I spent a long time defining myself by what had happened to me.

Not intentionally.

I don’t think I even realized I was doing it.

But when you’ve lived through things that change you, they have a way of becoming part of how you introduce yourself to yourself.

The girl who survived.

The young mother.

The woman who left.

The one who had been hurt.

The one starting over.

School began changing that.

There, I wasn’t someone’s ex.

Most people didn’t know the details of my past.

They didn’t know everything I’d survived before I walked through those doors.

They simply knew me.

And there was something incredibly freeing about that.

I could walk into a classroom and just be another student.

I could have an opinion without wondering whether someone would be angry about it.

I could laugh too loudly.

I could make friends.

I could be wrong.

I could change my mind.

I could discover things I liked simply because I liked them.

That probably sounds ordinary.

It wasn’t ordinary to me.

For years, so much of my identity had been shaped by other people.

What they wanted.

What they thought.

What they needed.

How they treated me.

Now, slowly, I was beginning to ask a question I hadn’t asked in a very long time:

What do I want?

I didn’t always know the answer.

Sometimes I still don’t.

But asking the question was a beginning.

I started realizing that surviving something doesn’t mean it has to become your identity forever.

My past explained pieces of me.

It didn’t own me.

There were still things I carried.

Fear.

Self-doubt.

The instinct to keep everyone happy.

The need to know what everyone around me was feeling.

Those things didn’t disappear simply because my circumstances changed.

But something else was growing beside them.

Confidence.

Not the loud kind.

The quiet kind.

The kind that whispers:

Maybe I can do this.

And eventually…

I know I can.

If you’re reading this…

Maybe something that happened to you has become tangled up with who you believe you are.

A relationship.

A mistake.

An addiction.

A loss.

A diagnosis.

A chapter you wish had been written differently.

Please remember:

Something can be part of your story without becoming your identity.

You are allowed to become more than what happened to you.

You are allowed to meet versions of yourself you haven’t even discovered yet.

And you don’t have to erase your past to do it.

You just have to stop giving it the pen.

Love,
Nova Leigh ❤️