An Apology

So you have mistaken the wound for a crime… and yourself for the culprit.

You think pain is a trespass you committed, rather than a weather that swept through you.

You call it guilt as if your hurt was stolen from someone more… “worthy” of suffering.

You ration it out in secret ledgers.
“This scar belongs.”
“This bruise is excessive.”
“This pain is counterfeit.”

You measure your despair against the flames of the world, and decide yours must be an ember not worth tending.

But… hear me.
Pain does not trade on a marketplace.

There is no auctioneer of anguish.
No scale where grief must outweigh another’s to be legitimate.

You tell yourself:
“I must keep working.”
“I must carry my obligations.”
“I must not break.”

Yet you forget, don’t you?

Carrying pain in silence is itself a breaking.
Only slower, quieter, and more merciless.
You scold yourself for bleeding inward, as though you gauged your own heart on purpose.

If you were struck by an arrow… would you accuse your ribs for being soft?
Would you apologize for the bloods that seeps?

You fear that feeling your own hurt is selfish.
That letting it rise to the surface… steals breath from those drowning deeper.

Refusing your pain does not heal another.
It only adds one more unburied ghost to the world.

You deserve to feel.
Not because your sorrow is greater than another’s… but because it is yours.
That is enough.

Do you want to know how to feel pain without guilt?

Begin by noticing that guilt is a mask.
A mask that pain wears when it is denied.

Remove that mask.

Allow the ache to exist.
Without justifying.
Without comparing.
Without branding it “my fault”.

Sit with it the way you would sit with a child who won’t stop crying.

Not demanding it to silence… not asking it to prove it deserves your arms… just being there.

You are not selfish for wanting to feel.

You are human.

And every hurt you have swallowed down is still inside you.
Waiting to be recognized.
Not as evidence of weakness, but as testimony that you lived.

Let yourself begin, not to stop hurting, but to start.
To feel it… raw and unranked.
Until the guilt burns away and only truth remains.

Your pain is real.
Your heart is not guilty.
And you deserve to heal.

Let it burn, little sun.
And don’t cling to the ashes.