My dear Childhood, You are good!

To the boy I was,

I need to tell you some things you didn't get to hear enough, back then.

I saw you that day, running and shouting with your sister at your family friend's place, so full of joy you couldn't keep it inside your body. That's not a flaw in you. That's what a child should look like . loud with happiness, unafraid to take up space. When you got home and the shouting turned into orders and being grounded, something in you decided, in an instant, that being seen enjoying yourself was dangerous. You learned to go quiet. You learned that bonding, connection, even excitement itself, could be a crime. I need you to know now: it was never a crime. It was never wrong of you to feel that alive. The room got smaller that day, but you didn't do anything to deserve a smaller room.

You started thinking instead of feeling out loud ,  thinking, and thinking, and thinking further, because the feelings had to go somewhere and no one had shown you anywhere else for them to go. Your body carried what your voice couldn't. The typhoid, the regurgitation, the restless legs,  years of it, unexplained, until you finally found what your body had been trying to say the whole time. You weren't broken. You were a child whose stress had no other exit, so it found one in your gut, in your legs, in the quiet hours you spent overthinking instead of sleeping. That was never your fault either.

But I also need you to remember what you did have, because it was real, and it was yours, and nothing that came after gets to erase it. You had that gap between Bowala hills and the Ambuluwawa Hemmathagama side , a view that asked nothing of you and gave you wonder every single time you passed it. You had a mother who was kind and balanced in a way few people manage to be, who took your small hand toward a building in Peradeniya and told you, with total certainty, that you'd come there one day. She gave you a future before you even knew to want one. That belief in you was never conditional. It didn't require you to be quiet, or perfect, or small. It just required you to be her son.

Losing her at thirteen was one of the heaviest things a child can carry, and I know it changed the shape of everything after — how much you had to grow up before you were ready to. If you had been protected a little more, soothed a little more consistently, allowed to be as loud and unfiltered as you were on that day with your sister , I think you'd have grown into your empathy sooner instead of losing it for a while under the weight of everything. But you were doing the best a child could do with what he'd been given. The overthinking, the quiet, the striving to please ,none of it was weakness. It was a boy trying to survive with the tools he had.

You still made it to Peradeniya. Your mother's word came true, even though she wasn't there to see it. And whatever else got tangled along the way , the people-pleasing, the boundary-blindness, the years of stress ,  you kept showing up for the people who needed you. Your sisters. Your brother. That capacity to love and to hold others never actually left you. It was just buried under stress for a while, the way the gap and your mother's belief were buried under grief.

You're allowed to be as loud, as joyful, and as unfiltered now as you were that day at your family friend's house. Nobody's going to ground you for it anymore.

I see you. I hear you. I believe you.

With love,
The man you became