I stopped calling myself weak for being affected by more than I used to be

Dear Delyara, This may be the deepest victory of the lot, because it is the one that changes the inside language. Life has changed me. Stress has changed me. Illness in the family has changed me. Money pressure, grief, age, work, disappointment — all of it has changed the sensitivity of my system. Some things land harder now. Some days I have less emotional skin than I did ten years ago. For too long I interpreted that as weakness. This week I tried a different interpretation: maybe I am not weaker, maybe I am carrying more without enough places to put it down. That thought softened something in me immediately. I don’t know if self-love always arrives as a grand feeling. For me, this week, it arrived as a correction in language. And that correction felt like mercy.