11/30/2025
"There is a little girl who never has to question if she is wanted. In that place, her name is spoken softly, not as a warning or a complaint, but as something tender that people are grateful to say. The softness of her voice is not something that echoes into empty rooms; it is held, answered, cherished. The people who were supposed to love her do not break her heart by pretending she is too much or not enough; they sit with the whole of her, even on the days when she is quiet and hiding and hard to reach. They do not ask her to shrink so they can feel bigger. They do not make her carry the weight of their own unhealed wounds. They simply choose her, again and again, until she no longer doubts that she was always worth choosing.
In that other life that she will never remember, she grows up in a world where tenderness is not rare or fragile or given with conditions. She never learns to read danger in the way footsteps fall in the hallway. She does not measure the mood of a room before she lets herself breathe. She is not an expert at apologizing for things that were never her fault. She does not stay awake at night replaying every word she said, trying to locate the moment she became unlovable. Instead, she falls asleep quickly, with a quiet mind and a steady heart, believing with her whole being that tomorrow is allowed to be gentle. No one there teaches her that love means surviving. No one there teaches her that affection must be earned. She grows up thinking that care is simple and ordinary: someone notices when she is tired, someone listens when she is sad, someone comes when she calls and does not leave when she cries.
In this world, in this body, the little girl who should have been safe carried the price of other people’s damage before she could even spell her own name. She learned early that the ones who should have stayed can be the first to walk away. She learned how to carry the silence after slammed doors. She learned how to pretend it did not hurt when promises were broken and birthdays were forgotten and apologies never came. She taught herself to become small in the corners of rooms, easy to ignore, easy to excuse. When they could not love her right, she decided it must be because something inside her was wrong. So she began collecting pieces of herself and tucking them out of sight: the softness that once reached for hugs, the voice that once spoke her needs, the eyes that once met other eyes and did not flinch. She called this survival. She did not know that, piece by piece, she was vanishing.
In the eyes of the world, she looks like a woman carved from strength, but no one sees how much of that strength was born from being left alone with her hurt. As she grows, people praise her strength without seeing the cost of it. They tell her she is so independent, so capable, so low maintenance. They do not see the part of her that is starving for someone to finally notice how tired she is. They admire how she never asks for help, not understanding that she learned long ago that needing anything makes her disposable. They say she is mysterious, deep, hard to read, not knowing that she is simply afraid. Afraid that if someone sees the raw truth of her, they will leave just like the ones before, and she will have to pretend again that it did not break her. So she keeps her stories to herself, holds her tears behind her eyes, and smiles in a way that convinces everyone she is fine. No one stops to ask why a person should have to be this strong just to be allowed to exist.
In the quiet hours when the world is finally still, she can almost feel that other version of herself, the one who got the softness she was denied. Maybe somewhere, that other little girl is running through a kitchen full of warmth, her cheeks flushed from laughing as someone tells her to slow down before she slips. Maybe she is falling asleep to the sound of gentle voices instead of raised ones, growing into her body without shame, learning that her feelings are not an inconvenience. And maybe this woman, the one standing here in this universe, can feel hints of that other life in the way her chest aches for things she has never known. Maybe the ache itself is a kind of remembering: a quiet knowledge that she was never meant to be this broken, that love was never supposed to feel like begging, that home was never supposed to be a place she feared. Perhaps the reason she hurts so deeply is because, somewhere inside her, she knows she was made for more than this.
In the middle of all her shattered pieces, she chooses, for now, to simply exist as she is, cracked but still breathing. So she stays broken for a while, not because she is weak, but because healing is not a straight line and she is exhausted from holding herself together for so long. She stays broken because every time she tries to fix herself quickly, she ends up wrapping the same old wounds in prettier words. She stays broken because there are nights when breathing feels heavy and mornings when getting out of bed is the bravest thing she will do. Yet, in the middle of all that, something small and stubborn remains. A quiet refusal. A soft promise. She begins, very slowly, to stop asking why they did not love her right and starts wondering what it would feel like to love herself without waiting for permission. She touches the edges of her own hurt and does not turn away. She tells herself that the people who failed to see her were not proof that she was unworthy, only proof that they were unready.
In the life she is still building from the ruins, there will come a day when she is no longer defined by what was done to her but by what she chose to grow from it. One day, she will no longer be the girl waiting for another universe to save her. She will still carry the memory of the child who should have been cherished and was not, but she will hold that memory with tenderness, not shame. She will learn to sit beside her own younger self in her mind and say, “I am here now. I did not leave you, even when everyone else did.” She will build a life that feels gentle in the places where her story used to be sharp. She will choose people who do not flinch at her feelings, who do not make her earn her place, who do not punish her for having needs. And little by little, she will stop calling herself broken and start calling herself becoming. Because maybe, in another time, in another universe, there is a little girl who is loved the way she always deserved. But here, in this one, there is a woman who rose from everything that tried to unmake her, and she will spend the rest of her days learning to be the love she never received, until the ache softens, the fear loosens, and she finally recognizes herself as the quiet, unshakable miracle they were too blind to see."
-Steve De'lano Garcia
