sanitizer to me, but I just accepted her gift because no matter how hard I tried to give it back to her, she kept insisting she wanted me to have it. So I kept it, and I just casually put it on my duffel bag for a future day when I might need hand sanitizer. But knowing I had to say goodbye to this special student and all the memories we shared from her introducing me to Labubu’s, and us bonding/laughing about it, having our own inside jokes about anime because she loved anime, her showing me her new key chains every week, showing me her drawings, or telling me a new story about her dad and hockey—-all off those memories felt tied to this stupid hand sanitizer that made me think of her and how much I missed her, and how much I couldn’t see her next school year because of everything. And I lost it.

There was a moment where I truly had the most miserable week in my life this year, and I had to force myself to go to work because we had a field trip. I remember having no motivation of wanting to be at work, and was so drained, but I went. We were watching a play in a theatre, and I’ve been to this theatre before and watched their kitschy plays, with playful songs and colorful outfits, and nothing about it was sad. But I never knew I felt so down until I was a teacher, crying as a human being at a children’s play about mangoes. The play was about two kids who shared mangoes with their neighbors, and all I could think about was how much I wish I was at my actual home with the community and neighbors I lost and couldn’t see anymore, and how I would share my mangoes with them if I had any. But now I couldn’t. Because that home wasn’t home anymore as much as it was always going to be. But I couldn’t not cry.

I cried watching Lilo and Stitch because all my students watched Lilo and Stitch, and for weeks, I would play the soundtrack in my classroom and we would talk about the movie even if I hadn’t seen it yet. And when I finally saw it, I was crying in the beginning when the beginng of the movie wasn’t even sad. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wish I could tell my students that I finally watched Lilo and Stitch and how much me not being able to tell them, made the reality of me not seeing them again that much harder—that much more real. Or when I saw A Bad Guy’s movie commerical, it reminded me of my one playfully funny student I worked so hard with, and he never loved reading, but he loved these comics. And now whenever I see Bad Guy’s anywhere, it makes me think of him, and how much I hope he’s okay.

Or when I saw the new Wicked Trailer for the first time, and I couldn’t bring myself to watch it until a while later. I had one girl who was obsessed with Wicked, and she and I would always joke about being Glinda and we would do hair tosses together in class. She was such a sweet girl, and she was a bit shy like me, and so when she and I bonded over Wicked, I felt her opening up more and it was just the most magical, beautiful thing to see. And I don’t say any of this in a creepy way, but I say this as a teacher who just really cares about my students in building connections with them and having them know that there’s someone out there who cares about them because I wish I knew that at my age.

I don’t know, there’s just so many times where I’m going through th emotions of my day, and it can be something as small as a hand sanitizer, a sound, a video, an idea, a joke, a picture, a song, and it brings me back to grief.

Grief is rememberence and love with no place to go.

And I don’t know how people keep going when this kind of grief feels like the hardest thing in the world.

No one really talks about how difficult it is to grieve people and places and dreams that are still very much alive. No one talks about it because in some ways, yes, they are not gone gone, but they are gone, you know. And I think there’s a part that makes it so much more challenging knowing they are out there and you can’t be there or be with them—like you have to let them go.

And letting go is hard.

Or it’s hard for me, someone who’s always had to let go too soon.

One of the most profound grief quotes I heard was from Andrew Garfield when he said:

“Grief is love with no place to go.”

When you lose seemingly everything in a year, where does that love go?

Living without the places and people I love, feels like an airplane flying with no direction. I don’t know where I am going or what I am doing anymore without that love or the people to share it with, nor the places where that love felt safe. I don’t know any place right now that truly feels safe.

Because my love has had nowhere to go, I have had no where to go.

I have been stuck.

Motionless.

In my head, in my mind, in my spirit in my heart.

Each day has become the puppet act of someone prying my strings up to get me out of bed and controlling me through the motions to act like I’m okay, when at the end of the day, I’m let back into my box, a collapsed heap.

