I came across something I wrote in my journal in 2006, and I honestly don't remember feeling like that at all. I was actually surprised that there was a period of my life when some of the things that were happening around me are the things I no longer remember. I was surprised to read what it felt like to be inside that particular kind of loneliness. I felt like an outsider. It is strange when you can recognize your own words and yet feel so far away from the person who wrote them.

There were words there that I wrote that must have felt so strong back then. “I feel so alone.” I wrote about feeling that the only time I really seemed to matter was when I had something to give. I wrote about people coming to me when they needed someone to listen, someone to comfort them, someone to help them, and then disappearing when they no longer needed anything from me. Looking at it now, there was one question underneath all of it that I didn't know how to articulate at the time: “I am here. Can you see me? Can you hear me? Would you still want me if I had nothing to give?”

I think what hurt was not simply being alone, but feeling unseen. I wrote about being quiet around friends, sometimes just staring blankly because I was afraid that if I started talking, people would lose interest or find me boring. I was already making myself smaller because I had somehow decided that being fully myself might make people want me less. And then I wrote something that really caught me this time: “I’m tired of always being there for me.” I don’t think I understood then how much that sentence said about where I was. I had become very good at carrying myself, keeping busy, functioning, showing up, being useful and helping other people, while inside I was simply tired of always having to be the one who was there for me.

What stayed with me most was the strange contrast between how I was feeling inside and how I was apparently being seen by the people around me. I was privately questioning whether I was even worth wanting, whether anyone would really stay if I had nothing to give, and feeling exhausted from having to always be there for myself. Yet, somewhere outside of that private world I had created in my head, a friend saw me as someone who carried herself well, with grace, with strength, with something worth believing in. That note from her read, "You are one of the few people who I know that can carry themselves so well. Keep your grace, always smile, and never lose faith in yourself.”

It makes me wonder if that was one of the first times something in me began to shift. I was so immersed in how I felt that I couldn’t see anything beyond it, and yet someone else could see qualities in me that I couldn’t recognize in myself. I even like to think that my angels may have used her to get that message to me. Not in some dramatic way, but simply by putting another person’s perception in front of me at a time when I needed to see that there was more to me than what I was experiencing inside.

Looking at this again now also feels strangely relevant because, even after all these years, there are still moments when I question my worth. I still wonder sometimes what value I bring to this world, whether I am doing enough, or whether I am enough for the people around me. I don’t think that means I haven’t healed. I think it means I am human. The difference is that I no longer take the feeling itself as proof that the question is true. I can have a moment of doubt without allowing that doubt to define me.

The girl who once wrote, “I’m tired of always being there for me,” had no idea that this would eventually become one of the deepest lessons of her life. She thought the answer was finding someone who would finally be there for her. What she eventually discovered was something much more powerful: she could become that person for herself.

I guess the beauty of healing is the change in perspective. What I wrote was my experience at the time, and I don’t doubt that what I felt was real, but it was still my perspective from inside that experience. I was seeing things through the eyes of someone who was hurting, and I couldn’t possibly have known everything that was happening around me or what other people were carrying themselves. I can acknowledge what that girl felt without deciding that the people around her were bad people. Those are two different things.

That is why this old piece of writing feels so meaningful to me today. Twenty years ago, I couldn't see beyond the pain I was in. I couldn't see what other people could see in me, and I certainly couldn't imagine the person I would eventually become.

Now I can look back at her and understand that she wasn't lacking worth. She was simply unable to see it from where she was standing.

It happens to all of us. You may be in that state too. This doesn't mean we lost our light; we just temporarily forget where we left the switch.

Healing isn't becoming a person who never questions herself again. It is knowing that when the question comes, you don't have to answer it from the place of your wound. When the doubt comes, we no longer have to mistake it for the truth.

If I could sit with the girl I was in 2006, I wouldn’t try to explain everything that was going to happen. I don’t think she would have understood anyway. I would probably just tell her that she is going to learn how to be there for herself in a way she cannot imagine yet, and that the things she believes about herself while she is hurting will not necessarily be the things she believes forever.

She had no idea that the life she was beginning to live would become one of the most challenging and awakening parts of her story. She also had no idea that twenty years later, I would find those words and be surprised that I had ever felt that way.

That is the part I find most astonishing about reading that entry now. I may no longer remember that girl or the words she wrote but I fully understand why she felt that way. I am so glad that she lived long enough to meet the woman who was waiting for her on the other side of it, twenty years later.

I may still have moments when I question my own worth and still need reminders of how valuable I am, but I don’t become that lonely girl again. I know exactly how to come back to myself now. I think that may be what healing has really given me: not a life where I never doubt myself, but a life where I no longer abandon myself when I do.