the most important letter I never sent

The post you are about to read has haunted my mind for months, and I’ve delayed it way past its overdue date. The clock keeps ticking, faster and faster each day… but now time is up. And so, with great shame, sadness and regret, I give you “the most important letter I never sent”.

Dear F

I am probably the last person you want to hear from right now, and I know whatever I say won’t change a thing, but I need you to know why even if it took me a while to figure it out myself.

I know I have told you about the bullying I grew up with, but I have never let you know the extent of the damage it caused. What now can be labelled as “just kids being mean”, left me drowning in a pool of self-doubt for most of my life. I was never pretty enough, smart enough, athletic enough… I was never (or at least I felt I wasn’t) good enough. And that feeling of unworthiness followed me everywhere.

Until you came along and, suddenly, I was good enough, perhaps even pretty enough. And I could breathe again.

But that shadow of doubt was never too far behind. For a while, you kept me afloat; by the end, it was you pushing me down, back to the water you had pulled me out of.

When you left, I drowned again - I wasn’t good enough again.

And everybody else kept trying to convince me that I was good enough, that I am good enough, over and over again… but the damage was done. My confidence was lost once more and I was back to square one, unsure of my own self-worth.

I really thought that that attempt of reconnecting was helping; in a way it did. Just not in the way we both expected it. But if anything, it helped me realize I had left my mental health on the back burner and it wasn’t doing great. It also helped me finally understand that I cannot keep basing my own self-worth on what other people think of me. And finally, I knew that if I was ever going to give us another chance, I needed to be the best version of myself I could possibly be - for you and for myself- because we both deserve that. I wasn’t there then, I’m still not there yet.

I stayed silent because I was trying, and failing, to swim against the current, to stay afloat; trying to understand if I was strong enough to fight my own demons and still be who you deserved me to be. I failed at both, I failed you, and you paid the highest price.

I have come a really long way since that shameful day; I have taken risks I would otherwise never take; I have grown a little proud of my achievements (no matter how small they are) and sent them out into the world… and someone I don’t know and that doesn’t really know me, looked at them and decided I deserved a chance to prove my worth.

That is why time is up.

I’ll wake up on Monday in a different country, with a job I always said I’d never do yet, so far, I have actually enjoyed doing. I am going to start fresh, be happy, and learn a whole lot of new things… And if things go right, I am not coming back.

If our paths ever cross again, I hope I’ll get the chance to apologize for how I dealt with things. 

I hope Life treats you with kindness, and may you find happiness wherever you go.

Yours always,
Love,

A.

The Box

I found a box under my bed. And not just any box, I found "the" box; the one that holds all my bad poetry. Poems about my teenage years, about all the unrequited silly crushes, about heartbreaks and happier days.

I've cursed that box so many times I've stopped counting. After each heartbreak, after each "darker" period of time, I'd write about all my anguish, all the pain, all the failed dreams...about all the things that would never be. 

But the ones that struck the most are the ones I wrote to my now ex. I have copies of handwritten letters I sent and drafts of some that never reached their intended destination. And it surprised me what finding those papers made me miss wasn't the relationship on it self. 

No, finding and reading all those letters made me miss the feeling of wanting to write something specifically to someone. I haven't felt that way ever since.

I miss the feeling of caring so much about someone that you want that person to know just how strongly you feel, in writing, on actual paper. No ruched "i-love-you's" here and there, no half baked "i <3 u" on the phone.. No, I mean proper, well thougt letters with a beginning, middle and end that are aimed to that particular person. Those types of letters you draft and restart over and over because you feel like your feelings aren't coming through well enough.

My future now looks like a blank notebook waiting to be filled with whatever my next step might be. But I sure hope that writing more of those letters is hidden between the lines of the pages still waiting to be written.

Andie

Mixed Feelings

I've been having mixed feelings...about my own feelings. 

There is no easy way to explain it. I don't think even I myself fully understand what's going on with me. It's like everything inside keeps building up for...something, only to falter and crash, burning all in its way down. My brain can't seem to commit to an emotion for long enough to allow me to actually act upon it. As if I've run out of time in my "free trial" of the pro version, and now I'm stuck with the crappy free version that promises to be just as good but we all know is not.

I'm sabotaging myself and nobody wins.

Maybe this is it. I've run out of my quota of "big", everlasting feelings and maybe from now on I'm destined to only feel everything in a superficial way and slowly turn in to a middle-aged spinster with five dogs to keep me company (fingers crossed on the dog part, I WANT A DOG!).

