Kate Didd

Maybe this is too much to say out loud, or maybe it’s exactly enough. I keep writing because if I don’t, the questions circle me like unfinished conversations. What am I meant to learn from this life? What am I processing, and what am I mistaking for truth because it sounds familiar? Who am I becoming when I stop abandoning myself? I am tired of believing things that shrink me. I want the kind of truth that steadies the body, not the kind that demands suffering as proof.

I replay the last season of my life like a montage set to the wrong song. I was asking for understanding, for clarity, for a sense of self that didn’t feel borrowed. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t see how it spilled outward, how love spoken through wounds still cuts. I never intended to hurt anyone, yet now, with the noise gone, I can see the ripples clearly. That realization aches in a way only honesty can.

My children didn’t need a flawless mother. They needed one who stayed. One who could hold them the way I was never held. I was raised in the aftermath of chaos, where love came tangled with fear and silence was safer than truth. That kind of beginning doesn’t disappear, it teaches you how to survive before it teaches you how to live.

At some point, the hurt stacked too high and something inside me went quiet. Last year, the world began to feel unreal, like I was moving through scenes without direction. I felt shiftable, like a piece on a board I never agreed to play on. I chased belonging as if it were something external, forgetting it was meant to live inside me first.

Sometimes I wonder if I learned distance from my father, if I inherited the instinct to lock the door before anyone could knock. I fear what my children might see if I let them all the way in, yet I know this with certainty, no matter how broken I’ve been, I would never become what broke me. All I have ever wanted is reassurance that I am not wrong for existing, that I am not a cosmic afterthought.

This last year feels like a story where I faded out at the end. The memories don’t land. Touch dissolves. My body remembers what my mind refuses to name. When I try to speak it aloud, my voice disappears, because saying it means accepting that it happened again. And some days, the fear that follows is brutal, what if this is all I am ever reduced to?

But this is where the rom-com twist happens. This is where the woman stops chasing love that costs her peace and turns inward. We do not normalize our own erasure. We do not laugh off harm to survive it. We choose ourselves because there are children watching, because hope is something we demonstrate, not explain.

So we build magic where we can. We return to rituals. We hang lights, bake sweetness into the air, and create moments that whisper, the darkness doesn’t own this house. We let joy exist even while healing is unfinished. We prove to ourselves that light can coexist with scars.

I brush off the dust. I straighten my crown, slightly crooked, but earned. I remember the girl who survived things she shouldn’t have and is still choosing tenderness. I am not volunteering for victimhood. I am not waiting for someone to save me. I want a life I can stand inside with integrity, built by my hands, my work, my imagination.

This is me, falling in love with myself, not loudly, not perfectly, but deliberately.

I am here because I am worthy.

I am here because I choose joy, even while healing.

And for the first time, I’m not afraid of the scene where I stay.