Sometimes pain sneaks up wearing the wrong face.
This morning, I woke up with grief sitting on my chest like a stone, tears flooded my eyes obscuring my vision. My body doubled over around my arms clutching at my ribs in an attempt to protect my shattered heart. Trying to hold in the broken pieces in a vain act of self-protection. It was sharp and personal and soaked in fear — the kind of fear that whispers, he’s gone, he doesn’t care, you were never enough. And I felt it rise so hard in me that my breathing stopped, choked by the weight of sadness stuck in my body. I wanted to vanish. I needed the pain to stop. The fear of being left again — of the silence of solitude, the emptiness — felt unbearable.
But here’s the thing: it wasn’t just this loss I was bearing.
It was that one, too.
The one from when I was age 11
The memory came back — my father, standing in front of me, eyes locked, voice raised.
“I’m going to punch your face through that wall,” he said, and I remember exactly where I was standing.
Back to the wall.
Nowhere to go.
No one to protect me.
And from that moment on, something in me changed. I concluded: love is dangerous. People leave. You’re not safe.
He did leave. I never saw him again. He built a new life, he loved new daughters, and I was erased like I never happened.
I don’t tell this story because I want pity. I tell it because sometimes we forget where the deepest wounds began. We think we’re crying about today’s heartbreak, when in truth, it’s the child inside us who’s still weeping — still waiting for someone to say, “You didn’t deserve that. I see you. You were just a little girl.”
This morning, I reached out to someone I care about. I offered an apology for harsh words spoken in pain. He responded in his own way — calm, perhaps a little distant — but not cruel. And for now, that’s enough. Because the real healing didn’t come from his message. It came from realising that I was grieving far more than just him.
I was grieving the father who didn’t love me who never came back.
I was grieving the innocent little girl with her back to the wall.
And I was grieving all the broken parts of me that still flinch at love however it shows up.
But today something shifted. Because now, when I look at that 11-year-old, I don’t just see a girl backed against the wall. I see a survivor. I see the roots of a woman who has grown fiercely, tenderly, despite the storms most people will never understand.
So this post is for her.
And maybe for you, too, if you’ve ever felt that kind of pain.
You’re not overreacting.
You’re not too much.
You’re remembering.
And maybe — just maybe — now you’re ready to begin releasing.
Love,
Little Miss Disorder
x
Living on the Edge 