Dear Frank,
As I was scrolling on Facebook this morning, something stopped me in my tracks: PostSecret shared the image of a secret I submitted more than a decade ago — maybe even 15 years ago at this point.
Before today, if you had asked me what I had sent in, I couldn’t have told you… but the instant I saw it on my screen, I knew that it was mine.
So much has changed since I submitted that secret, which felt, at the time, all-consuming. It’s quite beautiful to be able to forget the pain I felt back then and to almost never think about that set of circumstances I was in — not because I’ve repressed it or done a tremendous amount of soul-searching over it but rather because I have lived so much life since then and it no longer has a hold on me.
Reading the comments on the Facebook post made me laugh — so many people encouraging me to do the opposite of what I actually did. As it turns out, sometimes people ARE important enough to keep around, even if moments are painful. Friendship is not black and white; relationships change and evolve; people grow, separately and can reunite.
Today, we are friends — still and again — living in the same city and spending time together with our spouses and children.
I feel so happy to share this with you, and I feel a lightness in realizing that 19- or 20-year-old me got a happy ending to her story, even if it wasn’t the one I pictured at the time.