A Letter to My Younger Self

Sometimes healing means looking forward. Other times, it means looking back. Writing a letter to my younger self has always felt like an exercise in both grief and grace. Grieving the pain I went through, but also giving myself the compassion I didn’t always have back then.

I wanted to write to the version of me who was 5 years old, twenty years ago, before anything really happened. Before addiction, before hospitals, before the storms of mental illness and trauma. This is the part of me who didn’t yet know what was coming, who didn’t have the words to describe what it feels like to fight for your life. I want them to know that even through it all, they found a way forward.

Dear Sam,

You are so young and the world feels both impossibly big and too small for you all at once. You don’t know it yet, but you will spend a lot of years trying to figure out where you fit, stretching yourself into shapes that aren’t yours, carrying storms inside your body before you even have the words for them.

I wish I could sit beside you now, on the floor with your crayons and your wild imagination, and tell you this: You are going to go through more than any child should have to. There will be nights when you feel like you’re fighting to stay alive, times when the weight of the world feels heavier than your little shoulders can possibly hold. You will lose people. You will lose yourself for a while. You’ll make choices you regret. You’ll be hurt in ways that feel impossible to name.

But you will not stay lost forever.

There is a strength in you already, even if you don’t know it yet. The same strength that will one day let you say, “I choose life.” That strength will carry you out of the darkest places, and you will begin again. You’ll build a business, a home, and a life that feels like yours, not the version anyone else tried to build for you.

There will be days when your brain feels like fire, when you are too much for the world, when you are convinced you can’t do anything right. But there will also be days of laughter, love, and creativity so bright it spills out of you like sunlight. You’ll discover storytelling, and it will become your lifeline. Writing will save you more times than you can count. It will turn your chaos into something beautiful.

You will learn that balance isn’t about perfection. You’ll stumble, fall, and rise again. You’ll learn to hold the extremes of who you are with compassion. You’ll learn that your gender, your body, your identity are not boxes to squeeze into but a compass pointing you back to yourself.

You will meet people who love you for the real you. You will become someone who not only survives but thrives, someone who turns pain into art, fear into connection, struggle into community.

Sam, I want you to know that every part of you is worthy. The loud, the quiet, the messy, the brilliant, the broken… it’s all worthy. You don’t need to become someone else to earn love. You don’t need to erase yourself to belong.

The road won’t be easy, but it will be yours. And one day, you’ll look back and realise you made it. You’re still here, still creating, still choosing to move forward. That, my love, is everything.

With all the tenderness in the world,

~Sam🌿