There are many things that I would like to tell you so let me begin with the most important lesson of all. You're not perfect but you don't need to be. You're everything that this world needs you to be and more, you are resilient and beautiful. You are all the things that you see in other people, somehow you don't see these things in yourself. Trust me when I say it makes all the sense in the world that you see yourself as flawed and broken but also find that you're that way without a cause.

This doesn't make it strange to be needy and broken, in fact, you're right as you should be.

You should know that letting a stranger put their hands on you will not make you whole, that giving yourself up so easily does not solve your problems or numb the pain. But it also doesn't make you all the things that people say you are. You see this matters, in the end, what you think of yourself matters more than what others think of you.

You are everything that you need to be and you are who you are today because of everything that you have been through. You never needed to search for love in physical affection, with those who didn't know you and those who didn't care. You needed to search for the love within yourself, and you need to understand that whether or not you believe it you are loved in all the ways that you'll need to be. There is so much love in your heart and you know that which is exactly why you should be spreading love to other people but also to yourself. Learning to love yourself is important and learning that your struggles and your life story are valid is just as important. You're not defined by pieces of paper that say what's wrong with you, you're not defined by the medication that you take every morning, you are not defined by the mistakes that you have made.

These mistakes that you have made are to be lessons and good ones at that. The lessons you learn from the mistakes you have made last you a lifetime and they will carry you through the difficult times and the heartbreaks and the loss because you are stronger than you think you are and you are more beautiful inside than you could ever imagine. Loving the wrong person can be a mistake too and it turned you blind. Losing him was the worst but everyone told you differently.

Being so young you think that the person that you're with is going to be the person that you're going to marry and that life is going to be happily ever after, that they can save you when they can't. The only person that can save you is yourself and I know that's not something that anyone wants to hear, especially when they're in love. It has to be said, this is such an important lesson and I'm so glad that I learned it. Without this lesson, I don't think that I would have ever found the man that I'm with today, I don't think that I would've felt whole over the past almost 3 years at all. I know that you have to save yourself and it is so much harder then you will ever think that it is, it is waking up every day and telling yourself out loud that you're important and telling yourself that you are caring and you are loving and you are kind.

Saving yourself as a choice, it is the choice you make every single day. Choosing to live your life with your own purpose and stop trying to please everyone else and proving everyone wrong is what is going to set you free. That's all you want, isn't it? You want to be free from the demons that haunted you your entire life, you want to feel like you can become something and you want to be able to maintain the feeling of joy and not give in to fears which can sometimes even be irrational. You don't need to prove yourself to anyone, only you. I know that things are hard and lonely sometimes and sometimes it feels like your stuck and you just want things to change overnight but they don't just go away because you want them to. In fact, they don't go away at all, you simply learn to live with them and use them to your advantage. I promise you things will get better but not without a little bit of help.

I know that it is hard to talk about the things that you have done to mask the pain that you've been living with for so long and that for the first time you have to be honest and there is nothing more painful than that and that I do know. No one has an excuse to hurt you, not because you were blackout drunk, not because you were too frozen to say no and certainly not because you are just a woman. This also means that you have no excuse to hurt yourself, that you have to love yourself and respect yourself so that other people can too. I need you to know that you are everything that you are for good reason and God made you as you are because that's exactly how He wanted you. You are loving and you are kind.

Why not give some of that loving and kindness to yourself for once?