a journal entry on growing up, letting go, and meeting yourself in the middle
(āĀ“ā”`ā)
There’s a photo of me I keep coming back to. I’m younger in it ā softer in the face, lighter in the eyes, completely unaware of everything that’s about to change. I look at her sometimes and feel two things at once: a tenderness so deep it almost hurts, and a quiet relief that I am no longer her.
That’s the strange thing about growing up. You mourn the person you used to be even when you’re glad to have outgrown her.
The girl I was believed that being good meant being quiet. That taking up space was something you apologized for. She said yes when she meant no, smiled through things that deserved tears, and called it being strong. She measured her worth in how much she could give without breaking ā and she broke anyway, quietly, in ways nobody noticed because she was so good at holding herself together on the outside.
She loved too openly and trusted too easily and got hurt the way you only get hurt when you hand someone your whole heart without asking if they’ll be careful with it.
She was trying her best. I know that now. But her best was built on a version of herself that the world shaped ā not one she chose.
I moved far from home at an age when most people are still figuring out what they want for breakfast. Nepal to Canada ā two worlds so different they don’t even share the same sky at the same time. I came here carrying everything I knew: my language, my habits, my way of loving people, my idea of who I was supposed to be.
And slowly, quietly, all of it started to shift.š¤
Not all at once. Growing doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in small, almost invisible moments ā the first time you say no and don’t apologize for it. The first time you sit alone and feel okay instead of empty. The first time you choose yourself and it doesn’t feel selfish. It feels like coming home.
The girl I’m becoming is still a work in progress. I want to be honest about that. She’s not healed. She’s not fearless. She still overthinks at 3AM and misses people she probably shouldn’t and cries in the shower more than she’d like to admit.
But she’s different in the ways that matter.š«
She’s learning to take up space without guilt. She’s learning that her softness is not a weakness ā that feeling things deeply is a kind of strength the world doesn’t talk about enough. She’s learning to sit with uncertainty instead of running from it, to let things be unresolved without it breaking her.
She’s learning that she doesn’t have to earn her place in any room, any relationship, any version of her own life.
She’s still learning. But she’s learning.šļø
I think the hardest part of becoming someone new is grieving the person you’re leaving behind. Because even when that old version of you held you back, she was still you. She carried you through things that should have broken you. She got you here.
So I’m not trying to erase her. I’m just trying to build on her ā to take what she taught me and grow something softer, stronger, more intentional from it.
The girl I was survived. The girl I’m becoming is learning to live.
And maybe that’s enough for right now. Maybe becoming isn’t a destination ā maybe it’s just this: waking up every day and choosing, slowly, gently, to be a little more yourself than you were yesterday.
If you’re somewhere in the middle too ā not who you were, not yet who you’re going to be ā I just want you to know that the in-between is not a waiting room. It’s part of the journey.
You’re not behind. You’re becoming. š¤
if this resonated, share it with a girl who needs to hear it. and come back soon ā there’s always more to say.