Letters I should have sent
A reminder that you don't need to keep learning the hard way.
Dear Me, and Every Woman Who’s Loved Too Hard
There is something sacred about looking back and realizing how many times you thought you were broken - when really, it was all leading you back to yourself.
This series isn’t about men. Not really. It’s about the versions of me I lost while loving them. The women we become in the presence of love, loss and longing. It’s about the identities we shed, the boundaries we betray, and the quiet negotiations we make with ourselves in the name of connection.
I’m writing these letters because I used to think transferring hurt from pen to paper made the experience haunting, made it permanent. We’ve been conditioned to keep our hurt private. We’ve been told that vulnerability implies weakness, that emotional transparency makes us unhinged. Like you were too soft, too emotional, too much. But I’ve learned that silence doesn’t mean strength - it just means no one hears the lessons. We suffer in isolation, internalizing patterns that deserve to be unlearned.
And I’ve unlearned a lot.
As women, we are taught to compress feelings into digestible pieces. We are encouraged to be desirable but not demanding, soft but not sensitive, resilient to the point of erasure. We are taught that love is the goal, that being chosen validates our existence. But I’ve reached a point in my life where I no longer measure my worth in the proximity to romance.
Because the older I get, the clearer it becomes: joy is not found in another person. It is cultivated internally, nurtured intentionally and reclaimed consistently. It begins and ends with you.
Let me be clear, we’ve heard countless iterations of the advice ‘find yourself’ and ‘return to who you truly are.’ These letters are not intended to push you into some eat, pray, love narrative. But simply to show you how complex, chaotic yet fulfilling self reflection can be.
To my younger self:
You never had to prove your worthiness
You don’t need to make yourself easier to love
You don’t need to stay just because you’ve invested time
And you definitely don’t need to romanticize struggle in the name of loyalty.
If something looks good on paper but doesn’t feel right, you’re allowed to walk away
You don’t owe anyone your time just because the story makes sense to everyone else.
You don’t need a man to fill the in-between spaces of your life
Sometimes a man can give you everything you said you wanted and still not be the one
And no matter where life takes you, no matter how many times you loose yourself in the process of loving someone else - you will always find your way back.
To my younger sisters
It won’t always be easy. But you will evolve. You’ll learn to set boundaries, not push people away, but to keep yourself intact. You’ll learn that saying “no” doesn’t make you hard, and saying “yes” doesn’t make you whole. And you’ll realize that your freedom has never been up for negotiation, its yours by design.
This series is for every version of me - and every version of us, who gave too much, stayed too long, or mistook struggle for love. It’s for the women who are still learning that their pain is valid, that their growth is worth documenting and that their voices deserve to be heard.
We don’t need to keep learning the same lessons in silence.
Note: These letters may or may not be based on real people. Some are fragments from my own past, others are drawn from the lived experiences of women around me, friends, family stories that feel familiar. So please don’t trip.