I feel like life keeps going, the world keeps turning, and it doesn’t know how much it hurts—that my whole world stopped and everything feels normal. And it feels wrong, somehow, like how is everything still going and people are happy and laughing and I’m stuck in a place that doesn’t feel like home, but has to be home, but feels like a transitionary period, working in a place that’s not really my dream with people I don’t know, wanting to be with the people I love, doing the thing that didn’t feel like a knife in my chest every single day. Sleeping feels safer. Sleeping feels easier. Sleeping feels like I don’t have to face the nightmare that’s become my reaily.

I’ve lost my home this year.

And that’s something I’ll talk a lot about most likely on my yearly post, but yea, i lost my home this year. I was forced out under awful circumstances, and bullied into moving the entire house for the most part. And it was just my brother and I who moved every single thing until the very last day where I drove away from the house I was promised at sixteen would be our forever home. I guess everything my father says is a lie. I had to leave my neighbors and my community I’ve become close to over the past eight years where I feel like I really grew up. I mean, it’s the house where I graduated high school, went to Zoom University, graduated high school, and even started this blog in. This house was home in every sense that mattered, and now this house was going to be someone else’s home. I can’t bare the thought that another family will be living, and is living, in this house that was my home.

I lost my work home this year.

And that’s one of my greatest mistakes I made out of fear. I wrote last year, that I hope the decisions I make bring me clarity and peace. What if the decisions I made did the exact opposite? What happens when I made the wrong choice? I live with it. I have been living with my choice for the past four months, and if there’s anything I have learned is that sometimes we make choices that we think is best at the time given what we know, and that’s the best we can do. If we continue to blame ourselves for “should have known better” or “should have done things differently,” then we only make ourselves miserable because we are placing all this anger and hate at ourselves. I think about everything that led up to my choices, and a lot of my anxiety stemmed around fear and my insecurity of not feeling like I was enough. And maybe I manifested or self-confirmed everything I believed because I wanted to believe it and that was the story I was telling myself, or maybe I really did see what I saw and trusted my gut feeling. But I will never really know. All I know is that I made a choice I couldn’t take back, and now I have to live through that choice as painful and regretful as I feel about that decision every single day. I don’t know, there are so many days where I still look to the sky and go through the grieving process of being angry, sad, bargaining, and kind of accepting—-accepting that I can’t change the fact of where I am right now.

I have always heard the saying, “Some doors close for a reason, or for greater things to come,” or “God does not close a door you were not ready to walk from,” or something like that. In the back of my head, I wonder though, can some doors close for a reason and a season to walk back through. I know that maybe some doors close because there are greater things and maybe a better place to figure things out, but what if by leaving and coming back, I return with the things I learned and a new perspective and attitude of where I was. If you love something/someone, set it free, and if it is meant to be, it will come back to you. I’m also a firm believer of you always find your way back home.

I sound like a walking Hallmark ad, but when you have had little to no hope for the majority of the year, I have been looking to platitudes to ease the pain.

I lost my close relationship with my brother. I don’t see him everyday because I don’t live with him anymore. I miss hearing his truck ambling in the driveway or the sound of the garage vibrating the floor, singaling that my brother was home. I miss hearing him slam the cabinets or aggressively flick on the light switch whenever he got ready to go out with his friends or go to the gym. I miss hearing his boisterous voice from behind closed doors, telling his friends on the other side of a space game to “move to the left,” or “go go go.” I miss sitting by his doorway whenever we would think too long and hard about what we both wanted for dinner. I miss eating dinner with him—sitting at a table, watching a stupid reality dating show like Love is Blind or Single’s Inferno, and making all kinds of ridiculous comments together. I miss having a best friend at home who would laugh with me at shows and movies, or to talk to about how angry or sad I was about our situation, or someone who stood up for me when I wasn’t treated right. Most of all, I miss being with him. I miss having someone in my corner who understood me and made me feel safe physically and emotionally. He was the only person I could ugly laugh with and it wouldn’t matter. I don’t remember the last time I ugly laughed. I just miss my brother a lot. I call him, but it’s not the same as living with family and being with someone you love.