Or maybe my past and my own personal demons helped creating this shell of a person that suddenly realised she's scared of pretty much anything that might be classified as too intense. But that at the same time has the biggest hopes and dreams in the world! That wants to do so much, see so much, learn even more... 

I feel empty and at the same time too full to the point I'm bursting at the seams. I'm a walking contradiction. I want to hold tight to the past and simultaneously forget it happened. I want to be able to trust myself, my life, my heart in the hands of someone worthy but everything in me screams NO! I want to hold it tight and don't let go so it doesn't hurt, so I don't get hurt, so no one can disappoint me but myself.

Because that I can deal with, I've had years of practice in the "letting myself down" department. There's a too long to count list of things I wish I had done, or done differently, locked in my head and everyday it grows bigger, darker, heavier.

I know exactly what I want to be feeling, but getting from point A to point B never felt so hard.

Andie

The small things

I've been m.i.a for a while, slightly dejected with the lack of inspiration to write about... anything really. No matter what I did, no words would come out in a "shape" I liked.

Something changed. But something else happened today. 

Something I have been waiting for for a while, but not consciously doing anything about.

It was a ordinary day, in a ordinary week. I was wearing my favourite jeans and a batman t-shirt, barefoot and with my hair up in a messy bun. Nothing special or overly though over, no effort whatsoever was put on the way I looked today... But I passed by a mirror and had to look again: for the first time is too long, I actually liked what was staring back at me from the other side. 

It wasn't "perfect", but it was me and for the first time I felt like being me was good enough. 

And let me tell you, that's a pretty good feeling.

Andie

Something Worth Being Proud Of

Everyone that has read a thing or two I (rarely never) post around here has realized I write about feelings (or complain about stuff, but that’s not relevant right now). And not just any feeling, usually I write about the really high points, and the really low ones. For the words to come to me, I’m either extremely happy/excited, or extremely sad/heartbroken/unsure about life. I’ve tried writing about all the in-between's, but it never turns out good enough. I’m incredibly mediocre in terms of writing about “meh” subjects. 

But this is different, in a way. Because all my “feelings levels” have never been this much “meh”, but I still feel the need to write something about it. On the other hand, I guess we can still file this under the “unsure about life” category.

I reached an academic milestone last week: I finished my MSc degree. I told exactly three people about the date of the presentation – my parents and one friend that just happened to ask randomly at that time. Anyone that found out about it after that was either through the parents, or through the general e-mail the university sends every student (because here, these kind of presentations are considered open to the public).

I’ve wondered why I didn’t told anyone. 

For one, it wasn’t a particularly interesting subject (no one came to watch it).

And two, I was kind of disappointed with the project itself. I mean, it had tons of potential in the beginning… But then there were delays, bureaucracy, sick days, needed material that took ages to arrive and countless empty promises to make it more “exciting” that turned out to be just that – empty. 

I’m still proud of it, kind of. It was sweat and tears, back pains and headaches, stubborn equipment and countless failed attempts until something worked out. But I did it. All on my own. I did it! 

The excitement lasted three hours, maybe four. By the time tea time rolled around I was back at feeling the same emptiness. What do I do with my life now? I spent the four days that followed in the same state of mind.

But then there was this old guy, lets call him Tom, in my anti-gravity class at the gym that realized I had missed the class the week previous to that and asked why. And I told him I had stayed at the lab practicing my thesis presentation. But that it was done now, I had passed it with flying colours. 

And Tom - who is practically a stranger that I see once or twice a week for forty five minutes on that anti-gravity class at the gym -, said he was proud of what I had accomplished. He knew nothing about the subject, or the project, or the countless ways it failed until it could be something.  But just knowing I had done it was, in his eyes, reason enough. And then we had a lovely conversation about life choices.

And that my people, is what you should take from this abnormally long and random post. Life happens, things go wrong, you fall and think you lost the will to get back up… But you can’t just sit still and let Life fly by your eyes. Be proud of your achievements! No matter how small they seem, either in the big picture or compared to what someone else did. If is something you worked your ass off for, it’s something worth being proud of. 

Andie.

Embrace the blur | Andie Maars

and if you have that anti-gravity class (i've been told is similar to aerial yoga) i mentioned in your gym and you never tried, i'd recommend you try it twice. go to one class, wait a week, then try again (don't ask why, trust me on this, you'll know). it's the best thing ever!