🕊️ A Healing Letter to My Parents

— for the ones who couldn’t give me what I needed, and still shaped who I am.

There are days I want to forget.

Not because the pain was too loud — but because the silence that followed was louder.

And yet, here I am.

Writing through the ache.

Making peace with the fragments.

Realising that some of the deepest healing I’ve had to do… was from people who claimed to love me — or should have, at the very least.

To my mother — the firestorm I was told to respect

You loved me the way you knew how.

In survival tones.

In raised voices.

In expectations I never got to question.

You carried everything on your back — and I watched you burn for it.

I get it now.

You didn’t have the support.

You weren’t allowed to be soft and strong.

You were pushed to the edge again and again, and when you screamed — no one asked why, they just told you to lower your voice.

So you passed that unspoken rule down to me, didn’t you?

Be strong — but not too strong.

Be helpful — but don’t have needs.

Be quiet — unless you’re praising me.

But I was never meant to be an extension of your wound.

I came with my own compass.

And I wasn’t born to perform peace — I was born to embody it.

Even when you couldn’t see it, I was teaching you another way.

Not through rebellion, but through refusal.

Refusal to mirror your reactivity.

Refusal to play the good girl just to keep the roof from caving in.

Refusal to lose myself in the name of family.

And that refusal?

It was my love letter to you, even if it didn’t sound like one.

And through it all — I want you to know this:

My love for you has always been unconditional.

Even in my boundaries. Even in my silence. Even in the space I had to take to breathe.

To the other co-creator of me — the absence that never needed explaining

Let’s be real.

You didn’t raise me.

You didn’t hold me.

You didn’t even try.

And because of that, I never waited.

Never sat around aching.

Never wondered why you weren’t there.

I couldn’t miss what I never had — and that’s the part people don’t always get.

Your absence wasn’t some gaping hole in my life. It was just… a fact.

A box left unchecked.

A name I knew of, but never spoke with any emotional charge.

You existed — and that’s about it.

You didn’t fail me because I never gave you the chance to.

You made your decision before I could even form a memory of you, and I’ve honoured that decision more than you ever honoured your role.

This isn’t anger. It’s not even grief.

It’s not a wall, it’s not a wound — it’s just reality.

I feel nothing when I think of you. No love, no hate. Just indifference.

And no — that’s not a trauma response. It’s a soul knowing. It’s peace.

To both of you:

You taught me everything I didn’t want to repeat.

And somehow, that became the foundation for my healing.

I watched the dysfunction dance in different forms —

loud in one home, nonexistent in the other.

One parent burned hot, the other evaporated.

But both left a mark.

And still, I learned.

I learned how to observe instead of absorb.

I learned how to feel deeply without drowning.

I learned how to hold space for truth without making it pretty.

I learned that I can love you, Mum… and still walk a path that doesn’t look like yours.

I learned that I don’t owe him anything — not a conversation, not a fantasy, not a redemption arc.

One parent I carry in my heart, always.

The other? I left behind a long time ago — and not in bitterness, but in neutrality.

Because my peace doesn’t need a villain or a sob story.

It just needed space to exist without permission.

And now it has that.

If you’re reading this and you’ve felt the same…

Maybe you were the one in the family who felt too much, too early.

Who saw what others refused to name.

Who learned how to shrink, not because you were small, but because the space you needed made others uncomfortable.

Let me remind you:

You can be the one who ends the cycle — without becoming hard in the process.

You don’t have to mirror the dysfunction.

You don’t have to earn love through silence.

You don’t have to carry what they dropped.

So I’ll ask you this:

What part of your parents’ pain have you been performing as your personality?

And are you ready to put it down — not to hurt them, but to honour you?

🕊️

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Was this letter something you needed to hear today?

Leave a comment below or share it with someone who’s still untangling their own roots.

You can love where you come from — and still choose to grow somewhere else.

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Let’s heal forward — not just backward.