I miss seeing my coworkers who have become like family to me too. It’s awful.

It’s so awful to have no sense of real blood family, and then to lose your second family all in the span of three months.

Grief upon grief upon grief. Compounded.

Oh my gosh, I miss walking down the hallway to say hi to my one coworker who I used to teach with, and who invited me into her home when I was at a low point, and I accidentally hit her neighbors car. I miss having our little talks on the bench outside her room. She felt like one of the most safe people I could talk to at work because she saw my sadness and never made me feel like I was wrong for it. She was always there—when there was a centipede, when there was a tough situation, she was my real friend. I miss walking to my work office in the morning, and seeing all the early people and saying hi to them because I would see the same people in the morning and I loved seeing them. I miss seeing the cafeteria clerk and her always saying hi to me because I would say hi to her and I don’t know if she ever had that kindness before. I miss seeing the office ladies who I grew up with and who saw me at low moments, and felt like they wanted things to get better for me. I miss talking to my coworkers whenever I would pass them on the sidewalk, and we would talk about certain stresses we felt—you know shared trauma 🤪. I miss having people I feel safe around, and who I really have gotten to know more the more time I worked with them; I felt like I was getting more comfortable being there and being with my team that now it feels like something has been severed in such a different way—-forever changed.

I miss my students more than words can describe. And that’s the hardest part about teaching for me—the constant change of new students and grieving old students. You grieve the time you had together where you shared a space and time, had inside jokes, and really formed something special—-something akin to family. Where you got to know each other that you could tell how each other felt by a simple look in the eye or the way they walked. The class dynamic is everything, and some classes just bonded very closely, and I like to think that’s because of the environment the teacher creates. In part, they will always be your student, but also they grow up, they evolve, and you get to watch proudly from the sidelines, knowing you got to be part of that journey, but secretly hoping that you can always be part of that journey for them—that they will remember you one day to visit or that you come up in a thought about someone that really impacted them. But now I can’t watch from the sidelines. There is no sidelines. There is a line that I have crossed, that I hope that I can return to one day, but I don’t really know what will happen. I miss seeing my students and knowing they are okay. I mean, I know they are okay, but I don’t know, call me too sentimental, but I care deeply about the people I care about. I mean, wouldn’t anyone want to be able to see the people they love even if you know they are okay? It’s just the knowledge of knowing I don’t know if or when I will see them next, and that feels like a whole other torture within itself. Imagine being kept from the people and places you love.

I knew going into this year, what I was losing. But I never really thought about how great that loss would feel. I knew, like with all lose, the loss would bring pain and sorrow, but never like this.

It’s funny how we always think it’s the disaster we have to worry about, but sometimes it’s also the aftermath that causes the most damage.

The greatest loss I have faced this year, that I really did not expect to the extent I have, is losing myself.

I don’t really know who I am anymore.

I don’t really know what I want, where I stand, what I like, what makes me happy.

I don’t really love looking at my reflection because I don’t know who stares back at. I don’t like that that person feels so distorted from all her shards.

I can’t stand looking at her.

She’s so gone.

She doesn’t light up from within anymore. She doesn’t emote anything, except when her face scrunches in an agonizing sob. She doesn’t get dressed with excitement, but with necessity. She doesn’t care.

She’s not really there.

I look in her eyes, and all I see is a cavernous, echoing void.

And I didn’t use to look like that.

I’ve hit low lows before, gosh only knows I have, but this feels like a whole other level of I can’t do this.

I don’t know how to keep going when I barely know who I am or what I’m trying to go towards anymore.

I never wanted to feel this way about myself ever. I’ve felt like skin and bones, but never so lost like I do now.

“I’m starting to believe that

Sometimes you live through grief

And other times grief lives through you.”

