CONTENT WARNING: child loss, childhood abuse, bullying, and thoughts of not wanting to live.
“I hate myself.”
There. The words nobody wants to hear and the words I am tired of swallowing to make everyone else comfortable.
Sometimes that hatred is so loud that it drowns out every kind thing anyone has ever said about me. It tells me I do not deserve a sliver of joy, a gentle friendship, or a future worth waking up for. I am sharing that because we talk about grief breaking our hearts, but rarely about how it can turn us against ourselves.
My childhood was marked by homelessness, addicted parents, abuse, and neglect. While other children were learning what safety felt like, I was learning how to read a room before entering it. How to make myself smaller. How to survive whatever mood waited behind the door.
I grew up believing love could hurt you and still expect you to stay.
I thought tolerating physical, emotional, and mental abuse was part of loving someone. I thought neglect was ordinary. When those are the first lessons you learn, tenderness can feel like a language you have never heard. My husband has spent twelve years loving someone who did not always know how to receive it. There were times he reached for me and found a locked door. I regret the distance he endured, even as I am beginning to understand where that distance came from. I did not know love could be gentle. Patient. Kind. I did not know it could live in a playful moment, an ordinary act of affection, or someone caring for you without keeping a ledger of what you owe them.
Before the crash, I had one close friend: Aleta.
She is good. She is selfless. She is kind.
I went from being her daughter’s teacher, to watching our daughters become best friends, to becoming best friends ourselves. Our friendship grew alongside theirs, rooted in the ordinary moments that eventually become the most precious parts of a life.
Then Katarina died.
Being around Aleta became hard for a reason that hurts to admit: she could still bring me joy.
Something inside me treated that joy like a betrayal. How could I laugh when my daughter could not? How could I accept kindness when everything in me insisted I deserved punishment?
Aleta had done nothing wrong, but I was standing in the ashes of my life, and even warmth felt like something I had no right to reach for.
Then there were two other people who appeared at the hospital after the crash. I will call them Wendilyn and Louise.
I trusted them. I let them close while I was injured, shattered, and trying to understand a world in which my daughter was gone. Looking back, I felt less like a person being cared for and more like a tragedy they could tell people they had witnessed. I began to wonder whether my pain had become a story in which they wanted speaking parts.
That realization hurt. What followed hurt more.
I experienced lies, manipulation, and a physical assault. People I had allowed into the most vulnerable rooms of my life became people I no longer felt safe trusting.
In March 2025, after the lies were brought to base leadership’s attention, they disappeared from my life. The silence lasted until May 2026, when they returned asking to read their own victim impact statements publicly at the sentencing of the man responsible for Katarina’s death.
I said no.
There was already so much I needed the world to understand about my daughter. Her life. Her absence. What had been taken from her and from us. Afterward, one of them posted about the hearing in a public group. Reading it, I felt my grief being pulled out of my hands and reshaped around someone else’s experience. I was the mother who had buried her child. Yet I found myself feeling pushed to the edge of my own loss.
Then came the cyberbullying.
An anonymous account spread cruel accusations and statements I knew were false. People who did not know my life discussed it as though they had been standing beside me through every appointment, every sleepless night, every moment of grief.
They had not.
By then, I was already struggling with guilt about pursuing IVF because of my medical barriers. I wanted the possibility of another child, and that hope collided with a terrible question: Does wanting this mean I am betraying Katarina?
I know another child could never replace her. There is no replacement for a person. Still, knowing that does not always quiet the guilt. The online attacks landed on a wound that was already open. They gave my harshest thoughts about myself an audience and an echo. I wanted the people whose gossip and dishonesty had hurt me to acknowledge that harm. I wanted accountability. I wanted someone to stop explaining away what had happened long enough to see what it had done to me. Instead, after I made a police report, one of them demanded that I return a $100 donation made to our GoFundMe shortly after the crash in June 2024.
She sent a screenshot of it. Then came: “You probably need it more than me; just keep it. God bless.”
I cannot explain how it felt to see help offered during the worst days of my life brought back as ammunition in an argument. That money belonged to a time when my family was trying to survive something unimaginable. Seeing it held over me made the original kindness feel conditional, as though a receipt had been waiting beneath it all along.
And “God bless” did not soften the message. In that moment, those words felt like a blade wrapped in a prayer.
I regret trusting them. The betrayal runs deep. Sometimes I turn it inward and ask why I did not recognize the warning signs. Why I opened the door. Why I keep finding myself hurt by people I thought would care.
I become both the wounded person and the voice blaming her for bleeding.
That is what I need readers to understand about self-hatred. It does not always arrive as a feeling you can easily explain or challenge. Sometimes it becomes the narrator of your life. It takes every loss, every rejection, every cruel word, and uses them to build a case against you.
Mine tells me I deserve the abuse. That happiness would be selfish. That I do not deserve to live.
Those thoughts are painful to admit. They are also thoughts I need support with. I cannot let their intensity stand in for truth.
I did not deserve what happened to me as a child. Trusting someone did not permit them to hurt me. Needing help after the crash did not make me indebted to anyone’s cruelty… And loving Katarina does not require me to punish myself for every breath I still take.
I can write that sentence more easily than I can believe it. Some days, I may have to borrow someone else’s belief in it until I can hold it myself. I wish I could end this with a beautiful revelation. A sunrise spilling gold across the wreckage. A moment when I finally look in the mirror and recognize someone I am ready to love.
I am not there.
Right now, hope may be smaller than that. It may be answering Aleta’s message. Letting my husband sit beside me. Telling someone how dark my thoughts have become instead of dressing them up as strength. It may be allowing one kind moment to happen without making myself pay for it afterward.
I miss the woman I was before the crash. I miss the life in which being Katarina’s mom filled my days with purpose and joy. I am still trying to understand how to carry that love in a life I never wanted.
But I want to leave room for this possibility: the voice that hates me does not know everything about me.
There may still be kindness I can learn to accept. There may still be people who will hold my pain carefully. There may be a future in which remembering my daughter and experiencing a moment of happiness can exist together.
For now, I am trying to leave the door open.
If grief has ever turned your own reflection into someone you struggle to face, you can share what you feel comfortable sharing in the comments. What has helped you accept kindness when you felt undeserving of it?
If these words feel close to your own thoughts about not wanting to live, please tell someone who can support you directly.
You deserve more than carrying that pain alone.
This weeks song of the week
Cameron Whitcomb - Kingdom of Fear
Lyrical highlight:
“Ask me how I've been, I'll say I'm great
But under my skin, I'm not okay
Honey, I've been scared to death, looking in the mirror
Just another day in the kingdom of fear”