Hindsight, Written In Time

Writing has always been one of my favorite techniques when it comes to healing from childhood trauma. It's a powerful tool for processing the past gently—because it maps the journey of learning self-worth in a way that's private, but still undeniably tangible. And whether those words are carefully catalogued or simply tucked into the nooks and crannies of your life, the act of writing through pain preserves something important. They're a record of you, becoming yourself.

Each time we sit down with a racing mind or an aching heart and we spill those things onto paper, we save pieces of who we are, like snapshots buried in time capsules. Evidence of lessons learned from hard seasons, proof of how time brings revelation. Sometimes our writings are intentional, tracking emotional growth over time. Other writings give us clarity along the way to self-compassion.

Still others are there simply there to remind us that healing does happen, even when healing doesn't happen all at once.

I don't send a lot of mail, but I write a lot of letters. I write to my parents, even though they've been gone for years. I write to my children. To old friends and new ones. To people from church. Once I wrote a letter to a coffee pot after it broke—because pouring my frustration onto paper helped me avoid pouring it over the people I love.

Periodically, I write letters to myself, too. I share hopes with a future me who doesn't exist yet, and lessons learned with a younger me who didn't know better. Now and then I write letters to the present me, offering grace that only seems easy when I pretend it's for someone else.

Every so often, I come across an old piece of writing that feels less like something I wrote and more like something I survived.

It wasn't the first time I'd written a letter to myself, and it wouldn't be the last. My early years weren't soft or easily summarized, and I was still learning how to be treated gently. The aching girl behind my aging face still didn't know that life lessons could come softly, and she still carried tender wounds that had been poked and prodded, but never healed.

Back then, when I wrote letters to previous versions of myself, I often felt uncertain. The unhealed wounds that bled in my past self still ached sometimes in the present, and I didn't always have the emotional language to speak to the pain without unraveling. But even then, writing was the one place I felt most freely honest. The place where I didn't trip over words or worry about how they'd be received.

And that day, the words found me all on their own.

My daughters were little then, sitting quietly in the backseat, watching through the windows as our city faded to countryside. We were on our way to see my mom after a long stretch of illness and distance, and I found myself praying—not for answers, but for presence. Just one good day. Just enough strength to carefully hold the fragile gift of time. I never knew which drive to my mother's house would be the last.

The road wound through the outskirts of Knoxville, wooded and familiar, as we headed for the small town my mom lived in. I remember noticing that the leaves hadn’t yet turned—I’d been hoping for fall colors, but everything was green. Lush and alive. And unexpectedly, those familiar roads carried me back to the first time I'd seen them.

I was sixteen when my mom and I moved to Tennessee from central Florida, and I didn’t know it then, but that summer would reshape everything in my life.

It was an emergency move, forcing me to leave my father behind, without even getting the chance to say goodbye. I'd left my best friend, and my heart was still shattered by the memory of us in those last moments, clinging to each other in the parking lot of her first job. Both of us sobbing even as we pretended we were fine.

But there was quiet hope, too. Staying with my grandmother meant reconnecting with my favorite cousin—the sister I’d always wished for. And there was a boy I loved deeply, who was moving with us. In the middle of chaos, I believed love might steady me. I had no idea how much I didn’t know.

Years later, as I drove with my own children behind me, I thought about the child I had been and the words she never heard spoken gently. So in the quiet of the car, with the wind in my hair and old pain echoing in my heart, late-20s me sent a letter to the past:

* * *

Hey, kid.

I know things are heavy right now. I know you’re grieving people who are still alive, even if you don't know how to process what that means yet. I know your heart is broken over relationships that'll never look the way you hoped they would. And I know you’re angry at being young and feeling everything so intensely—especially when you can't control the options, the impact, or the circumstances.

Please hear me when I tell you that the boy you’re crying over is not who you think he is. Even when the anger burns out and you talk again...even when you finally make peace...he isn’t your future. Let him go and trust it's for the best. Take what was good and raise your standards. Take what hurt and strengthen your boundaries.

People who hurt you will come and go, and there's no escaping that. But life will also bring people who take time to know you. People who will see your intelligence, delight in your humor, and grow through your resilience, even when you can’t see it yourself. But they won't show up until you stop trying to please impossible people. Let the impossibles go too, even when the loss hurts. Loss only writes your story if you let it.

And the crazy thing is, you won’t end up where you think you will—not for a while, anyway. You’ll wander through life. You’ll question yourself, your beliefs, your origin, your existence. You’ll crash headlong into darkness and you'll learn the magic of light. And by the time you're me, you’ll realize that you never needed to look that hard for someone to believe in. Because she's been in your mirror all along.

*****

Writing a letter to your younger self isn't always easy, and finding that old letter today made me wonder what I would tell my younger self now. But only for a moment, because I realized I already know what I'd say. I speak to her all the time now.

I see her in my daughters, who are 22 and 16. Motherhood and memory shape the relationships we have, and in every conversation, I get to be the coach I never had. To tell them that finding your voice is worth it even when it's hard, and that looking back with compassion gives grace to more than just you. My students are just slightly younger than my youngest daughter, and I speak to them as if they were my own. I tell them my story and they marvel because I've been through so much. They ask me how I survived like that but ended up like this, and I smile as I warn them: Sometimes becoming the woman you needed means trusting the long process of letting go of who you thought you'd be.

Well, not always. But sometimes.

Because the truth is, we spend so much time waiting, don't we? We wait for the right person, the right moment, the right version of ourselves. And we tell ourselves that that's when life begins. That's when we'll be worthy of love. Or rest. Or joy.

But what if this moment is already enough? What if you just believed that you're already worth loving, that you're already someone who matters? What if you embraced that hope as truth—right now, without asking someone else for permission?

Time can't erase the past, but it does give us perspective. And if we let it, it gives us a chance to speak to ourselves with the kindness we've been craving all along.

I won't pretend it's easy even now, because it isn't—but I can promise it's worth practicing. And maybe that's the whole point anyway, because it's the practice that changes us. Consistent listening, determined hoping, intentional becoming...these are the tools that help us...

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