Dear Parts of Me That Are Still Hurting,
How I have tried to bury you over the past 35 years. No matter how far I ran and no matter how much I ignored myself, I simply could not rid myself of you. I try to numb you, and somehow you grow stronger. I try to discuss you in therapy… like you’ll disappear.
You still linger.
You are of a spider’s web. I cannot see your strands. I feel your thickness and captivation grow with every swipe to escape your grasp. I fight you, but the threads of your tapestry grip tighter and tighter. The pain that remains is akin to a second skin. I am bound. The more I fight you, the more I fight myself. All it does is hurt me and others.
I guess that’s the hard part about finding the bug in the code that is yourself. It means you’ve already broken.
There is no walking without you. Even though those who have caused you have all long vanished, you remain. Every thread of your web, your trojan horse, is a memory I cannot escape. A captured piece of my consciousness tarnished and drained of the color that once spurred the dynamic vibrance of my “happiness”.
Though much of you remains inactive and no longer traveled, you remain part of my architecture. You are a part of my taxonomy…a part of my failed attempts at the construction of my life and dreams. Once part of my destination, you have now become part of my detour.
You are here, rotten parts of old variations of me. You are legacy code. If you’re not understood, you will destroy the whole platform. The virus that is a misunderstood and denied you has already succeeded in destroying all but the core components.
The reason I’m writing to you is to finally acknowledge that you are a part of me. You are not going anywhere. That’s why we’re here. We’ve finally reached the time where the healthy version of me outgrows the limited functionality you gave the rest of my life out of fear. I continue to battle against the meaning of you, but I will no longer deny you access. I will put in the work, no matter how much you hurt to fix.
I wish I could bury you. I cannot. Instead I will do what I can to love myself despite your existence. Instead of hating you this time, I think I’ll try to understand you. Doing that requires being kind to myself, and even understanding how to co-exist with parts of my code that no longer function or serve me.
I crashed. It’s not because you were code that failed. It’s because you were the best code I could write with what I had.
It wasn’t good enough.
And now, you have to change.
Signed,
Me