Love Letter No. 011: To The Ones Who Hurt Me

October 15, 2026

There are parts of my story I will probably never tell in full.

Not because I am ashamed of them, but because I have learned that vulnerability does not require giving everyone access to every detail. Some experiences belong to me. Some memories have taken years to understand, and others I have simply learned how to carry. What I can say is that I have known what it feels like to be hurt by people who should have known better.

For a long time, I didn’t realize how much those experiences had shaped me. They influenced the way I trusted people, the way I protected myself, and the way I responded when something didn’t feel safe. There were parts of me that became guarded and parts that learned how to survive before I ever had the language to understand what I was surviving. As I have gotten older, I have found myself looking back with a level of awareness I simply did not have when I was living through it.

I used to wonder why I had to be strong enough to survive things I never deserved to experience in the first place. Why some of my strength had to be built through pain. Why I had to learn lessons I never asked to be taught. I don’t have a beautiful answer for that, and I don’t think everything painful needs one.

What I do know is that I made it through.

That doesn’t mean everything disappeared once the moment was over. Healing has required me to recognize patterns, create boundaries, ask for support, and understand parts of myself with more compassion. Some of the things I once viewed as flaws were simply ways I had learned to protect myself. I can appreciate the person I was then for doing whatever she knew how to do while also allowing the person I am now to choose differently.

I will not thank you for hurting me. I will not give you credit for the strength, awareness, or resilience I carry today. Those things belong to me. I built them from what was left. I found ways to laugh again, trust again, dream again, and create a life beyond what happened to me. That is my accomplishment, not yours.

I don’t know if forgiveness will ever be part of every story, and I have made peace with that. I no longer believe healing requires me to excuse what happened or make someone else’s actions easier to understand. Sometimes healing is simply reaching the point where the people who hurt you no longer get to determine who you become.

So this love letter isn’t really for you after all.

It’s for the version of me who survived you.

The one who kept going when life felt impossibly heavy. The one who didn’t know how much strength she had because she was too busy using it. The one who deserved tenderness then and still deserves it now.

I will not thank you for hurting me.

But I will always be grateful to her for surviving it.

With love,

Chandler