looking back

The pages feel unfamiliar under my fingertips. The handwriting is mine, but the person behind the words? A stranger. A shadow. I didn’t realize how long I had avoided looking back. I made a conscious decision to move forward, despite the fear, despite the pain. There was no time for reflection, only survival. One foot in front of the other, keep moving, don’t look back. And in that dedicated avoidance, I stopped writing. I stopped posting on here. It’s been 3 years since I last put my thoughts into words.

There’s something about writing things down that forces you to reckon with the truth. To confront what has changed and what hasn’t. The people you once loved. The things you once believed. The pain that once defined you. As time passed, I told myself I had healed. I had evolved. But now, reading old journals, I find myself wondering: How much is still there, lurking beneath the surface? How much of my past did I actually leave behind?

Reading my old words feels like standing between two versions of myself: The girl who felt everything too deeply, who ached for something greater than herself, who mistook chaos for passion and silence for security. The girl who thought love had to consume her to be real. And the woman who has learned, sometimes forcefully, how to keep herself in check.

There was a time when I lived with wild abandon, when I expressed myself without hesitation or self-doubt. There was a time when I believed in the power of longing, in the beauty of intensity. But that girl not only burned herself out, she faced consequences that nearly killed her. That shit scared me.

Writing, real writing, requires something I haven’t been willing to do. It requires reconciliation. Not just with old words, but with old versions of myself. And part of me has resisted that, because I don’t know how to merge then and now. There’s a reason I stopped writing the way I used to. Some of it was time, exhaustion, survival. But some of it was fear. Fear that I wouldn’t be able to tap into that version of myself anymore. Or worse, that I still could. That I would find her waiting for me, unchanged, unrelenting. Still holding onto the ache, the longing, the hunger for a love that burned too hot to hold. Still wanting what I have spent the last few years learning to live without.

And yet, I feel the pull again.

Writing has always been the one thing I can’t fully turn my back on. No matter how long I go without it, no matter how much I try to convince myself it’s a worthless pursuit, a waste of time, I always find my way back. But coming back also means reckoning with feelings I’ve tried to leave behind. It means asking the hard questions:
Am I still haunted by ghosts, or am I the one keeping them alive? Am I really at peace, or have I just learned how to live with the weight of unresolved things? Have I truly let go, or have I just stopped looking back?

Writing again means acknowledging the space between who I was and who I am. And maybe the scariest part isn’t letting go. Maybe it’s realizing that I’ve already let go. But somehow, I still don’t know where I stand.

Maybe this is what reconciliation really looks like. An uneasy truce between then and now.