A Letter to Our Contributors

I know what you’re thinking.

You don’t think anyone will care.

You think your story isn’t worth telling because it doesn’t look like everyone else’s. You walk around every day carrying the weight of your world in a way that feels like nobody else knows.

I know the spiral your mind can take because I’ve been there.

For a long time, I didn’t think my story was worth telling either.

I had been through so much that eventually the latest terrible thing just felt like a normal Tuesday.

Why should anyone care?

Even the people who were supposed to be the closest to me, the people who were supposed to love me, didn’t even care.

Everyone saw me as strong.

I was the woman who could handle anything. Figure it out. Keep moving. Take care of everyone else. Get back up.

But I didn’t feel strong.

I felt like an impostor.

Because there was another side of me that almost nobody saw.

The vulnerable side.

The side that wasn’t handling everything.

The side that spent three years waking up every day not wanting to be alive.

The side that hid behind the curtain of what everyone else wanted, needed, or expected me to be.

I didn’t even know who I was anymore.

All I knew was what I had been through.

And that was enough.

Then one day, one of my coworkers looked at me and said:

“You don’t understand how much of an inspiration you are.”

I genuinely thought she was out of her mind.

Me?

with my mess up Life and my truly dysfunctional world?

You’ve got to be kidding me.

But she wasn’t kidding.

She told me that was exactly the point.

She watched me go through things that weren’t just hard. They were the kind of things most people hope they’ll never experience.

The kind of things that break most people.

And somehow, every time I got knocked down, eventually I got back up.

I had never thought about it that way.

That was the day I decided I wanted to start seeing myself the way other people saw me.

And that shift in perspective changed everything.

So now I want to ask you something.

What if you can’t see your own story clearly from where you’re standing either?

The things you’ve dismissed as ordinary may not be ordinary at all.

The experience you don’t think anyone would care about may be the exact experience someone else has been trying to find words for.

Someone may see herself in your story and, for the first time, realize she isn’t alone.

You don’t have to feel inspirational.

That will come.

You just have to realize that you deserve to be heard.