She Died Before She Lived
There’s a girl who lived in my body for most of my life. She was always trying, always hoping, always believing that if she just did enough, gave enough, helped enough—someone would finally see her. Someone would finally love her for who she was, not what she could do.
She died the day I realized the truth. And maybe that’s the only way I could finally start to live.
The Architecture of Conditional Love
Growing up, love had rules in my house. Love had conditions. Love had to be earned through services rendered, through being useful, through making myself small enough to fit into the spaces others carved out for me. My siblings orbited around my mom like planets around the sun, basking in her attention and warmth. I was somewhere else entirely—maybe Pluto, cold and forgotten at the edge of the solar system.
But there was my dad. Injured, often in pain, and somehow I became his caretaker before I even understood what that meant. I learned that love came with a price tag: help clean, get some time with dad. Take care of everyone, earn your place at the table. I thought this was normal. I thought this was how families worked.
Even our family vacations told the story of where I belonged. Them in one car—the real family. Me and dad in another—the afterthought and the wounded one, traveling separately but parallel, like we were following the same destination but would never truly arrive together.
The Morning Everything Changed
I was not even twelve when I woke up to the sound of my mother screaming. “He’s dead, he’s dead.” The words cut through the morning air like glass, sharp and final and impossible to take back.
The first thing I did was pray. Even as a child, I reached for something bigger than myself, something that might make sense of the senseless. Then my mom handed me the phone, and suddenly I was shouting CPR instructions across the house to her, my voice carrying the weight of trying to save the only person who had ever really seen me.
The ambulance came. The fire department came. And then a man much taller than me delivered the words that would reshape my entire world: he was pronounced dead.
What nobody knew—what I kept buried for years—was that I ran to my mom’s bedroom afterward. I had to see him. I had to see the only person who cared about me, lying there with white foam coming from his mouth. I was in denial, desperate to find some sign that this nightmare wasn’t real.
After the funeral, after the flowers wilted and the casseroles stopped coming, I found myself in an empty classroom at school with a phone. I would call his number over and over, just to hear his voice on the voicemail. Just to pretend, for thirty seconds at a time, that he was still there.
I was diagnosed with PTSD and major depression before I was even twelve. A child shouldn’t have to carry those words, shouldn’t have to understand what they mean. But trauma doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It doesn’t care about your age or your capacity to understand. It just happens, and then you have to figure out how to keep breathing.
The Lone Wolf Years
After dad died, I became even more invisible. I think I reminded my mom of him—we were similar in ways that probably hurt her to look at. So I became the lone wolf, desperate to be loved by people who never wanted to know who I really was.
For the next ten years, I kept trying. I kept asking my mom to get to know me, to see me, to love me for something other than what I could do for her. I was always the one reaching out, always the one hoping, always the one believing that maybe this time would be different.
I was the black sheep. I was the scapegoat. I was the one who absorbed all the family’s dysfunction and pain and somehow made it my fault, my responsibility, my burden to bear.
The Promise That Became a Prison
A few months ago, I realized something that changed everything. I understood why I stayed so long, why I kept trying, why I kept accepting scraps of attention and calling it love.
When I was that little girl standing in the aftermath of my dad’s death, I made myself a promise. I told myself that losing my mom would break me. I told myself I couldn’t be an orphan. I told myself I had to hold on to whatever family I had left, no matter what it cost me.
That promise—that desperate plea from a terrified child—became the thing that hurt me the most. It kept me trapped in a cycle of trying to earn love from someone who didn’t know who I was and didn’t want to learn.
The Death That Led to Life
The girl who made that promise died when I finally understood the truth. She died when I realized that staying and trying to be loved by someone who never saw me was more painful than any loneliness I might face alone.
She died before she ever got to live. She spent her whole existence trying to be worthy of love instead of learning that she was already worthy. She gave everything she had to people who treated her like a convenience rather than a person.
But maybe that’s okay. Maybe some parts of us have to die so that other parts can finally be born.
I’m still learning how to live as myself instead of as someone else’s idea of who I should be. I’m still learning that love doesn’t have conditions, that I don’t have to earn my place in the world, that I don’t have to be useful to be valuable.
It’s terrifying and liberating all at once. This new version of me is still figuring out how to exist in the world, still learning how to take up space, still discovering what it means to be seen and known and loved for who I am rather than what I can do.
She died before she lived. But maybe now, finally, I can start to live before I die.
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*Some stories aren’t meant to have happy endings. Some stories are meant to have honest ones. This is mine.*
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