“How lucky am I to have someone that makes saying goodbye so hard.” -Winnie The Pooh

(I have to say this quote made me tear up when I found it. I immediately knew it was the one that would begin my blog post)

This letter is my open letter to the people I hurt the most. To be honest, I have been really up in the air with writing this letter. In fact, I think this is my fifth attempt to write this. I’ve struggled with who I wanted to write this letter to. I know that in my life, I have hurt a lot of people. To those people, I am very sorry. However, I believe this letter to the two people I feel like I hurt the most recently is something I’ve needed to write and get off my chest for a long time. I wanted to share it to my blog readers because to be honest, I’ve been struggling a lot with processing all of this myself. I think we all have to process difficult, painful things and it is by far one of the hardest self-growth things we go through. I just want to be open and vulnerable with my readers and honest with them and with myself as I go through my blog-writing process.

Dear Braydon,

I am writing you this letter because I believe you deserve more than just my apology. We’ve talked and you’ve forgiven me for the things I did to you. I think I owe you some clarity and closure in order for both of us to move forward in our lives. You asked me a lot of times: “why are you doing this to me?” Whether it would be during or after a fight, one in which we both would say mean, terrible things to hurt each other, you would always ask me why I was with you. I always had some bullshit answer, and to this day, I do not think I ever gave you a true, genuine answer as to why I chose to remain living in your home, even after the lying, cheating, and manipulation had been happening from my end.

You sent me a recording of a fight we had back in 2018. I’ll be honest, I’ve listened to it several times and it just rips at my soul every single time. Not only did we have a horrible fight over something so petty, we said terrible, mean, cruel things to each other. We hurt each other so much so often. I look back at that fight in 2018, and reflect at how that was the way we fought our entire relationship. We were out for blood with each other. We would say things that would hurt our core, we would rip each other apart. The worst part of it all, we really never built each other back up after the damage had been done.

At the end of the fight, we are apologizing to each other. I’m sobbing in your arms, saying “I just want to be loved.” “I don’t feel loved, and I haven’t for a long time.” Hearing that sad version of myself really ripped my soul apart. However, it really made me see a lot of the answers to your question you’d asked me many times: “why are you doing this to me?”

That girl I heard on that recording, the one who just wanted to feel loved, the one who had just got done saying terrible things to you, yes, that dumb girl, that girl was very insecure. She was scared. She was angry. She felt lonely. She felt lost. She felt jealous. She was jealous of your confidence and your ability to carry your own weight and feelings, because as you can see, she could not do that very well. It would be like over-stuffing your suitcase full of clothes and not being able to zip it up, so the clothes fall out everywhere. (Probably a bad metaphor, I’m a bit off my game here).

I was jealous. I really want to go back to this one. I was so jealous of you. When I met you, I had yet to heal my own childhood trauma and pain. I always would put you down for your feelings and your life experiences because in my mind, you had life served to you on a silver platter. I put you down for every single accomplishment you had. I rained on every parade you created. I was jealous of the things you had in your life. I was jealous of your family. I did later realize that the way I treated you because of my jealousy was inexcusable. I also see that I’ve done this before many times in the past before you, and it is something I have really worked on in my life. I do not want to envy others. I want to support and encourage others and build them up, not tear them down whenever I felt jealous of their accomplishments. I also have become a million times more grateful for the life I was given, because it most definitely could have been much worse.

I was insecure. This one belongs in bold, shiny, huge letters all over this post. My insecurities were one of the major downfalls in our relationship. I felt insecure for so many things. The problem with my insecurities was that I was unable to recognize when they were being projected onto you. I would say: “You don’t love me.” “You don’t care.” “You don’t want me to be happy.” Ironically, I see that the great large majority of the things I accused you of feeling were things I felt about myself. I didn’t love myself. I did not care about myself in the ways I needed to emotionally. I was afraid to allow myself to be happy. (I actually wrote a blog about the last one). My own feelings of inadequacy led to me subconsciously accusing you of feeling these types of ways. I think it was my own subconscious trying to protect me from actually seeing that I was causing 99.8% of our problems. I believe timing is everything, and I truly do not think at the time I would have been able to process  and recognize my own insecurities the way I can do today.

I was lost. I want to be fully transparent and say that this is not an excuse for the way I disrespected and lied to you. It is not an excuse for anything as a matter of fact. I just want to say, the fact that I was lost and wandering through life is something I should not have dragged you along for. I should have let you go if I knew I could not give you the version of myself that you deserved. This goes back to the theme of it all: I was selfish.

I used you as my comfort zone. You were my rock. I did not even take the time to see how I was hurting you. I did not even care. I think forgiving myself for this aspect has been what I struggle with the most. I have to forgive myself for the things I did to you at some point. I feel like I torture myself purposefully or I hold myself back from being happy because I do not feel like I deserve anything after I hurt someone so badly. However, something I am slowly learning is that like I said before, timing is everything.

We were obviously not each other’s person, and I wish I could go back and do it all differently. I wish I could take away the pain I caused you. Unfortunately, I can’t. I do know that you would not want me to be miserable or unhappy either. I just have to process everything that happened. I have to grieve the loss of my old life, my old home, my former cat kiddos, my routines, my hobbies, the version of myself that I grew to become throughout the time I spent with you, but most of all, I have to grieve the loss of the person who was also my best friend for so long.

