Why am I Writing this Now?

Somewhere along the way, I learned to protect myself.

I don’t remember making that decision. I simply remember living it.

Whenever disappointment came close, I withdrew. Whenever criticism appeared, I grew quiet. Whenever life hurt, I built another layer of armor around the softest places in my heart.

Looking back now, I can see that beneath all those defenses was a single question that had followed me for decades:

Am I truly worthy of being loved?

I don’t believe anyone intentionally placed that question inside me. It formed slowly, through childhood experiences, disappointments, losses. Beliefs a little girl wasn’t old enough to question.

Those beliefs slowly became the wall a frightened little girl built to shield the places she’d learned to hide.

For years I thought the wall was there to imprison me. Now I wonder if it was the best defense a scared child knew how to build.

The unfolding of my life has not been about pretending that wall never existed. It has been about discovering, one crack at a time, that I no longer need to live behind it.

Perhaps healing isn’t learning to become someone new. It is finally believing what God has been saying all along, that the little girl I spent so many years trying to fix was never beyond His love in the first place.