Dear Tiffany,
There was quite a long period of time when you wore long sleeves and long pants or skirts every day, and on bad days you went to bed in your clothes so that you wouldn’t have to see or touch your skin.
Now you wear t-shirts, and even sometimes tank tops, and sometimes shorts! In public!
And I just love you for that.
You are fairly clumsy, falling into all these trauma pits, tripping over your anxiety and your depression. Your emotional proprioception leaves something to be desired.
But damn, friend. You claw your way back out of every single pit that you fling yourself, and are flung, into. You may not have whatever it is that buffers and insulates some people from experiencing difficulty as trauma, or from difficult emotions and the fallout afterwards, but you are resilient like nobody’s business.
There was a time when the sight of your own skin made you cry – when the coarse dark hairs on your skinny little arms made you queasy with shame and you heard that sneering voice calling you a monkey (it was one person who said that. One person! And it haunted you for years!) – and you are writing this in short sleeves and your arm hair isn’t even that noticeable right now because you have a tan! And the hairs are sun-bleached! Because you have been wearing t-shirts all summer!
And in the winter, when your skin is back to blinding white and the hairs are back to their coarse darkness, you will still wear t-shirts.
And that’s just kind of lovely, right?
Love,
Me