bananapancakes

DREW STARKEY and MIKE FAIST at the DIOR fashion show in Paris.

Because people usually say it after you have survived something difficult, but very rarely do they ask what surviving it actually cost you.

What it cost your energy. Your sense of safety. Your ability to relax completely. The softer parts of you that got worn down from carrying too much for too long.

I think there are people who have been resilient for so many years that they no longer know how to stop bracing themselves. People who became dependable because they had to. People who kept going, not because they were fearless, but because life did not really give them another option.

And after a while, resilience stops feeling empowering. It just becomes tiring.

You get tired of being the one who “handles it.” Tired of adapting. Tired of recovering. Tired of surviving difficult things and then immediately being expected to continue functioning like nothing happened.

Sometimes you don’t want to be strong. Sometimes you want to be held gently by life for once.

You want rest that actually feels restful. You want softness without guilt. You want to stop feeling like every difficult experience is just another lesson you are supposed to grow from.

And honestly, I think that feeling deserves more understanding than it gets.

Because there is a quiet grief in realizing how much of your life has been spent enduring instead of simply living.

So if you are tired of being resilient, I hope you know that does not make you weak or ungrateful or incapable.

It makes you human.

Human beings were never meant to carry endless amounts of pain without eventually becoming exhausted by it.

You deserve support too. You deserve gentleness too. You deserve spaces where you do not have to be the strong one all the time.

And I hope one day you experience a kind of peace that does not require survival first.

Not relief after crisis. Not temporary comfort between difficult periods.

Because it is confusing. It would almost feel easier if there was no love there at all. But sometimes there was love. In the way they tried to protect you. In the sacrifices they made. In the ways they worried about you, cared for you, wanted a good life for you.

And at the same time, there were still things missing.

Maybe comfort did not come in the way you needed it to. Maybe your feelings were not always understood, or noticed, or handled gently. Maybe you learned to keep certain parts of yourself quiet because it felt easier than trying to explain them.

That kind of hurt is difficult because it does not always come from cruelty. Sometimes it comes from people who loved you deeply, but did not know how to emotionally connect in the ways you needed. People carrying their own wounds, limitations, fears, or ways of surviving.

And you are allowed to acknowledge both truths at once.

You are allowed to recognize their love and still grieve what you needed but did not receive. Those things do not cancel each other out.

Forgiveness, for a lot of people, is not pretending nothing hurt you. It is slowly accepting that someone can love you and still fall short of understanding you completely.

That does not make your pain dramatic. It does not make them monsters either. Sometimes it just means everyone was trying with the emotional tools they had, and some of those tools were not enough.

And I think many people quietly carry guilt for still feeling hurt by parents they know tried their best. But being loved imperfectly can still leave wounds. It makes sense that it affected you.

At the same time, you do not have to stay trapped only in anger forever either. Sometimes healing looks like understanding that your parents were human before they were parents. People shaped by their own experiences, their own upbringing, their own emotional gaps.

That understanding does not erase your feelings. It just softens the sharp edges around them a little.

You deserved emotional safety. You deserved gentleness. You deserved to feel understood, comforted, and emotionally close to the people raising you.

And if they could not fully give that to you, it is okay to mourn it.

But I hope you also know this: the love you needed is still something you can experience in your life. Through other people. Through chosen family. Through the way you learn to treat yourself now.

The story does not end at what you did or did not receive growing up.

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