A Love Letter To My Past Self

She knows conventional wisdom suggests not looking back, but her past contains stories of such heart-aching beauty and transformative grace that sometimes she can’t resist the desire to turn around for a moment and just soak it all in.

I am often fascinated with the me that I once was, years ago.

I seek her out in photos. I search for proof of her in old writings. I find her in snippets of the life I captured and shared, my journal of words and images and snippets of memories that remain.

Often, when I look for the ghosts of my past self, it is the self of 2013 I return to. She is pivotal to the self I would become — though she didn’t know it yet.

That girl, she had been shattered, had gone to the ground with loss after loss in the two years prior. Had left so much behind on the path to wholeness. And she had also been loved and seen and known in ways she could have never believed had she not lived them, loved in a way that made all things possible, then and forever. She found hope again for everything she had put to rest and then lost it, hard and harsh…