Letting Down My Younger Self

“You know what? I quit,” she says, barely above a whisper, her voice cracking like glass under strain. Her gaze doesn’t lift, locked, unwavering, on the amber bottle trembling in her hand. The pills inside rattle like tiny bones, like lost souls impatient for her to join them.

“Just in case,” She thinks as she glances sideways at the trio of other bottles lined up on her nightstand, arranged with surgical precision, just in case the first ones don’t finish the job. She’s thorough. If she’s going to vanish, she wants it clean. Certain. She doesn’t want to wind up a vegetable or paralyzed instead of the intended purpose.

This isn’t her first time dancing at the edge. She’s spent years toeing the line between wanting to live and wishing she’d never been born. She always wishes she were someone else. What always pulls her back is her responsibility to her cats. There’s also the fleeting hope, or the fear of failing, and waking up half-alive, trapped inside a husk that can't scream. But tonight, those anchors feel frayed.

What brought her here is older than this moment, persistent trauma, worn and weathered, etched into the marrow of her bones like a poem she never meant to learn by heart. A self-hatred so vast and ancient it feels mythological but familiar, like she was born cursed. She’s always carried it, but lately, it’s devoured everything and stolen her ability to live. She can’t look in a mirror without wanting to rip her face off like a mask. Her fingers itch to punish the body that has become her enemy.

The lines in her forehead are like trenches, carved deep like claw marks from something that lives inside her. No amount of makeup can conceal them. Her face, too round, betrays her, soft where she’s tried so hard to be sharp, so round she looks chubby even though she exercises enough to ensure that doesn’t happen. She sees her hair as limp and defeated. Thin and fine. She sees eyes, once a shade of green kissed by spring, now dulled into a muddy brown in every photo, like even light refuses to reflect within her. She sees her father’s face in hers. Her brother’s too. She sees masculine features she can’t scrub away. It’s as though her identity was stolen before she ever got to claim it.

She knows others find her attractive. She doesn’t know why and doesn’t believe compliments when they are paid to her. She wants to shrink within herself when any attention is called to her. She has been used for her body all her life. That’s all men have wanted from her. She’s the fun girl, but not the type you marry. The girl for now, but never the one you stay for. Never the one you choose. Just around until you get bored. All her life, she’s always been left. Left for someone else. Someone better always chosen over her. She’s used to abandonment, but the most recent has left her so scarred she can’t heal. This tissue is built up it’s blocking the flow of blood that can heal her soul.

The last man broke something in her that hasn’t healed. Four years gone, and the wound still pulses deep within the core of her being. It was the final straw that stole whatever was left of her confidence, and she can’t seem to find her way back to herself. In those early days, he would text her from sunrise to midnight, pulling her into his orbit with the gravity of a dying star. Of course, she got swept in. How do you resist someone who looks at you with the flame of desire?

He held her like a lover, touched her like she mattered. He looked at her the way a Disney prince becomes lost in the eyes of his princess. He would spend his time with her during quiet nights. Hold her hand. Kiss her forehead. She tried to protect herself. But he knew the right things to say to pull her back in. He would beg her to stay over. When prodded as to why, he’d say, “Because I enjoy spending time with you.” She would get sucked in over and over again. But it was all just a lie. He spoke claims of only seeing her as a friend. But she couldn’t hear his truth through his misaligned actions. Always the recurrent murmurs of, “I just see you as a friend.” That brutal refrain, recycled like trash from the mouths of too many men.

He can’t even treat her like the “just a friend” he keeps telling her that she is. He doesn’t ask her to hang out unless it’s when he wants something sexual. He is embarrassed to be seen out in public with her. He doesn’t take an interest in her life. Doesn’t ask questions to get to know her. He doesn’t need to get to know her anymore. He only did that to earn her trust and get what he wanted. He preyed upon her vulnerabilities. And she was the foolish sucker that walked so blindly into his trap. So desperate for validation and love, she never stopped to question and look at the bigger picture.

She was confused by his actions and words, but she tried to stay friends, because she thought friendship was still something. But it wasn’t. Not with him. Being near him is like deliberately swallowing poison by the spoonful. Slow. Torturous. And she keeps doing it, because he’s blurred the lines so beautifully, so carelessly. Words said no, but his hands, his eyes, his presence, everything else, whispered yes. Until he vanished into the arms of someone newer. Someone much younger. Someone better. More worthy of his love and affection.

She doesn’t even know this new girl, and yet can’t stop comparing herself. But she doesn’t have to know her. She’s a mirror to every other woman her exes have chosen instead. And every one of them feels like another tally mark on the chalkboard of her inadequacy. It feels impossible to see anything good about herself. All she can see is what is wrong. How she was never good enough by his standards. This man’s criticisms of her echo in the chamber of her mind. Like a Rolodex of insults waiting to be used on herself during her lowest points.