– lfhokulani

I wrote this in the midst of the most grief-heavy year of my life.

And I have just been really thinking about what grief really means. Grief is everything everyone says it is, like a hollowed out feeling in your chest, reliving the loss multiple times over, love without a home, an infinite timeline of processing what it means to heal and keep going.

But I really think that sometimes you have so much grief in you, and other times you feel like you are the grief.

And if there’s one way I feel like I could describe who I am right now, it feels like grief.

I’ve been grieving home. Work home. Family. A sense of family I never got. A family I had to let go of too soon. Students I had to say goodbye before I was ready. A dream that I still have and stupidly want. A person used to enjoy more things. A relationship with myself.

More so the little girl in me who always, always had to grief without ever really knowing what that emotion was because she was too young to understand or know that her love and hurt were so intertwined with the grief she felt. So the grief she feels right now as a 24 year-old is the grief she’s accumulated since she was a kid, and the best she knows how to handle that grief is to cry incessantly without mercy, wishing people could see how hurt she is, how drained, how tired, how mad that she never wanted to feel this way. I mean, who wants to feel like there’s a knife in your empty heart every single day after knowing such love?

The cruelest of fates.

One of the better things to come out of hardest years of my life is I finally started the therapy I’ve been wanting for years.

I never took the leap to actually look for a therapist or get the help I should have when I was a teenager, heck, when I was a kid, because I never really knew how to look or if I could afford therapy. Also, someone in my life always made therapy feel like a punishment whenever I said, “I need help.” They would tell me, “Why? Do you need therapy?” or “Are you crazy? You want to go to a mental hospital?” I always felt like therapy was a threat I couldn’t fully want because if I did, I would be spoken to like I was insane. What’s insane is the way this person made me feel.

What was different about this year, was I am at one of my lowest in my life right now, and I don’t feel this way every day. It feels so much harder. I struggled with numbness before, so I know what it’s like to not feel literally anything, and arguably, that had to have been my lowest, and I don’t want to be at a place where I’m back to being numb because it took me YEARS to not feel numbs—to laugh again, to live. And I don’t want it to take YEARS again to find my way back out of such numbness. So for my own heart that has sunk, I needed help before I got buried in that darkness I couldn’t dig myself out of. I knew I was heading towards such darkness, when I was crying one day in my bathroom, clutching my chest and feeling like I could truly feel each part of my heart cracking open like a fallen glass. Pinpricks. Sharp fissures. Clutching my heart could not hold together how hard I sobbed, how alone I felt, and how much I didn’t want to feel so much pain every day. I needed help.

I looked for months. Looking for a therapist really is work. There’s Betterhelp, but I wanted something closer and real. Gratefully, after no calls back, emails that didn’t work out, I found someone.

I just started therapy, and people keep asking me if therapy is working. I tell them it’s too soon to know because how do you really know if therapy is working when you are still trying to work through the things that brought you there in the place. I feel like all I talk about is the things that hurt, and trying to understand that hurt, but I don’t know yet if I’m getting better or if I’m just getting everything off my chest right now to not feel like I’m keeping it in. And maybe that’s the first step.

This is the first year I truly felt angry.

I never really understood that maybe I fear anger because I don’t want to hurt others with such a strong emotion the way some people in my life have expressed their anger in my life. I don’t think I let myself get full rage angry, but my anger turns to sadness—tears. I cry more than I scream, punch, or yell; that’s not me. But I am. I’m so angry at what has happened this year and how much I feel like a big part of it is because of me, but I know that it’s not my fault completely. It’s so hard to accept the truth and what your mind is telling you because you feel like the first person you should be angry at is yourself.

I’m also angry and sad that this is how I’m going into being twenty-five.

I’m acutely aware that I haven’t done much in my life, or it doesn’t feel like much when I think about. And I’m turning twenty-five. Like where does the time go? How am I turning twenty-five, when I feel like I just turned twenty and COVID was still a thing and I was in college?

