Dear Younger Me
I know you won’t believe this yet, but I love you.
I know how heavy your heart is. I know what it feels like to lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling, wondering if anyone will ever really understand you — if anyone will stay. You’ve always been surrounded by noise, but somehow still felt completely alone. You grew up with chaos disguised as normal. Love that came with conditions. Silence louder than screaming.
You watched your family fall apart like it was your fault, like you should’ve been enough to keep them whole. You blamed yourself — quietly, privately — and then learned to hide your needs, your fears, your truth. You taught yourself to perform instead of feel. You learned that survival meant pretending.
But survival is not the same as living.
You turned to people who mirrored the dysfunction you came from, because even pain feels like home when it’s familiar. You gave your body in hopes someone might finally see your soul. You learned to equate sex with connection, even when it left you feeling emptier every time. You thought if you were beautiful enough, wild enough, wanted enough — maybe you’d finally be enough.
Then came the chemicals.
Chemsex didn’t come out of nowhere. It arrived like a promise: freedom, escape, touch, power. You were tired of hurting. You were tired of carrying it all sober. So you took the escape route — just for a night. But the night turned into a weekend. Then it turned into forgetting. Then it turned into dependence.
You lost pieces of yourself in those rooms, on those couches, in strangers’ beds, surrounded by people who were just as broken — just as desperate — as you were. You said yes when you wanted to say no. You let things happen to you that still make your stomach turn. And after the high came the crash — the shame, the silence, the terrifying sense that maybe this was all you were ever going to be.
You became a ghost of yourself. You smiled in photos, laughed at parties, posted like you were fine — and went home feeling like a stranger in your own skin. Depression didn’t knock — it moved in. Anxiety wrapped around your chest like barbed wire. You looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the person staring back.
You thought material things would fix it. That if you wore the right clothes, bought the right stuff, lived a flashy life, maybe you could outrun the truth. But you were living in debt — not just financially, but emotionally. You were bankrupt of self-worth, starved for real love, drowning in illusions.
You have an addictive personality — not because you’re weak, but because you feel everything so fucking deeply and were never taught how to carry that safely. You learned to soothe pain with self-destruction, because nobody showed you how to sit with it, speak it, survive it without turning it inward.
But hear me now — please:
You were never too much. You were never not enough. You were just hurting, and trying to find your way home.
You don’t need to destroy yourself to be loved. You don’t need to numb yourself to be wanted. You don’t have to keep giving away pieces of yourself in exchange for moments that don’t last.
What you really want — what you’ve always wanted — is to feel safe. Seen. Held. And you deserve that. You always did.
There’s a future version of you that’s still standing — not because it was easy, but because you chose to stay. You chose to fight for your life, even when you didn’t believe it was worth fighting for. You chose healing, even when it hurt like hell.
Let go of the people who never learned how to love you. Let go of the parties that feel like belonging but leave you hollow. Let go of the lie that you need to be high to be okay.
You are not broken beyond repair. You are not your past. You are not what happened to you.
You are loved.
I love you — even when you don’t love yourself. Especially then.
Come home to yourself.
I’ll be here when you do.
Always,
Me.
