be the person you needed growing up

i know what it is to grow up in a house that was full of people and still feel completely alone in it. i know what it is to learn, very early, that your feelings were an inconvenience. that the adults around you were too busy surviving their own pain to see yours. that you had to figure things out by yourself, not because you were capable, but because there was no one coming. and so you became capable. you had to. you had no other option.

maybe you know what it is to stand at a door and look through the crack of it and watch something happen that a child should never have to watch. and maybe that is why when you grew up you know what it is to walk back to your sibling after, your little sibling who is scared and looking at you because you are the older one and that somehow means you are supposed to have an answer, and you do not have an answer, you are just as scared, but you pull them close anyway and hold them tighter than you have ever held anything.

that does something to a person. it does something that takes years to even name. you grow up thinking love is something you have to earn. that care is something that comes with conditions. that asking for help is weakness because help never came when you asked for it so eventually you stopped asking. you become so good at it that people look at you and say you are so strong and they mean it as a compliment and you smile because you do not know how to tell them that the strength was never a choice. that you would have given anything to have been allowed to be soft.

and then you get older and you carry all of that with you into the world. and the world is full of people carrying their own versions of the same thing, the same door crack, the same held breath, the same childhood spent being more of a parent than a child, the same hunger for someone to just see them without them having to perform or earn or explain. and you recognise them. of course you do. you know that look. you have worn it your whole life.

and i think that is why i am the way i am now. i cannot walk past someone without wanting to know how they really are. not how are you fine thanks, but how are you. what are you carrying. when was the last time someone made you feel like you mattered just by existing. i know how it feels to go day after day without a single moment of genuine warmth. i know how it feels to be made to feel small, to feel like the problem, to feel like the love in you is somehow wrong or too much or something to be mocked. i know. i carry that knowing everywhere i go.

so i hold the door. i take my airpods out and i actually look at the person talking to me. i remember birthdays, i play peekaboo with the baby behind me in the grocery line, i pour someone else’s water before i pour my own. if i admire you i will tell you. while you are here and while it is true and while you can still feel it land. people do not get their flowers while they can still smell them and i have wished too many times that i had said it sooner. so i say it now.

i know people misread it sometimes. i know kindness without an agenda confuses people who have only ever known conditional love. and it used to make me want to close up. to be less. but then i think about the child who just needed one person to come and sit with him and tell him it was not his fault and that he was loved, fully, without having to earn it. i think about him. and i stay open. because he is the reason i do any of this.

be the person your younger self needed. that is the whole project of becoming. hold the door. remember the birthday. tell them you love their laugh. pour their water first. look people in the eye and mean it when you ask how they are. everything will be fine, as long as you are a decent person.

it costs you almost nothing. and to someone who has been standing in the cold for a very long time, it is everything.

be the person you needed growing up. for yourself. and for others. the world needs it now more than ever.