I need to tell you something and I need you to actually let it in.
You are not small. You have never been small. You have simply been in spaces — and sometimes relationships, and sometimes your own head — that made you feel that way. And the feeling was so consistent, for so long, that at some point you stopped questioning it and just accepted it as fact.
It is not a fact. It is a story. And today we are rewriting it.
Let me tell you what I see when I look at you.
I see someone who has survived one hundred percent of their hardest days. Every single thing that has come at you — the grief, the loss, the disappointment, the moments when the ground shifted under your feet and you had no idea how you were going to keep standing — you got through all of it. You are here. Still breathing, still reaching, still reading these words and looking for something to hold onto.
That is not weakness dressed up as survival. That is power. Raw, undeniable, hard-won power.
We talk about power like it's something external. Something that gets handed to you by the right circumstances, the right connections, the right opportunities. And yes, those things matter — I'm not going to pretend the playing field is level, because it isn't, and I'm not in the business of lying to you.
But there is a kind of power that nobody can give you and nobody can take away. It lives inside you, and it has been there the whole time, and most of you have been so busy surviving that you haven't had the chance to fully realize what you're carrying.
I want to introduce you to it.
You have the power of your perspective.
You see the world in a way that is entirely, unreplicably yours. Shaped by everything you've lived through, every lesson you've learned the hard way, every moment of beauty you've noticed in places other people walked right past. That perspective — your specific, particular, one-of-a-kind way of seeing — is not just valid. It is valuable. The world needs people who have seen hard things and come out the other side still able to find the warmth in it.
That's you. That has always been you.
You have the power of your empathy.
I know sometimes it feels like a liability. Like you feel too much, absorb too much, carry other people's pain in your own body until you can't tell whose is whose. And yes, we need to work on the boundaries around that — we will, I promise. But the capacity itself? The ability to sit with someone in their pain without flinching, to understand instinctively what someone needs, to make people feel seen and heard and less alone just by being present with them?
That is a superpower. In a world that is increasingly distracted and disconnected, the ability to truly show up for another human being is extraordinary. You have it in abundance.
Don't let anyone convince you that your tenderness is weakness. Tenderness takes more courage than armor ever will.
You have the power of your resilience.
And I don't mean resilience in the toxic, bootstrap, just-push-through-it way that word sometimes gets used. I mean the real kind. The kind that isn't about never falling — it's about what you do when you hit the ground. And I have watched you hit the ground. I have watched you lie there for a minute, sometimes longer than a minute, and feel every bit of it. And then I have watched you get back up.
Not because it was easy. Not because you weren't scared. But because something in you — something stubborn and luminous and completely yours — refused to let that be the end of the story.
That is resilience. And it is one of the most powerful things a human being can possess.
You have the power of your choices.
This one is quiet but it is enormous. Every single day, in ways large and small, you are choosing. Choosing how to respond to the things that happen to you. Choosing what to prioritize, what to release, what to keep working toward. Choosing how to treat yourself and what to accept from others. Choosing, moment by moment, who you are becoming.
You may not be able to control what comes at you. But you have far more agency over your response than you've been led to believe. And that agency — that space between what happens and how you choose to meet it — is where your power lives.
I want to address something directly, because I know some of you are sitting with it.
You may have spent years in situations — relationships, families, workplaces — where your power was systematically minimized. Where you were told, in words or in actions, that your voice didn't matter, that your needs were irrelevant, that you were lucky to have what little you had and shouldn't expect more. Where the power dynamic was so lopsided for so long that powerlessness started to feel like your natural state.
It is not your natural state. It was a circumstance. A painful, damaging, absolutely not okay circumstance — but a circumstance nonetheless. Not a life sentence. Not the truth of who you are.
The truth of who you are is someone who survived that and is still here, still growing, still reaching. That person is not powerless. That person is extraordinary.
So here is what I want you to do with all of this.
I want you to start noticing your power in the small moments. The moment you set a boundary and hold it. The moment you speak up when you would have stayed silent before. The moment you choose rest over guilt, or honesty over performance, or yourself over the habit of shrinking.
Notice those moments. Name them. Let yourself feel the quiet satisfaction of them. Because power, like confidence, grows when you pay attention to it. When you acknowledge it. When you stop waiting for someone else to confirm it and start confirming it yourself.
You are not small. You have never been small.
You are someone with a perspective worth sharing, a heart worth knowing, a story worth telling, and a life worth building exactly the way you want it.
You have everything you need. You always have.
Now go show the world what I already know.
Love, Mom 🧡
