#coffeeincascadia

[coffeeincascadia]

twenty years later.

I am so deeply sorry for everything the world will put you through and for the things other people will do to you, myself included. You have a light in you, one so big and bright that others will try to put it out. You are so very intelligent and so very kind. A natural storyteller, a lover, a gentle soul meant to guide others through the world with your compassion and understanding. You won’t be given the love and celebration you deserve. 

Your mother will be triggered by your youth, your potential, your conviction, and your thirst for knowledge. She was raised to believe that taking up space was wrong. That it made her difficult, irritating, and ugly. The fact that you take up space in every room without fear or self hatred will make her angry for the parts of herself that she can’t claim. She will stifle you, make you question the parts of yourself that make you a force to be reckoned with. From the doubts and irritation that she pours into you will grow hatred for the parts of yourself that make you so very powerful, so very unique, and so very happy. 

Your stepmother will see you as someone to compete with. She will torment you, knock you down every chance she gets, and try her hardest to take away any potential you have to become better than her. She will make you think you are undeserving of her attention because you’re too fat, then will fain disgust at your thinness. She will subliminally tell you day in and day out what you need to do to acquire her love and affection, and, when you do it, she will use your compliance as yet another reason to hate you. Truthfully, there is nothing you could ever do to make her tolerate you, let alone love you. But you have so much love to give, and you are still under the impression that everyone else does too. So you will starve yourself and exercise yourself to the brink of death. You will dim your light and fall deeper and deeper into her game. You will inevitably loose, and you will hate yourself for it. Cut yourself. Burn yourself. Isolate yourself. You will spend every day wondering how you became such a disgusting and unloveable creature without ever realizing that you are not the horrid thing, rather that you were manipulated into believing that the parts of you that are inherent and beautiful are shameful, appalling, and unloveable. 

You are like your father in ways that still confuse me. It hurts me to know that you are so very much like the man who will be incapable of fighting for you, and who will be your first true heartbreak and betrayal.  It destroys me to know that he will use the parts of himself that exist in you to manipulate you into thinking you are a rage filled beast when in reality you are a confused little girl who just wants someone - anyone, to hold her hand and walk through the world with her. He gave you your intelligence, your fire, your capacity for debate, your thirst for knowledge, your compassion, your ability to disappear into books and to befriend the ink on a page more easily than you could other people. He gave you the parts of himself that were pure and beautiful. When everything is taken away from him, he will burn every part of himself that reminds him of what he lost straight to the ground.  You will be nothing more than collateral damage. 

The first two decades of your life will be so utterly painful. So confusing. Every aspect of your being will be confused, twisted, and mutilated. You will question every decision you make, and every single day you will be stuck in an endless labyrinth, in which every corner you turn as you try to exercise your own identity will be met with a hard wall of anger and guilt and hate, put in place by the adults who were not adult enough to keep their traumas to themselves, and who instead perpetuated them onto you. 

I am so very sorry that you will go through all of this. Im so very sorry your light will be extinguished and your identity will erode into something  unrecognizable. I am so very sorry that you will loose so many people and so many parts of yourself and that you will experience so much pain and suffering. I am so very sorry that the generations before you couldn’t deal with their shit and make sure that they didn’t pass it on to innocent little girls who are born to slay dragons and save the world. I’m so very sorry everyone you should be able to trust will make you believe that you are worthless if you don’t work yourself to death trying to meet their expectations without ever stopping to consider what will make you feel happy and safe. 

You no longer live in this world. You exist purely in my memories, my emotions, and some very far off corner of my consciousness. You are hiding, so afraid, so hurt, and so lost. Everything that should have never happened did, and it changed us, and bent us, and eventually you grew into me, a person who is so used to hating every part of herself that she broke herself in her attempt to be perfect enough to be loveable, and who almost lost everything she loved in the process. I’m learning now. Learning to take care of you, nurture you, and love you, all in the hopes that I can find myself in you. Truthfully, I have no clue who I am or who I’m supposed to be, but I think I know who you are, and I think I can shower you with the love and appreciation that you deserved but never received. I hope that if I’m patient, and if I can become the one to hold your hand and walk through the world with you, that you won’t be so scared anymore, and that you’ll come out again and help me learn to who I am and how I can love the version of me that isn’t so little anymore as much as I love you.