Love Letters to the Girls Who Are Too Hard on Themselves

you were never meant to carry all this weight

To the girl who thinks she is running out of time,

You wake up with the weight of a thousand unfulfilled expectations pressing against your chest. A tally in the back of your mind counts the things you haven’t done yet: the career you don’t have, the business you haven’t built, the life you thought you’d be living by now. Why does burnout feel so much like slacking? You feel like you're falling behind, but you're not entirely sure who you are trailing. Everyone and no one at the same time.

Somewhere along the way, someone taught you that love must be earned, rest must be justified, and that your value depends on your ability to keep up. And so, you run. Me too. In fact, it's all I ever do in my dreams. I run and run and run and always wake up before arriving at my destination. The nightmare has repeated itself every night since fifth grade.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself where exactly you are running to?

I wonder if you’ve noticed how tired you are, how cruel you’ve been to yourself. I have. Sometimes my spirit aches from trying so hard to be everything to everyone all the time.

The older I get, the more I learn that the most beautiful things in life are not the ones you can add to a resume. They’re the quiet mornings where sunlight spills across your bed in golden patches, the friends who make you laugh so hard your stomach hurts, the song that feels like it was written just for you, the slowness of a Sunday morning.

You are allowed to embrace the "slow life" without feeling like you are giving in to some internet trend. You are allowed to seek beauty in the mundane. You are allowed to exist outside of the expectations that were placed upon you before you even knew how to spell your own name.

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To the people-pleaser,

I see how much of yourself you give away, little pieces handed out like confetti, hoping that if you give enough, someone will finally see your worth. You bend, you stretch, you shrink yourself to fit into the spaces others leave for you. You apologize too often, for taking up space, for asking for what you need, for having emotions that spill over. You worry that you are too intense, too chatty, too needy, too much. Mostly you just wonder if you’re enough.

Your worth isn’t in how much of yourself you can give away. The people who truly love you will never ask you to hollow yourself out for their comfort. They’ll celebrate the wholeness of you, the messy, beautiful, complicated entirety of who you are.

It is an act of rebellion to be show up as the full version of yourself, and one that will change the trajectory of your life for the better. We were never meant to be easy to categorize, homogeneity makes us convenient for capitalism, and destructive to ourselves. We are made of contradictions, and you are here to be unique. The louder you sing your song, the easier it will be for your kindred souls to find you. As someone who struggles to emote, trust me. The world does not need more people who silence themselves into neat, digestible versions. It needs people who feel, who express, who remind us what it means to be alive.

Please stop setting yourself on fire to keep others warm. You deserve to bask in your own light.

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To the girl who is waiting to be chosen,

You have spent so much of your life waiting for someone to pick you, to see you, for a sign that you are lovable, that you are wanted, that you are enough. In pleading to be a supporting character in someone else’s story, you've forgotten that you are the main character in yours.

You replay your conversations like old records, picking apart every word, as if dissecting the past will somehow protect you from the future. Your mind is a constant churn of what ifs and should haves as if peace is a thing you can bargain for with the right combination of thoughts.

What if you treated yourself as the precious thing you are? What if you started showing up for yourself with the same devotion you so readily give to others?

There is a world where you don’t sit in front of your phone, staring at a screen, hoping for a message that will change everything. And in that world, you do not feel hollow from the absence of another’s validation, because you have already chosen yourself. You feel full, overflowing even. Real love always starts within the self, and begins in the way you speak to yourself, the way you care for your body, the way you honor your dreams even when no one else sees them yet.

I hope one day you’ll choose yourself first. Imagine if you could embrace the cracks and rough edges. That’s where the light gets in.

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To you, the girl reading this,

You are so much more than you give yourself credit for.

Me shumë dashuri,

Leidi