The thing I have come to find is that we both care about and at one time we both loved each other. We both had such different ways of giving love and we both received love differently. I felt like we would argue a lot and say “I’m trying and you’re not.” You did not feel loved by me for such a long time. I knew you loved me, but I let my own feelings of not loving myself get in the way of accepting and feeling the love you gave to me. It made your efforts appear as if I dismissed them, didn’t appreciate them (which I know I did not appreciate them enough), or that I was just not reciprocating the same feelings back to you.  

I had drained you so many times, I had robbed you of your own self-love and worth in order to support my own. I know that I was empty when I met you and I took all of my insecurities and past pain and I dumped it all on you. I expected you to just handle it. I did realize that throughout time, I needed to have more grace for you. I also needed to work on my own self-love and self-worth and not expect these things to be filled from someone else. I really had subconsciously asked you for a lot right off the bat. I was your first real relationship and I took advantage of your fears, your sensitivity, your feelings and your kindness. I used your insecurities against you. I beat you down to build myself back up. When you left me on the side walk, I never really took the time to think of how much that might have hurt you to have to let me go. It is the same concept when you let me go for the final time in February, it took me a long time to see how much pain I had to have caused you for you to finally have the courage to cut me off.

What I can say is this, I did not always do these things consciously. I blame my ignorance and lack of self-awareness for my actions. I know that processing this will help me grow in so many ways. I’ve already learned so much. However, it’s hard to find ways to grow and be happy when I know I hurt you and you still feel that pain today. I know I always invalidated your feelings throughout our entire relationship. I’d say “you’re being too sensitive.” “You need to get over it.” “You are just stressing me out and I can’t handle your feelings right now.” I want you to know, this entire process and grieving has helped me become much more selfless. Your sadness, your pain, your trauma, your fears, and your feelings are valid. I just am very sorry for not taking ownership for the ways I projected my feelings onto you and for invalidating everything you ever felt.

Lastly, I want to say thank you. I know we reflect on the pain, the past, the mistakes, the bad, and the days we would love to forget. However, it was you who helped shape me into who I am. You gave me an opportunity to grow, to begin this self-discovery journey, and to take the leap into this whole internal-self growth process. I love that you have adapted it in your life as well. You not only changed my life, but I believe you helped save my life. There is not even enough gratitude to give for all of the GOOD things because there were so many that you did for me. But most importantly, I want to thank you for loving me, in the times I couldn’t love myself, during the times even as just my best friend, during the times when I couldn’t accept the love you gave, and also in the times that I did not give love back in the right ways in return. I will always cherish the good, the lessons, and the memories, and I will use them to move forward and to become a better version of Kaitlin than I have been before. I only wish you growth, happiness, good vibes, and that this letter helps bring you some sort of closure as you also continue moving forward into good things in your life.

The second person in which I am writing this letter is to myself. Part of writing the first part of the letter was meant to help me admit my mistakes and really dive into the reasons I did some of the things I did. This has been by far, the hardest thing to process. I also feel like I am saying goodbye to my past version of myself in order to move forward into a better version of myself, which is also hard too. Working through self-forgiveness this time around in comparison to the first time around back when I started this blog is that this time, I do not have anyone or anything else I truly can place the blame on other than myself. Yes, I can connect a lot of it back to my insecurities, my selfishness, and my inability to recognize and address the things I have projected onto other people. However, all of this is on me. I can only take responsibility for the way I acted, the way I responded, and the ways I can do better in the future.

I have grown to have so much more grace for people around me. I can see the positive side of someone’s intentions (some may call that naïve, but I call it being optimistic). I have to learn to have some grace for myself. Yeah, I really messed up. I mess up a lot. I am a person who does not think before I act. I do not always think before I speak. I just do stupid things or say stupid things and then have to suffer the consequences to follow. I care what other people think of me. I am a basket-case of emotion sometimes. I don’t always make the best decisions. I can be distant sometimes. I can be overly clingy sometimes. I can be annoying sometimes. I drink too much sometimes. I need more hobbies and goals in life. I fail at things sometimes. I am lazy somedays. I need to really work on self-love and self-respect. But, this is me.

I might have things to work on, I am definitely not perfect, and I might make mistakes in the future, but each day, I have to take it one step at a time.  I cannot allow someone else to determine my worth. I have to find my own worth and learn how to love myself again. Like I say a lot: “it’s really hard to be on the same team with someone you don’t like.” I want to be on my own team, I want to help myself grow and continue learning each and every day. I want to find my purpose again, because I wholeheartedly think I have really lost that focus. I cannot go back and change the past, but I can reflect on it in order to prevent it from becoming my future.

I really needed to write this. I know it’s long, and it’s somewhat repetitive. I have just really came to find that maybe all of this is not something I can fully process in one blog post, in one day, or after only one therapeutic cry. Forgiving myself for things I’ve done is by far one of the hardest things I’ve worked through during my self-discovery journey. I’ll get there one of these days, but for now, I’ll leave the second part of my open letter...open. I’ll do that because I know I have so much more to write to myself in order to heal. I feel like this part just only barely grazes the surface and that’s okay.

So, for now, thank you for reading, and have a great day.