A Letter to the Girl Who Tries Too Hard

Dear you,

At the beginning of this month, you made a quiet promise to yourself. You said, I will write nearly every day for this month. You wanted to reclaim something for yourself. A sense of rhythm. A way back to a voice that you felt you had lost when the melancholy first crept in. This month of writing was supposed to be your bridge and your connection to the part of you that feels most alive when words are pouring out of your ink.

What a noble pursuit that was, that promise.

And at first, you did it. You really did. You showed up. You even wrote two pieces in one day, two! Remember how that felt? You were on fire, electric with possibility. You were there, present, alive.

But then life began to swell. Work demanded more. School crept in. People needed things. Time evaporated. And so did the writing. One skipped day became two, then five, then a week. And in that silence, the old guilt slipped right back in. And even when your mind broke through no fault of your own, you piled on the hate. You blamed yourself for a storm you didn’t summon.

You started to feel like you had failed. And not just at writing, but at everything.

Because you are the kind of person who, when you make a promise to yourself and break it, doesn’t just feel disappointment – you feel like you are the disappointment. Like you’ve let your entire self unravel. That inner critic of yours? It’s ruthless. It turns the smallest stumble into a declaration of unworthiness.

You catastrophize. You spiral. One undone task becomes a full-scale judgment of your entire existence. You’re the judge, the juror, and the jailor of your own mistakes, and you deliver the harshest sentences. You convince yourself that if you’re not perfect, then you’re nothing. You convince yourself that if you miss the mark, the whole effort is meaningless. That you, somehow, are meaningless.

And yet, you know, deep down, you’d never hold anyone else to this standard. You’d never say to someone you love, “If you don’t do this perfectly, you don’t matter.” You’d never expect your friends, your family, or even strangers to move through life without missteps or rest. You offer them grace. You offer them softness and space to breathe. So why not offer that to yourself? Why not pour that same deep, aching compassion into the woman you see in the mirror? You are the kind of person who will burn off their skin just so others can feel warm. And as noble-or suicidal-as that is, what about you? Don’t you matter too?

Your mind is tired, Mable. It’s tired because it’s been trying to carry the impossible. Your body is tired from running toward a finish line that doesn’t even exist. You chase a version of perfection that not even God asks of you. And for what? To prove you’re enough?

You already are.

And this has always been a pattern in your life. You try, and when you fail, you become afraid to try again. Because you’re afraid of the error part of trial and error. You want so badly to be excellent that any imperfection feels like evidence that you should stop altogether. You have such a deep, almost pathological need to be perfect. But you are human, Mable. And humanity is not defined by flawlessness. It is defined by its grit and its refusal to give up in the face of imperfection.

There is beauty in the trying.

So try to remember that, the next time you feel like your belonging hinges on your perfection. It doesn’t. It never has.

It’s okay to miss days. It’s okay to be inconsistent. It’s okay to not always follow through. Not because you’re lazy or broken or undisciplined, but because you are alive and life is unpredictable. Your worth was never meant to be earned through productivity or performance. It’s inherent. It’s yours.

You are not your habits. You are not your calendars or your pages. You are not your success rate. You are already valuable. Already whole. Already enough.

And here’s what you haven’t given yourself credit for, you still wrote. You wrote about longing. You wrote about broken bones. You wrote about saving yourself. You wrote more in this one month than you’ve written in years. Even on the days you didn’t write, you thought about it. You wanted to. And that matters because it means your voice isn’t gone, it’s just gathering breath.

You are doing better than you think.

Trying is doing. Showing up, even if inconsistently, is a kind of bravery. Progress isn’t always obvious, and neither is it linear. Growth isn’t always measurable. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is return, gently, vulnerably, and without apology. Okay, maybe some apology. But remember that you can’t give from an empty cup.

So come back. Not in punishment. Not to prove anything. Just come back and begin again.

You are not broken. You are not behind. You are not a failure.

You are Mable. And you are trying. And that will always, always be enough.

With so much love,
Mable.