I was in college when someone asked me a question I wasn't ready to answer.

My mom was getting married again, and her maid of honor, Kris, was over at the house. We got to talking, and I mentioned that I didn't want to start dating until I lost weight. Kris looked at me and asked, "Can you accept yourself for who you are?"

I said something polite. But what I actually thought was: No. Not yet. When I lose the weight. When I do better in school. When I heal more. When I'm healthier. When I'm further along. When I'm closer to who I want to be.

When I'm perfect, basically, or at least close to it.

That was many years ago. I'm answering the question differently now.

 I realized that I put myself down too much.

It wasn't obvious. It was more like a constant undertone: I'm not quite good enough. I'd felt it for so long, and been shown and told it for so long, that eventually I believed it. I was too sensitive, too heavy, not energetic enough, too sick, etc. Whatever it happened to be at the time, I always found something.

Then recently, I looked back at everything I've written over the last few months, the stories, the things I finally said out loud for the first time, and something clicked.

I have been through an enormous amount of stuff. Childhood abuse that began when I was eight. Feeling invisible in my own family. Four layoffs. Caring for everyone else except myself. A night I almost didn't make it. Right now, I'm dealing with financial stress that keeps me up at night, worrying about my house, worrying about my cat, worrying about whether any of this is going to work out. It is genuinely hard, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

And yet.

I still laugh. I still get excited about things in a way that probably looks ridiculous to other people. I still find things that are funny, interesting, and worth talking about. I still show up. I still care about people. I still believe healing is possible. I wake up, do the work, and keep going. Most of the time, I do it with a playfulness I didn't fully appreciate until recently.

That's not nothing. That's actually remarkable.

I spent so many years focused on how much those experiences had hurt me that I rarely stopped to appreciate how much strength it took to survive them.

I think a lot of us learned early on that we had to earn the right to feel okay about ourselves. If you grew up being told (in words or just in the way people treated you) that you were too much, or not enough, or somehow the problem, you absorbed it. You internalized a standard that was never fair to begin with, and then you kept enforcing it on yourself long after the people who set it had left the room.

You became the one doing it. You took over that job so efficiently that they didn't even have to stay.

I know I did. I got very good at it.

And here's what I want to say about that, to you and to myself: there was a little girl in there who didn't deserve any of what happened to her. She was curious and funny and full of love, and she was completely undeserving of what was done to her, said to her, and withheld from her. She didn't create any of that. She just lived through it.

Recently, I stopped and actually talked to her. I said: “I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I was so harsh. You were a beautiful, innocent little girl who didn't deserve what happened to her. You deserved to be treated better. You deserved unconditional love. You deserved to be authentically yourself. If you were my daughter, you would know every day that you were loved and cherished. I love you.”

She's been through enough.

She doesn't need me piling on.

I didn't get here by deciding to feel better about myself. I got here by doing a lot of work over a long time, and then, one day, looking back and finally seeing it.

The healing showed up in small ways before I noticed the big ones. I started waking up differently. For a long time, every morning felt like I was running on a 20% battery. Just getting out of bed felt like an achievement. Most days, I didn't want to go anywhere, do anything, or talk to anyone. That blah feeling was so constant. I’d tried medication, supplements, working out, eating better, etc. I got in really good shape multiple times, but that feeling seemed to stay no matter what I did.

It's not how I am anymore. Now I wake up, and I want to work. Sometimes I'm excited about it. Sometimes I'm not, but the blah feeling is gone. I joke more and make myself laugh when no one's around. I'm lighter in a way I can actually feel, not just something I'm telling myself.

I've also been thinking about dating again, which I hadn't let myself think about seriously in a while. And I caught myself doing the old thing: “I'm not ready, I need to lose weight first, I'm not good enough for someone really great.” I've been gaining weight since my surgery, and working out has been genuinely difficult. There's still a lot of pain and inflammation, and some days I can't do it at all. I went months without being allowed to work out because I was still recovering. And I was treating that like a character flaw.

Today I just got tired of it. I thought about everything I've been through, everything I've built, everything I've survived, and I thought, “Somebody would be really lucky to be with me. They'd probably be laughing most of the time if they got my goofiness. The weight is temporary. Who I am isn’t. That's the part I've actually been working on, and that work shows”.

I finally decided I was done. Done putting myself down, done waiting until I was acceptable enough to deserve good things. It took me many years to answer Kris's question. But I'm answering it now.

I think about who I am right now. Not who I'm trying to become, not some future version of me with everything figured out. Just who I am today, in the middle of all of it. And I think that person deserves better than the way I sometimes talk to her.

I am building something real from scratch, during one of the hardest stretches of my adult life, while also doing the work of excavating and healing things that most people never find the courage to look at directly. And I'm doing it while still being kind, playful, and genuinely happy much of the time. That's the healing actually working. I did that. Nobody handed it to me.

A lot of us were taught that love had to be earned through performance. Get good grades. Don't be a burden. Be responsible. Be smaller. Be easier. And if you did all of that perfectly enough, maybe you'd finally deserve to feel okay.

But that finish line keeps moving. Real love doesn't ask you to become someone else before you're allowed to receive it. And you are allowed to be healing and lovable. Stressed and lovable. Imperfect and lovable. Human and lovable.

Some people will deliberately make you feel small. Some will do it without even realizing it, because they're running the same program themselves, and misery has always loved company.

The critical voice in your head that sounds like it's protecting you, keeping you humble, keeping you realistic, is not your friend. It's just an old recording from people who had their own damage to deal with.

You can turn it down.

Start by noticing when you say something to yourself that you would never say to someone you love. And then try, just try, to talk to yourself like you'd talk to that little girl who was doing her best with what she had.

Because she was and still is.

There are plenty of people in this world who want to put you down. You don't need to help them.

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