How am I going to have my frontal lobe developed when I don’t feel developed as a person?

I feel broken down by the world—-undeveloped.

Maybe being twenty-five is the rebuild?

Maybe it’s where I finally have the help to actually create a softer, stable, steady life for myself instead of constantly having to be strong and fight. It’s funny because today is the first time I wrote in my journal, and I wrote how I wish I could be soft, stable, and steady, and then I saw a video on Instagram that said the same thing about being in your 20s, and you can create that life for yourself if you let it. And I want to let it.

I don’t know a lot right now. I don’t know where I’m going to physically be in a year from now. I don’t know where I’m going to be emotionally. I don’t know where I’m going to be mentally. I don’t know anything right now.

But I know I just want life to feel like it’s not hurting every day. And that I don’t feel like getting out of bed is the biggest feat.

I want to create a life that feels softer now. Gentler. Tender.

Safe.

I want to be able to focus on my needs instead of worrying about what everyone else feels or what they think or what they want because for so long, I put everyone above me to make sure they were okay or they were happy, because if they were happy that meant things were okay. But who ever checked on me? Who ever made sure I was happy? Not myself. And I wasted so many years taking care of others physically and emotionally, that I didn’t care for the one person who needed it at the end of the day: me.

And I’m sorry to that girl who made it her job to make sure everyone else was okay because she wanted to feel loved or to have love in her life, so she wanted people to be happy and to love her. But she was never happy because she had so much pressure on her little shoulders and so much of a burden to fill. And she never took the time to make herself happy or to find the love she needed from within or with others. I’m sorry to that little girl who would never go out with her friends because she wanted to spend time with her family before it burned down the middle or to make sure her everyone was okay. How do you explain that to anyone? Hey, I can’t go shopping and ride bikes today because X is sad and has no one to go out with so I’m going to stay home and go out with X, but you go on ahead. I’ll just watch from my balcony my friends becoming closer, and me getting farther because I chose family and what I thought was love. And when it all came down to it, no one in my family chose love for me.

They never made sure I was okay, except maybe the people who really cared. That’s who I knew who was family.

I just want to feel like me again.

Or some semblance of myself who feels okay. Who can laugh without feeling guilty or wrong about it. Or to smile and actually mean it because something makes me happy and not because I have to perform. I want to be able to buy clothes that make me feel beautiful and excited to wear them again because I love expressing myself, and not like I’m just putting on clothes because that’s what you do. I want to be someone who picks up a book because she really wants to read and fall in love with a story and learn lessons or connect with characters and not just because she needs to distract her mind or as a routine. I want to be able to take time to bake something and not stress about the mess I make or carry supplies back and forth from one palce to the other. I want to be someone who goes to work with a genuine pep in my step and not feel like my feet are dragging in dried cement, my eyes shut, fists tight because I’m fighting myself to be there. I want to be someone who leads with her heart that feels gentle and not explode at such small things because everything and anything feels like a trigger now that makes my fuse so incredibly short. Because being angry and mad and short with people isn’t me. But I fear I’ve become someone with no patience these days because I don’t care anymore, or I’m so tired. I want to be someone who cares again, not that I don’t care, I just don’t have my heart in many things right now, and it makes showing up like the greatest climb. I want to be someone who isn’t so tired all the time, who doesn’t wake up and immediately kick her bed because she doesn’t want to get out of it to go to work, but she feels peace because she has something to look forward to. I don’t want to always be lying down and sleeping in one spot way too late because it’s easy and comfortable, but I don’t really have the motivation to do anything right now. I want to be someone who’s motivated, inspired, and passionate again. I don’t know what motivates me anymore. I don’t know how to find that right now. I want to. I want to be someone that a year from now I can look back and think, “man, she is getting through it.”

