These land best one a day — today’s work needs a day to actually happen. Nothing expires and you can’t fall behind; whenever you come back, it’ll be here.
Write to the child you were. Say the thing she never got to hear.
Somewhere there is a photograph of you at seven years old.
Look at her. If she walked into this room right now — tired, having done everything right, and still somehow certain it wasn’t enough — you would know exactly what to say to her. You’d have it instantly. You would kneel down and you would not hesitate for one second.
You have never once said it to yourself.
And this isn’t a metaphor: she is not a different person. She is you. Same one. She simply got older, and somewhere along the way people stopped speaking to her kindly — and then she learned to do it herself.
Here is the part that may land hard. The caretaking almost certainly started with her. You did not learn to come last in nursing school, or in your marriage. You learned it young, because it worked — it kept the peace, it earned you warmth, it kept you safe. She was doing the best she could with what she had. And she is still in there, still doing it, still waiting for someone to tell her she can stop.
So today, you write to her. And by some trick of the heart, it reaches both of you.
Find a photo of yourself as a child if you can, and actually look at her for a minute before you write a word. Not a glance. Look.
Call her by name. Whatever you were called back then — the nickname, the one nobody uses anymore. Start there: Dear…
Say the thing she needed to hear and never did. Not advice. Not a lecture. Not what she should have done differently. Just the thing.
Then read it back out loud — and notice who is actually listening.
Dear ____ …
Use the name she was actually called. It matters far more than you’d think.
You don’t have to do this part alone. I sit down with a few people at a time and we build the four weeks around them — where they actually are, not where a quiz guessed they were.
If that sounds like something you want, here’s my calendar. If not, I’ll see you tomorrow either way.
“You would never let a child carry what you carry. She is still in there, carrying it.”
— Kara