People say, “Just love yourself”. She hates when people say that. As if that’s a light switch. As if you can rewrite years of invisibility with a mantra. She wants to scream when they say that. What do they know of living life like a ghost, like someone who haunts her own story?

“See your worth outside of these men!” Easy for them to say when they know what love is. She has never known unconditional love. Not from romantic interests. Not from family. The message has always been clear: you are too much, and never enough, all at once. Unwanted, unlovable, and flawed are the words tattooed in invisible ink across her being.

Now she sits on the edge of her bed, her knees drawn to her chest like a child bracing for punishment. The bottle trembles in her hand, the pills whispering promises of silence. She counts them out like prayers, even though she doesn’t believe in anything anymore. A lingering question posed upon her dry, cracked lips, “How many will it take to fade away into the darkness?” She wishes she could wake up and just be someone else. But that’s not how life works. And who’s to say this new skin bag would be any better? She might come back someone worse.

She’s a runner. She’s thought about running out in traffic at night. It could easily look like an accident. In winter, she envisioned exposing herself to the frigid temps of the pond outside her apartment with the hopes that hypothermia would overtake her. But she doesn’t want to leave a mess. She’s considerate, even in death.

She’s not stalling because she’s second-guessing. There’s no light she’s clinging to. She’s stalling because of the cats. Her little familiars. The only souls who treat her like she matters. The only beings that actually see her. They curl into her side like puzzle pieces, purring with a trust that she doesn’t think she deserves. Their love is wordless, but loud. It tethers her to the now. She’s tried putting this off until they pass, but cats live a really freaking long time! Maybe they’ll eat her body like urban folklore predicts.

She looks down at the obsidian fluff curled beside her, purring like a heartbeat outside her own. Her hand lingers above its warm fur, trembling. The obtuse orange stares at her, purring with the vibration of a lion's roar, like he knows something bad is about to happen. Like he’s hoping the purrs can soothe and eliminate the emotional pain and scarring.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and her voice is so raw it could bleed.

She raises the water glass to her lips. Tilts her head back. And in that brief, suspended moment, when the world narrows to the sound of her breath and the pulse in her ears, something flickers in her vision. Maybe a trick of the eye. Or maybe not. A soft blur, like heat rising off asphalt. Her fingers go slack, and the pills spill onto the comforter like scattered teeth from a broken mouth. Her breath catches. Her vision pulses. Not darkness. Not light.

Something ancient and familiar is staring back at her.

There, across the room, sitting on the edge of her dresser like a ghost returned home, is a girl no older than six. Barefoot, knees pulled to her chest, she wears a Disney princess night gown with sleeves that drape over her tiny fists. Her hair is wild, the kind of tangled beauty only children can pull off. It’s as red and vibrant as a wildfire, untamed and burning with the memory of every unspoken word. Her green eyes shimmer with the kind of sadness that ages a soul far too soon.

She’s glowing. Not with light, but with memory. She remembers this girl. Her gapped-toothed smile stretched wide with wonder and her sweet, infectious laughter. She was joy in its purest form, unbruised by disappointment even though it was all around her. She’s untouched by shame, not yet hardened by life.

“We were never supposed to end like this,” the little girl says. Her voice is small, but the content beyond her youth. She words reverberate with the weight of every silenced scream she swallowed in childhood. “You promised me we’d make it out. We had dreams beyond our limitless imagination.”

The woman on the bed can’t speak. She’s paralyzed by disbelief. Her lips part, but the words are stone lodged in her throat. She’s trembling now, because what do you say when the child version of yourself comes back to witness your final act?

Before she can gather a response, the air thickens again. The shadows behind the bedroom door stretch and soften, giving way to a second figure. This one strides in like thunder before the storm, calling attention to her presence.

She's seventeen, maybe nineteen. Lean and sun-kissed from cross-country meets and teenage rebellion. Her eyeliner is sharp. Athough her make-up is still minimal like her present self, her smirk is dangerous. She wears a skin-tight flannel, the button pulling at her ample and perky breasts, fitted jeans, and combat boots, her hair in thick, knotted braids cascading down her back. She looks like she just walked out of a Polaroid from a better time. Confidence rolls off her like perfume: heavy, intoxicating, undeniable.

“Jesus,” the older self mutters. “You’ve really forgotten us, huh? Forgotten yourself.”

