Hey, try to remember that you chose this. That this entire beautiful mess is an adventure you signed up for. And adventures are meant to hurt a bit, or they wouldn’t be worthwhile.
You are pure energy currently experiencing life as Kaisa. And in order to grow into the best version of her, you need to feel this pain and confusion and loss. If you work with it, not against it, it will allow you to expand.
There’s no need to be afraid. It’s just a game. Forget about time. Forget the past. Forget who you were and who you wanted to be. None of it is really real. Not as real as your source, your energy, your soul. Being a human is a powerful illusion. It’s your job to remind yourself every day that it’s not real.
𑄷
For years, you’ve been wondering what self-care means. Forget self-love, your therapist said. If that’s too far out of reach, aim for self-kindness.
That was supposed to be more manageable, but for years you still couldn’t wrap your head around it. Every time you tried to be better, you got worse.
That’s because you didn’t try for yourself. You tried for everyone else, to stop them from worrying, or to get them to accept you.
Baby, that was never going to work.
Every time you write to prove your worth, laugh to prove that you’re healing, leave the house to prove you’re still capable, you’re being inauthentic. And inauthenticity sprouts weeds inside you. Now you’re wrestling among the nettles and brambles—
But somewhere in the overgrowth you can sense a beam of light. A reminder that your life is yours to live for yourself. This roundabout way of healing is yielding no results. So please, for a moment, just stop. Find your way back to your centre and rest there awhile. Sometimes, all you can do is survive. And that’s okay.
There is a bridge that connects surviving to thriving. It’s called play. Remember?
𑄷
I know that sometimes it feels so overwhelming and empty, like you’re freefalling with nothing to grab hold of. But it only feels like that when you let yourself believe that this is it, that what you’re experiencing right now is all there is. When you believe you are a human, when in fact you are the light that shines out of your eyes when you laugh.
𑄷
You thought you would post something about your trip to Japan. There were so many wonders, so many lessons, surely there’d be plenty of material? Well, it wasn’t happening. Instead, you started writing letters to yourself. Now you feel naked for posting something so personal and vulnerable, but the thing is, you just have to write and post whatever you’re currently experiencing. This is also self-care: to let your intuition override your expectations.
𑄷
Sit still and let the fear wash over you. Run from the wave and it will be forever breaking against you.
𑄷
Every time someone told you it’s your fault, you believed them, because they started telling you that from a very young age. You were yelled at and blamed for things when you were still stumbling around in clogs and sucking on a soother. The soother you reluctantly gave up when you were four and wanted to prove that you were growing up—a decision you bitterly regretted on that long, cold ride home. Because you either are growing up or you’re not. To do something for someone else is not real. To do something to prove yourself to someone else is just pretending.
You’re still growing up, and that’s okay.
The blaming never stopped. It only got worse. Each time, you hunched your shoulders further and whispered more apologies, and let their words lodge like daggers in your back. And you added a thousand more yourself, one for every time you thought you had to be or do or say or feel something you didn’t want. When you acted against your own truth.
Now those daggers are scraping at your bones, preventing you from moving and living as your body regularly gives in and says enough. In the past, you’ve recognised this and pulled some of those blades out, thrown them at the feet of their owners and said NO. But the years went on and amnesia set in again, as it is wont to do. We forget, we remember, we forget again. This is the nature of human life—forgive yourself.
And remind yourself.
Every time you resist a painful feeling, you throw a hook at it and reel it in. You pull it up like a rotten fish and say I wish you were different, and in doing so, you hang it round your waist and live in its stink.
Stop resisting. Stop identifying with the dead fish. Let them float past. Acknowledge them but don’t judge them. It’s improv: “Yes, and…”
This way you can walk more freely, breathe fresher air.
𑄷
Should is a heavy word. It drags behind you like dead weight. Did you know that it’s safe to let go?
𑄷
Today, you looked up at the treetops as they swayed wildly in the July winds, and you remembered how you used to do this as a child: sing into the winds, follow their dance through the woods. And you felt those core parts of you, the ones that have always been there; key pieces of who you are and how you see the world—wonder, awe, the way you seek and see magic everywhere. Those are the building blocks of your soul. All the rest is ego waste, side effects of being a human. Don’t pay it too much attention.
𑄷
Your version of this universe is unique and fleeting. Soon it won’t be here at all.
I urge you to honour your own reality. Your own experience. To trust what goes on inside you, and let that instruct you before anything else.
Remember, it’s not real. You are a dream within a dream. You’re floating inside an illusion. It doesn’t have to be this hard.
Forget what you are.
Remember what you can become.
Oh GOSH. This is stunning from so many angles, Kaisa! Mostly how brave it is to be vulnerable and in that, be true 🩵 so many gems in here it was hard to widdle them down to a few favourites that landed and spread inside me, resonant.
"There is a bridge that connects surviving to thriving. It’s called play. Remember?" YES.
"..in fact you are the light that shines out of your eyes when you laugh." Mmm
"Every time you resist a painful feeling, you throw a hook at it and reel it in. You pull it up like a rotten fish and say I wish you were different, and in doing so, you hang it round your waist and live in its stink." I know these rancid fish well. Love imagining them dangling around my waist as a reminder to choose differently.
"..key pieces of who you are and how you see the world—wonder, awe, the way you seek and see magic everywhere. Those are the building blocks of your soul." 🌱🌻✨🫧🌈
The first paragraph already touched something inside me, and the rest lived inside me. Beautifully laid out thoughts on letters, Kaisa.🤎