Sitting with my friend across our scratched kitchen table in our Norwich home, we talk about crying when we are alone, for our past and present selves that have been hurt- are hurting. In what seems to me a deeply honest set of joyful tears and painful laughter, the sorrow coated, strange-looking words are dropped on the table: ‘We are healing, Melina!’

Months later I am listening to my favourite podcast, Dear Sugars, and Cheryl Strayed discusses how recovering from the darkest period of her life, she nurtured herself back to health, did not let herself be swallowed by the severe presence of grief. I quite literally stop in my footsteps as I hear the phrase: ‘I have been loved too well’.

She explains that the reason she chose the path that, to her, represented healing, was because she had been loved too well to let herself go. Her mother taught her how to love herself well. I have one of those moments where everything overwhelms everything that sits comfortably posed around it. In one warm Athens evening that welcomes mosquitoes, I am so demandingly reminded of all the times I have cried for myself or thought of myself when I have needed to cry.

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I cry with simple, soft things. I cried as my therapist told me I needed to treat myself kindly. I cried when I thought of how my mother put me to bed with stories. I cried when I heard on YouTube the story she would play on the CD player that was placed on my bedside bookcase in Istanbul. I cry as I construct the personal metaphor of myself being nurtured back to health. I cry as I realise I might be missing something that I will never be able to have- I cry as this realisation hardens into a truth. I cry at the thought that I had to grow up abruptly, at a capricious command. I cry at the thought that I didn’t; that I was taken care of so well in pre and post grief times. I cry so often speaking to my father about building things- over, again. I cry on the bed, and I really wish I could cry in the shower, but I cry. And when I’m done crying, it clicks: I too, was loved so amazingly well; I too, was taught how to sprout back.

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And yet, ‘too well’, taken completely out of context, is weighed with some other meanings. Family members, as it goes, commented on the way my parents raised me. Strangely, they commented that I was given too much love- as if love is stored in mason jars- tightly sealed with a ‘use by’ date on the lid, and nutrient information on the back. What a strange idea- that a child can be loved too much, cared for too well. They told my mother to read me fewer stories at night. They told her that I would grow up to be spoiled.

My mother’s response was to read novels to me. My mother’s response was to walk in the snow to take me to ballet and swimming class- she was on the brink of bursting, her belly swollen with my brother. Her response was to send me books about how babies are made, and a massive, soft teddy bear that I later developed an allergy to, from the hospital ward- she was sick with pneumonia and about to give birth. My mother’s response was to have close relationships with all my teachers- she wanted so much to tap into my thirteen-year-old attitude that spoke so much and revealed so little. My mother’s response was to do all this but also warn me that I must never judge anyone because we are one inch away from becoming the other.

And I was so content, and sometimes so desolate; I felt it all so acutely. I knew that her response was to grieve for me more than I was grieving for her.

My father’s response was to hold our fifteen and nine-year-old hands that in a day were covered with wrinkles of a special kind. My father’s response was to give us significant promises for a future that we thought to have seen buried with our own four eyes. My father’s response was to listen to me endlessly as I sat on the edge of his bed and felt so much, all at once. My father’s response was to take me to all the doctors you can think of; any professional that could help- it was so difficult to help, even harder to be professional. My father’s response was to say all the words that were needed, to give all the hugs that, if missed, would have left the gaping, grieving wound developmentally exposed and emotionally infected. My father’s response was to fly to Thessaloniki during a competition. My father’s response was to give every last second of the short hour to patching me back into a functioning quilt. And, now, I still feel it all so deeply; and when I don’t, I know what it means to be able to.

And what were they responding to, my parents? At its core, to the way I needed to be loved; softly, like a patchwork quilt, like ballet lessons in the winter or giant, dust collecting teddy-bears, and novels read out-loud.

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A lot of my writing reads like a tribute to my parents. This entire post feels like I am trying to fit the history of my person in a sentence- a ridiculously absurd, non-existent- possibility? I feel the closest to that that I have ever been tonight. I feel that the closest I will ever get to that one sentence is to say, ‘I have been loved too well.’ That is, so well. I have been loved so magnificently, so I allow myself to be all at once the person who acknowledges the double reality of what it means to cry for themselves.

It is not self-pity; it is self-love to be, quite frankly, painfully honest with yourself. And, in this way, I am rather suddenly reminded of the humanity I am learning by loving myself to health.