Meeting the Girl Who Survived Me

A memoir fragment on healing, remembrance, and coming home to myself

There are moments in healing when the past doesn’t rise to haunt you.

It rises because it finally feels safe enough to be seen.

This is one of those moments.

The moment I met the girl I used to be, and the girl who kept me alive.

The Girl on the Shoreline

She waits for me on the shoreline of a place that doesn’t exist in the physical world, but an inner landscape where memory meets spirit.

She’s fifteen.

Heavy-set.

Long, slightly wavy hair.

Wrapped in the black clothing she used as armor.

Tired in the way only a child carrying adult-sized wounds can be.

She doesn’t run.

She doesn’t hide.

She just watches me, cautious and wounded, silently asking:

Are you real?

Or are you another adult who will walk away?

I sit beside her.

Quiet.

Still.

No lessons. No agendas.

Just presence, the very thing she needed most.

For a long moment, she says nothing.

Then, with a voice that trembles from years of being unheard, she asks:

“Why did no one help me?”

The question hits like truth and grief arriving at the same time.

I look her in the eyes and give her the answer she always deserved:

“The adults were drowning in their own wounds. None of it was your fault.”

She studies my face like she’s checking for lies.

Slowly, her shoulders soften.

“You protected Mom,” I tell her.

“You fought for her in ways no fifteen-year-old ever should have had to.

You weren’t the problem.

You were the protector.”

She exhales a long, shaky breath she has been holding for decades.

“I thought I would end up like them,” she whispers.

I shake my head and answer gently:

“No. You became me.”

And something shifts a small miracle, a softening, a release.

She steps closer.

I open my arms.

She collapses into me with a relief that feels holy.

I hold her.

Not to fix her.

Not to change her.

But to finally see her.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “For coming back for me.”

“I never left,” I tell her.

“I just had to grow into the woman who could hold you.”

She dissolves into light and settles inside my chest

not as a wound

but as a part of me

that is finally home.

Closing Reflection

This is what healing often looks like.

Not rewriting the past

but reclaiming the girl who lived through it.

If you’ve ever carried a younger version of yourself inside your ribs

afraid, forgotten, blamed, or unseen

you are allowed to meet them too.

You are allowed to hold them.

You are allowed to tell them the truth.

You are allowed to bring them home.

With love from the Temple Within,

Jill — Mainely Mystics 💜