🪞✨ Before I Had Words ✨🪞

 

🪞✨ 🪞 ✨🪞

For a long time, I treated my inner child like a liability.

Like the reason things didn’t last.

Like the voice that should have known better by now. 🫧

I told myself I was stronger now.

More rational.

More controlled.

And somewhere inside that story, the younger version of me became the scapegoat—the part I blamed for trusting too easily, for reaching when I should have learned to pull away, for believing people when they spoke gently and vanished when it mattered. 🪢

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But that was never the truth.

The truth is: she was never my enemy. 🪞

She was my evidence.

She was the part of me that knew what safety should feel like, even when she never had it. She wasn’t naïve—she was calibrated for connection in a world that rationed care. She wasn’t dramatic—she was honest in a system that rewarded silence. She wasn’t reckless—she was reaching for regulation before language caught up. 🌬

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She remembered what my nervous system learned before my mind had words.

She remembered how affection came with conditions.

How belonging could be revoked without warning.

She remembered the quiet math of figuring out where she was allowed to take up space—standing still while voices moved around her, learning early how to be small without disappearing. 🫧

And instead of burying that knowledge, she carried it forward—into friendships, into love, into every place I hoped this time might be different. 🪡

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I blamed her for the pain that followed.

But the pain followed because the world did not meet her honesty with care.

She kept hoping because hope was the only survival tool available to her.

She kept attaching because connection once meant safety, even if briefly.

She kept believing because disbelief would have required her to give up on being seen at all. 🩹

That is not weakness.

That is adaptation. 🌿

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Loving this way cost me things—relationships, time, pieces of my own safety.

But it did not cost me my integrity. 🪞

She is the reason I can still feel tenderness.

She is the reason I notice when something is off.

She is the reason my body reacts before my mind catches up.

She is the reason I can now tell the difference between intensity and intimacy—because she endured the confusion long enough for me to learn. ✨

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Healing did not come from silencing her.

It came from turning toward her and finally saying:

You weren’t wrong. You were early. 🌬

Early to name what hurt.

Early to sense danger beneath charm.

Early to feel grief before it had a funeral. 🫧

She didn’t fail me.

She protected my capacity to love in a world that kept trying to harden it. 🌿

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Now, when she shows up—when something aches too deeply, when trust feels fragile, when longing resurfaces—I don’t shove her away or tell her to be quiet.

I listen. 🪞

Because she doesn’t speak in lies.

She speaks in sensation.

In memory.

In truth. 🪢

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I am not here to outgrow her anymore.

I am here to stand with her—grown enough now to give her what she always needed: steadiness, protection, and a voice that won’t abandon her when things get hard. 🩹

She learned to survive without protection.

I am learning to live with it. ✨

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