There’s no cruelty in her voice, just grief twisted with a sharp edge of disdain. A tired kind of anger. Like watching a piece of creative writing that lingers in a weathered journal in an attic, neglected and gathering dust. Her lip curls slightly, not in hatred, but in disbelief. There’s a fire flickering in her chest, one that aches not just to be remembered, but to burn bright again, to matter. To remind this ghost of a girl that she was once a force, not a shadow.

“You used to be such a fucking force,” she continues, crossing the room with deliberate steps. “Not because everything was perfect, but because you fought. Because you survived things that should’ve leveled you. And you danced in the wreckage. You built from it. You used to not take shit from anyone. You stood up for yourself and didn’t let anyone walk all over you. You didn’t care what anyone thought. Where did that girl go?” She spits the words like venom, sharp, bitter, and burning with betrayal. As if saying them aloud might exorcise the shame of the woman sitting before her.

The older woman swallows, eyes burning now. “But I’m tired,” she whispers. “I’m so tired of trying and still being wrong. I don’t even know who I am anymore. What’s there to even like about me?”

“You’re us,” the child says simply, slipping off the dresser and walking forward with slow, solemn steps, like a child coming to tell their parents they threw up, sad but fearing reprimand. “You’re the girl who used to make up stories in her room with her Barbies and Beanie Babies, even when your mom had forgotten you were there because she was wrapped in her own narcissism. The one who would draw for hours to disappear into made-up worlds of color and creation. The one who wanted to write stories and work with animals. You protected me. You carried me.”

She flinches. The words cut deep, not because they’re foreign, but because they are hers. Every syllable echoes with a forgotten truth, pulled from some hidden cellar inside her. She knows them. She’s said them, screamed them, written them in journals she later buried in shame.

But it’s the voice that unsettles her. The child, her inner child, stands there with Kool-Aid-stained cheeks and eyes too wise for someone so young. The words fall from her lips with the weight of someone who's lived a thousand lives. There’s no stutter, no tremble, just a calm, devastating certainty.

The maturity in her tone is unnatural, almost sacred. Like a child that’s seen too much, too soon. It knocks the breath out of her, as if her younger self had walked straight into her ribcage and pounded on the hollow inside. “Remember me,” the air whispers.

“You still do,” the teen adds assuredly. Her voice is softer now, breaking through her protective armor. “And somewhere deep down, I know you still want to live. You just don’t want to live like this. You don’t want to live for anyone else anymore. Perfection doesn’t exist and it even it did, it wouldn’t keep anyone from leaving you.”

The woman chokes on a sob. Her whole body folds inward like paper drenched in rain. Shame ripples through her like nausea. She wants to vomit the fullness of this self-hatred.

“I don’t know how to fix it,” she gasps. “I don’t know how to stop hating myself. Everything hurts. I feel like a shadow of a person, like I’m haunting my own life. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

The child and the young woman move closer now. One takes her left hand, the other her right.

“You know who you are. You’re us. All your past, present, and future selves. You don’t have to fix it all tonight,” the teen says. “You just have to choose not to disappear.”

“And to let us help you remember,” the child says. “Who you are. Who you were before the world told you you were too much, or not enough, or unworthy.”

“You were always enough,” they say in unison.

“But there will always be people telling you different. You can’t be everything to everyone without losing yourself.” The teen folds her arms, her voice steady but sharp, like she's learned this lesson the hard way. “And you did. Piece by piece, you gave yourself away until there was nothing left but the version of you they could use. That’s not living. That’s erasing.”

The room is silent. No ambient noise to ruin this moment. Just the steady purr of the cat beside her, rising and falling like a metronome for safety and comfort.

She looks down at her hands, one still trembling, the other finally steady in their grip.

“I don’t know how to start over,” she murmurs.

“You don’t have to,” the teenager answers. “Just start. With breath. With forward movement. With one fucking day.”

The child nods, a little smile blooming on her lips. “And tomorrow, we can draw. Or write. Or just be.”

“And please, for the love of God and yourself, delete that man’s fucking number.” The teen says jokingly, but stern. “He’s not your friend and never has been. He’s got some new bitch, and that’s ok. It doesn’t make you less than. He wasn’t right for you, and you weren’t right for him. Let go and move forward.”

The woman nods slowly. A fractured, reluctant nod. The kind that says not yet, but maybe… someday soon.

The little girl and the bold teen fade into the shadows, not gone, just waiting. Watching. Although she can still feel their warmth, cuddled beside her, and the cats. Guardians of the spark that refused, even in the bleakest night, to go out. Wise sages to a much older woman who had forgotten her fire and lost her wisdom, dimmed by years of quiet heartbreak and shrinking into silence.

She reaches across the bed, brushing the scattered pills into the drawer like crumbs from a past life. The water goes untouched. She curls around her cat, body aching, soul hollow, but still, here.