I don’t tell myself this a lot because I always felt like my accomplishments meant nothing or weren’t important to celebrate. But I should tell myself this more often, but to myself who is reading this a year from now—and even myself right now—-I’m proud every day you kept trying when you didn’t want to. I’m proud that you did the hardest things you never fathomed and never wanted, and that takes a lot of courage and for lack of a better word, strengths. No one can just lose two homes and people you love in three months and not feel the way you did, and you should be incredibly proud you tried your best through it. If you ever lost anyone or anything compounded, you should be increidbly proud how you tried your best through it. No one really tells you how to live with grief or how it feels like an anvil on your chest you live with every day.

Someone once said that grief is like a rock in your pocket. That rock can feel heavy, but over time, the rock feels lighter not because the rock got smaller, but you grew stronger, holding it. And I liked that because I don’t think grief ever truly goes away, you just live with it. You carry it with you in every moment, place—grief is remembrance in motion—- and that love and hurt—always intertwined—are there with you. Not in a bad way, but a way that reminds you that what you felt/experienced was real. Maybe your grief isn’t a rock, but a hand sanitizer, a bracelet, a ring, or a photo. Grief is something you carry, something you live with in your heart—forever changed.

I’m not my grief, but I know that it has changed me in ways I never thought it would. And it scary. Especially because I don’t know a lot about who I am right now or who I will become.

I really want to be better for me, and to heal whatever hurt I feel so I can carry this grief with more grace.

I think I grieve the idea too, that I’m not at the place I thought I would be at this point.

Twenty-four and I’m as shattered as ever.

How in the world are people my age getting engaged, married, having kids, getting a house, a dog, moving across the country? How do people handle such changes?

I always wanted to have that picture-esque, movie fantasy life of a life partner, marriage, a house, a pet, but I’m not even close to any of that. And it sucks to know that—that I’ve never been remotely close to any of that. I know this year a relationship wasn’t even in my mind because all I felt was survival, and I don’t feel like it’s fair to be in a relationship when I don’t feel like I’m in a good place. And it sucks. I’ve never felt like I’ve ever been in a good place to even begin the journey of having what I would dream of. Sometimes I wonder if I hadn’t grown up with so much heartache, how different I would feel about myself and if I would have met someone sooner because I was in a healthier place because I had the time to grow up. I never really had the time to live and grow up, I survived instead of lived. That makes it so much harder to find happiness within me and with others.

I feel sad that I don’t even know when I will find that dream with someone not because I need it, but because I want it. I know it might take years for me to be at a healthy place, and it’s hard because being a women, you’re biological clock for children ticks on. Life is so different than how you ever think it will go.

But you know, in the spirit of not trying to be so hard on myself, I think it’s pretty incredible that I survived twenty-four years of absolute shi*. All by myself. Gosh knows, I didn’t do it well, but I did it.

And that’s more than I can ask for.

You know, life is hard, and as hard as it is and as much as I’m battling right now, I know that each day is a gift that I don’t take for granted because you never know what changes, what you can lose, or what can happen. And I try my best to do what I can each day, but yes, I want to live my life more than just survive it now. Maybe that’s my next chapter and the thing that’s out there for me—-maybe that’s why I had to lose everything I loved, to find something greater? I hope. But I don’t know how much hope I have now.

I don’t really know what else I accomplished this year, because it all seems like a blur. But I did get tenured as a teacher and finished my third year with my second grade class who I loved and laughed with. I felt like because I taught second grade for two years, I really had a better understanding and more confidence when I taught. I felt like I was finally finding a groove or ways to teach better, but starting all over again feels like I’m floundering on shore. I don’t feel like I’m good anymore at what I do, and maybe that makes me feel like it confirms what I thought people thought of me—that I’m not good enough. It hurts because I don’t truly think I’m not good enough, I just don’t think this year is what I love or where I want to be. I know I want now, and I know that if I want something, I have to fight for it; I have to work for it. If you really love something too, I think you need to fight for it as much as you can because if you don’t fight for it, then you will lose it, and then once you lose it, you never know if you can get that back. I hope I can. I’m going to fight for it as much as I feel weak every day, I’m fighting so I can fight for this idea I have.

