Dear Future Me: This Is Where It All Begins

What I Learned About Strength, Self-Trust, and Starting Over.

Begin with What Broke

The year everything changed didn’t start with a clear line in the sand. It started in pieces. Fragments. Things slipping out of place, one after another. A quiet kind of unraveling that settled in slowly—tired mornings, hollow afternoons, and a heaviness that didn’t crash in, but wore me down little by little.

Early in the year, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. Thankfully, it wasn’t the worst kind. But it still changed everything. She needed surgery and treatment, and I spent most of my time on video calls with her doctors, families and friends, trying to make decisions from a distance, trying to find someone who could care for her when I couldn’t be there myself. It felt like I was stretched between two places at once: where I physically was, and where I knew I should have been.

I didn’t fall apart right then. That might’ve been easier. I just started to quietly come undone. The kind of unraveling that looks like functioning on the outside while something inside slowly dims. And at some point, I realized I was standing at the edge of something I didn’t want to name—because naming it would make it real.

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