To nine-year-old me, because you didn\'t have the words to explain back then.
You only knew that the weight of the world felt heavier than it was supposed to
You lost friends,
You lost family,
You lost people
And blamed yourself for it,
So you changed yourself
You thought changing meant people staying
So you became quieter, thinking it would make people stay
You thought that trying harder would not push everyone away
And you tried so hard to make people stay
But no one noticed
And no one cared
And mostly, you just learned how to stay quiet
Because if you weren\'t too loud, you weren\'t seen
And people not seeing somehow meant them staying
People still saw you as the kid who\'s always happy
You learned to smile when you were expected
You learned to laugh when everyone else laughed
And slowly, pretending and acting became easier than explaining
I wish I could tell you that you were right
And I wish I could tell you people noticed, but
No one noticed you were quiet.
No one noticed the words you swallowed.
No one noticed the small self you became.
You became silent when you learned no one cared.
I wish I could tell you that you didn\'t sit alone
Night after night after night
Waiting for a change
Hoping for a change
And watched in helplessness.
When change never came
I wish I could tell you everything changed in one day
But it didn\'t
There wasn\'t a moment when everything suddenly became okay
Things just moved forward,
Quietly,
Slowly
And painfully
And you moved with them
Because you had no choice.
I wish I could say,
That you didn\'t grow up faster than a kid should have
I wish I could say things got better quickly
But they didn\'t
You just learned how to hide how you felt, instead of telling people
Because that\'s what you learned was normal
You learned how to exist in the background,
Without asking too many questions or asking for too much
And you felt like giving up
So many times,
But somehow you kept going
You kept going, not because life suddenly became easy and fair,
And not because everything changed and worked out how you hoped
But because you were strong enough,
Strong enough and worthy enough,
To stay
When it would have been infinitely easier to leave
I wish I could tell you that you learned loudness,
That you learned how to stop hiding in the background
But we haven\'t
But we\'re trying, and that\'s enough.
You\'re still quite
You still hide
You still overthink
And you still remember everything,
Even when you want to forget
Despite all this,
You are here,
You made it
And maybe to a lot of people, that doesn\'t sound like a lot
But it\'s more than you thought was possible for so long
This poem isn\'t about how everything suddenly fixed itself.
It\'s just a reminder that you survived
You survived long enough to grow,
Long enough to become someone who understands the weight of the world
Long enough to realise that life isn\'t fair
And that\'s okay
You made it this far, and that has to matter
You made it, even if life was never fair
So keep going. I\'m proud of you