Tonight, something as simple as seeing a picture brought back emotions I didn’t realize I was still carrying.

And surprisingly, it wasn’t just the hurt.

I remembered drawing together. Singing together. Car rides to the store. Watching him completely in his element when he created. I still remember this huge portrait he once drew of my mum. He was incredibly gifted, artistically and musically.

There were good memories. Real ones.

But there was hurt too.

And maybe part of healing is allowing yourself to remember both without feeling like one has to cancel out the other.

Tonight also made me realize that for a long time, I carried anger toward one person and unknowingly let pieces of it spill into other parts of my life—how I loved, trusted, protected myself, and even how I saw myself.

Sometimes we think because we survived something, we healed from it.

Those aren’t always the same thing.

So this is for the woman—or the little girl still inside her—who has ever wondered why someone didn’t choose her, stay, show up, or love her the way she needed:

Their choices were never a measurement of your worth. You were always enough.

We may not be responsible for the wounds people gave us, but eventually we become responsible for what we do with them.

We can’t rewrite our childhood or someone else’s choices. But we can decide those choices don’t get to write the rest of our story.

Maybe healing isn’t forgetting or pretending the good wasn’t good and the bad didn’t hurt.

Maybe it’s finally being able to say:

There were beautiful parts. There were painful parts. Both shaped me—but neither gets to decide who I become from here.

Still learning. Still unlearning. Still healing. 🤍

If you are too, keep going. There’s still so much life ahead of us.

#ceeluvv