I also moved into my first place by myself this year. It definitely wasn’t in the way I wanted it, and not really how I thought moving out would feel, but I moved out by myself. I don’t know, I think the joy of moving was sucked out because of the reason I had to move.

I got a job. I’m grateful to at least have a job. I paid off my student loans as a twenty-four year old. That’s something right? I learned how to use a screwdriver and a paint spray machine 😂. I also babysat a dog and a cat for the first time. Wow, I’m uneventful.

But even if I didn’t do much being twenty-four, I did more, and carried more, than anyone should at any age. That’s good enough; it might not seem like much, but it’s the best I could do.

My hope going into being twenty-five is rebuilding, healing, and finding myself again.

I do hope to create a life that doesn’t feel like I’m a warrior fighting or dodging, but a person who soft, safe, stable. I hope that through therapy, I can actually find myself out of this darkness that make it hard to get up each day, and that I can find a way back to someone who has a voice and a laugh and a smile. Someone who feels more like a human being than a shadow—-not really there. And if I do that, than that is more than I could ask for.

If I’m being bold, I hope to travel out of country or somewhere different to experience different things and places. I hope that I can find more excitement and passion when going outside of just places I’ve known. Maybe I’ll take up ballet again or do another yoga class. Maybe I’ll write another book that I hope to submit one day to become a published author. Maybe I’ll finally unpack all these boxes still around me. Maybe I’ll be where I hope to be.

I just hope things get better for you each day. That each day doesn’t feel so heavy, so you can enjoy being twenty-five because being twenty-four wasn’t so enjoyable, and we both know it. You’re not going to be this age again, and I hope beyond hope that you can enjoy it because gosh knows you deserve to enjoy things and to have goodness in your life. I don’t think you believe that you deserve good things or that the good things matter because you’re so used to sadness and pain that it feels safer. I hope you know joy like you’ve never known it, that that becomes the safety and comfort and not this constant pain you try to feel because you think being sad is what you want to feel. You want to feel happy and loved, and being sad never made anyone notice you more or love you the way you thought it would. So stop trying to be sad so people can notice and people can listen. Try to find joy for you because that’s what you want, and the rest will follow—the love you always wanted, the love you tried to have as a kid, the love for yourself. Maybe try something different, let yourself be happy. Let yourself let love in because you know that you are worthy of love.

And I’m sorry that anyone ever made you feel like you weren’t worth listening to, weren’t worth seeing, weren’t worth loving all these years. You didn’t deserve that because now you think no one can love you unless you’re sad and they try to care and help you. But you don’t need to be sad for people to care. They will care about you because they do—through the sadness, anger, happiness, everything. Love is not contingent on needing people to care for you. You need to care for you. You need to love you for you.

And maybe this is all my frontal lobe finally developing—kicking in—to tell me all of this, but yea, it’s always been you. *insert sob here* I wrote a story when I was 18, and that phrase is very meaningful to me then, and now. I’ve always just needed to care for myself more than I have.

In a year where I have constantly told myself I’m broken, I think it’s finally got through to me that maybe this is where I needed to break so I could break through.

I hope whatever happens in the coming days, months, a year from now, that you have gotten through.

That you have found the light shining from the top of the ocean.

That you have the will to swim back to the surface.

That you can catch your breath again.

That you can touch your heart and feel it beating loudly with pride from having threaded itself together.

That you are in places that make you excited to be there, that feel safe to be there, that feel like home.

That you are with people that feel like home.

That you are your greatest home yet.

I know.

I know.

It’s hard. It’s been so hard.

I don’t know if every one at this age has felt this way before twenty-five, but my gosh, it’s been hard.

Keep trying. Keep getting up even when you don’t want to, even on today when you’re one year older and you don’t feel that way. Know that just because you’re a year older, doesn’t mean you’re old, but you to remember to keep living as much as you can. You deserve it.

Here’s to truly hoping life gets better and many more years to come,