self worth
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One of life’s unavoidable truths is that people move on. What hurts most isn’t that someone hates us, forgets to call, or even chooses another path, it is the realization that their story continued without us. They turned the page, and suddenly we are left wondering whether we mattered at all. The terrifying possibility the…
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Everyone knows of you, but they do not truly know you. Perhaps because you never gave them the chance. And that is not necessarily a failure. Sometimes hiding parts of yourself was the safest thing you could do. Perhaps it was easier to become the quiet one, the strong one, the agreeable one. The version…
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We spend so much of our lives being haunted. By people who left. By versions of them that no longer exist. By the quiet question of what did I do to make them go? We replay their words and our favorite moments over and over, flipping through a stored memory book we know we shouldn’t…
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“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy One of my favorite lines in literature, but we are often more alike in our unhappiness than we realize. Each family’s pain manifests differently, in varying intensity, yet these truths exist in nearly every household. The saddest part…
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One moment you believe your garden is flourishing, then a gardener walks away, and you are left with silence and an emptiness you never thought possible, but here’s what is extraordinary about abandoned gardens. They grow what they want. It doesn’t matter that this red rose appeared in the middle of a daisy patch or…
Black Ink and Parchment 