Sarah Smith’s Path to Healing

Hello you,

I realised the other day that I never thanked you (my teenager) for all the things you have done for me. When I look back on my time as a teenager, I see a very dark time. It was a time of bullying from family, degrading from my father, invisibility at school, violence, and so much more that I probably don’t even remember. It was a time where anyone would have rightfully broken down and probably hidden from the world.

You hid but didn’t break fully. You knew you were going to get out and you fought every step of the way. So I wanted to dedicate this post to you, to every step you took to fight, to survive, an environment that was built to break you.

What I honestly admire most about you is how you got out. How one sentence (“People only have as much authority over you as you give them”) shaped your whole thinking and actually allowed you to take away the authority of the people that were trying to harm you. You didn’t just take that sentence as knowledge, you created a way out with it. That alone is… wow.

You hid. It hurt me in the end, because I was so scared of what would happen if I did decide to show who I am. But for you… for you it was exactly what you needed to do. You were so brilliant, and to decide to take that away from the people that were actively hurting you, and decide that they were not allowed to have access to your beautiful self, that is truly courageous.

You didn’t seek validation from the people that hurt you. I will admit that you did seek validation from other people, but those were people who treated you like a human. People who were truly amazing. In the end, it hurt me because I forgot which people I should be seeking validation from and at one point, it was actually the wrong people. But that wasn’t your fault. That was on me. You truly didn’t want to be validated by people you didn’t like. That is strength right there.

You have such a big heart. You were able to forgive the people who hurt you because you understood that they didn’t have a choice. You forgave people who were in the same situation as you because you knew they were also just trying to survive. I didn’t understand, and chose to forgive people because I wanted their validation. I didn’t understand… I needed to forgive.

I now understand how brilliant your survival strategies were, how I didn’t understand them and when I didn’t need them anymore, I started to use them in the wrong way instead of learning to live, not survive.

So thank you for having those strategies, and I am truly sorry for not understanding and blaming you for “ruining my life”, when in reality, I was just too scared to be me so I tried to be you.

I will do as much as I can to let you be at peace now.

Lots of love,
Me