#belong

5:20 PM – Chicago, IL

Now Playing: Mixed Up – Miley Cyrus

Today I had a follow-up conversation with someone I love very much. Someone I truly hoped could remain in my life despite the divide between me and the rest of my family.

I reached out because I didn’t want time to pass with unresolved feelings or weird energy between us. I wanted to be honest about where I was at and make sure she knew I wasn’t trying to punish her or make her feel like she did something wrong.

I just wanted to take a step back in the healthiest way I knew how.

But instead, I was forced to accept something I’ve been resisting for a long time.

I don’t think I’m able to have relationships in close proximity to that family system without sacrificing my own sense of safety.

I wanted so badly to believe I could.

I thought because she was younger, I could simply prioritize her needs over my own. I never imagined one of those needs would be for me to leave out the parts of my life that shaped me.

I never thought hearing me celebrate surviving difficult things — even when I was talking about them from a place of gratitude and growth — would feel too heavy for someone I love.

But I also realized something about myself.

Even if they truly don’t care about me anymore…

I care.

I care about what information finds its way back to people I no longer feel safe around.

I care about wondering what version of me exists through someone else’s retelling.

I care because I walked away from that family for a reason.

So today, I made the difficult decision to take a step back.

Not because I don’t love her.

Because I do.

But because I don’t want either of us caught in the middle of something neither of us created.

And that is what hurts the most.

Not the decision itself.

The grief.

I’m grieving what I thought our relationship could become.

I’m grieving the version of us I imagined as big sister and little sister.

I’m grieving the hope that maybe this relationship could exist outside of everything that has hurt me for so long.

Her last message carried so much finality.

Maybe she didn’t mean it that way.

Maybe she did.

Either way, it broke my heart because it made me realize how much of that relationship I had been carrying.

The moment I put it down, everything became still.

And that is how I ended up here.

Pouring my heart out on Tumblr again.

For the past two months, I’ve been determined not to come back here. But in that time, I realized why Tumblr has always been one of the only places I’ve felt free to express my pain without feeling like I have to shrink myself or make it easier for someone else to hold.

This blog has been my journal since I was sixteen.

Now I’m twenty-eight, and I can look back through years of real-time evidence of my own resilience.

Walking away from that just doesn’t feel right.

Maybe that’s why I’m here again.

Not because my heart is broken.

But because every time it is, I’ve always found my way back to myself through writing.

For a while now, I’ve felt like the greatest thing that family system stole from me wasn’t just my sense of safety.

It was my sense of belonging.

That realization hurts more than I know how to explain.

But strangely…

It also makes me feel free.

Because if there’s nothing left for that system to take from me, then there’s nothing left keeping me from building the life I’ve always dreamed of.

I didn’t leave everything I’ve ever known just to keep living inside the prison that experience built in my mind.

So today, I’m making a different choice.

I’m choosing to let this grief become fuel.

Fuel to build the dance career I’ve dreamed about.

Fuel to become the woman I’ve been fighting so hard to become.

Not because I need to prove anyone wrong.

It’s cultural literacy to read about ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’ Source link