Dear younger me[edit]
You were always so eager to be useful, weren’t you? To pour yourself out like water until the cup was empty. I see you now, hunched over the kitchen table at 3 a.m., nursing a cup of tea that’s gone cold, whispering, “Just one more thing,” while your bones ached with a weariness you called “weakness.”
I wonder sometimes if you ever let yourself notice the quiet hum of the house when the world was asleep. The way the steam curled from your teacup, the way the streetlight painted gold on the floorboards. You thought kindness meant doing—for the sick, the lonely, the children who needed a hand. But you forgot to be kind to the tired woman holding the cup.
You made a mistake, my dear: you believed rest was stealing time from the world. You’d say, “I’m tired,” as if it were a sin. You’d push through the fog of exhaustion, thinking your body was a machine that could run forever. But the machine breaks. And when it did—when you collapsed after the hospital shift, tears hot on your cheeks—you learned the hardest truth: kindness to yourself is not selfish. It is sacred.
What if you’d let yourself sit with the tiredness? Not as a failure, but as a holy thing? What if you’d whispered to yourself, “You are loved, even when you can’t move?” There’s a kind of grace in that—when you finally stop fighting the weight of your own bones and let the quiet hold you.
You didn’t know then that the world needs your rest as much as it needs your hands. That your stillness is a prayer, too. You didn’t know that the kettle singing on the stove at dawn, the way the light fell on your wrinkled hands, was where God lived—not in the grand gestures, but in the small, tender moments you rushed past.
So I’m telling you now, with the softness of a morning breeze: Be gentle with your tired self. Let the tea cool. Sit. Breathe. The world will not end if you pause. In fact, it will be more beautiful for your presence there, not your absence.
You were never meant to carry the weight alone.
— Gertrude Carroll, still wondering