I feel this whole thing. We are all so hard on our young selves. We were just learning how to be people in a brutally judgmental world where one slip knocked us way down. The shame we carry with us for decades might teach us but it also makes us have so much self-loathing. I am so close to the girl I was young too. She follows me and we need to be kind to those little girls who were far from being women. This piece reminds me to do that. To stop carrying the albatross of my youth and enjoy the woman I am now, who survived that