To Be Honest

by Nelle Starling

love yourself when things are hard, when you make mistakes, when you give up before trying, when you don’t workout for the second day in a row, when you lay in bed all day, when all you feel is sadness, when a promise is hard to keep, when you don’t know what to say, when you say too much, when you fail, when you don’t want to. love yourself even when you don’t feel like it

every version of yourself deserves forgiveness.

the thing about change is that it can rip you open one second and set you free the next. trust the process and remember that there is a reason you left something behind. your future needs you more than your past does

the beautiful thing is that the birds keep singing even when the seasons change.

but who will i call when something good happens? happiness isn't the same without you here

something to remember: one day you will have everything you prayed for.

to the girl i used to be... we made it to the other side of healing. we smile again and it's honest. we let go and it didn’t break us. we laugh until we cry (and it doesn't hurt). we like who we’re becoming. we learned how to love ourself again. we found something worth waking up for. we stayed.

i hope you know that... it's impossible to carry everything at once. set things down if it gets too heavy. it's okay if you need to take a break from being the listener and the healer. you can have empathy and boundaries at the same time. your feelings are not wrong. you are the writer of your story and you don't have to read it out loud if you don't want to. your happiness is sacred. don't give yourself away to people who don't know how to care for you.