The Little Girl I’m Still Learning to Hold

The part of me I’m still learning to care for.

Why has letting go been so difficult for me in the first place?

I am beginning to understand why surrendering myself has felt so frightening—and why I learned to confuse love with self-abandonment.

There is a quote I used to love and refer to when I was healing my inner child and it read:

“It’s like a mother, when the baby is crying, she picks up the baby and she holds the baby tenderly in her arms. Your pain, your anxiety, is your baby. You have to take care of it. You have to go back to yourself, to recognize the suffering in you, embrace the suffering, and you get a relief.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh

For me, healing meant going back to the first, deepest wound of my childhood: the abuse I experienced as a child.

For years, I carried the secret of what had happened and suffered quietly. I did not always have the words for what was happening inside of me or the understanding of what was happening, but I knew there was a heaviness I could not escape.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to believe that love meant giving whatever was asked of me and caring for someone else’s needs, even when it hurt me. I learned to make myself smaller, to stay quiet, and to carry pain that never should have belonged to me.

When I finally said, “Enough. I can’t live with this anymore,” I was already swallowed by the pain. It had reached every part of me. Standing up to it was terrifying, but it was also the beginning of my freedom.

I chose that I would no longer accept it, no longer let what had happened control my life, and no longer carry the blame for someone else’s choices, behaviors, and actions.

But liberation came with a cost.

When I spoke up, I had to face denial and the way my pain was turned back onto me. That part was its own kind of wound. I was blamed for what had happened to me—the child who had been hurt—while being told that I was trying to cause harm, break apart a family, or create something that wasn't there.

There were lies I was expected to carry alongside the original secret, and a version of the story was created that protected someone else from having to face the truth.

Writing this now, I can still feel how heavy that was to carry.

But I can also feel the part of me that survived it—the part that finally chose to tell the truth, even when no one else wanted to hear it.

I learned very early that loving someone meant abandoning myself.

And perhaps one of the deepest forms of healing has been realizing that love was never supposed to require that of me.

I thought that telling the truth would be the end of that story. In many ways, it was the beginning of my freedom. But I am realizing that surviving something and fully understanding how it shaped you are not always the same thing.

I learned how to protect myself from the person who hurt me. I learned boundaries. I learned to speak up. I learned that his choices were not my responsibility.

But somewhere deeper, there was still a part of me that believed keeping someone else comfortable was safer than honoring myself.

Maybe that is the part of me I am still learning to care for.

The little girl who learned to stay quiet and carry someone else's pain is now the woman learning to pick herself up, hold herself tenderly, and say: you don't have to do that anymore.

Maybe healing isn't only about learning to protect myself from the people who hurt me. Maybe it is also about learning to recognize the moments when I am tempted to abandon myself to keep someone else comfortable.

Maybe that is the part of me I am still learning to care for.

The little girl who learned to stay quiet and carry someone else's pain is now the woman learning to pick herself up, hold herself tenderly, and say: you don't have to do that anymore.