To whom it may concern:

I know this isn’t what you asked for. I know this isn’t what you wanted. I know this isn’t what you deserve. But I want to remind you of something.

When you were ten years old, your anxiety put a hand around your rib cage and squeezed so hard your lungs forgot how to breathe. The nighttime was more of a choke hold than a lullaby; the tears were more about what could happen rather than what did. You thought you wouldn’t make it out alive, but you did.

When you were thirteen, your world started to crumble at your feet. Everything you had known about family packed itself into boxes of cardboard and shipped itself in every different direction. Sometimes you think it still hasn’t settled into something permanent. If trusting a person was like a glass vase on a table, someone had sent it crashing to the floor. You thought nothing would ever turn out okay again, but it did.

When you were fourteen, it was like happiness was a room and someone shut off the lights while you were still inside. Friends leaving felt like pulling out teeth; painful, and leaving visible holes in their place. Going to school was like walking into cemetery; surrounded by people, but still somehow all on your own. You thought no one would ever be your friend again, but they did.

When you were fifteen, you were too young to bury your childhood. You should have been dressing up for fun instead of dressing up for funerals. Tears at this age should be reserved for bad test grades and ugly haircuts, not dirt plots and closed caskets. The loss felt like jumping into the deep end before knowing how to swim. You thought you would never come back from that, but you did.

And now, at seventeen, it’s time you learn that sometimes the right people make the wrong choices. And you learn that sometimes you will be put into situations in which there is no solution; no right answer, no easy choice. When catastrophic events happen in our lives, it’s easy to forget to move. It’s even easier to forget what it feels like to be a human— or what it feels like to be anything at all, for that matter.

Despite what you’ve heard, forgiveness is the hardest part. It’s easy to be angry, it’s easy to cry, and it’s easy to lose yourself inside the tragedy you’re going through. But there is true strength in forgiveness. There is something unbelievably admirable about staring heartbreak straight in the face, and kissing its forehead. In telling them, “I don’t think you’re a bad person. I think you just made a mistake.” In being the bigger person, even when you have every right not to. There is strength in walking away when things get hard. But there is even more to be found, in some cases, in walking back into the fray. Forgiveness doesn’t make you weak, and it doesn’t make you stupid. Forgiveness, first of all, makes you brave. Forgiveness: it makes you human.

I just want to remind you of something. Another thing you did at fifteen years old, is you spent a whole day cutting out letters from magazine pages to make a quote, and pasting them onto your bedroom wall to look at every day as a reminder. Every night when you go to bed and every morning when you wake up, you were meant to see the words: “And the road goes ever on and on.” You did this to remind yourself that despite whatever happens to you, despite what blocks your way or obstructs your visions and dreams on the way to where you’re going, the road to get there is still underneath your feet and still pushing forward to your destination. The road of life keeps going regardless of how often you stop and for how long.

I know this is a less than favorable time for you. I know that it feels like the threads of your reality have been plucked apart and rearranged in a foreign order. But if I can teach you anything from this it’s that you know how to survive. Every time you have thought that the thing you were facing was going to be the thing that broke you, you pulled yourself out of the depths and crawled your way back to the freedom of yourself. You can do this. I’ve seen it before and I’m sure I’ll see it again. The tragedies that happen to you are not what define you; it’s what you do about them.

With love,

Britton