Dear girl, do you know?
However this world carves you, however life wears you down, deep in your heart you are still that innocent, kind, shining little girl.
She may fall silent for a while because of pain, but as soon as the spring wind rises again, she will bloom once more.
Dear girl, you may feel you aren’t beautiful enough, clever enough, good enough, and always believe you don’t deserve tenderness and being favored.
These thoughts often come from early lack — your family of origin didn’t lift and support you enough, so you came to believe love is a prize that has to be “earned.”
These worn-out thoughts come from a worn-out collective consciousness, and they need to be let go.
Real love doesn’t need to be given by others; it comes from your own heart. However you treat yourself, the world will answer in kind. Starting today, please be compassionate with yourself. This is not only the source of happiness, but also the starting point for reshaping your life.
Dear girl, have you, too, once made “a stable, happy family” the ultimate goal of your life? Growing up, we all seem to have been fed a script for women: get a respectable diploma, find a secure job, marry a reliable partner, and then become a devoted, gentle wife and mother.
Within that frame, many women have quietly had the borders of their dreams drawn in, never realizing they had far greater possibilities.
But reality has never been kinder to you just because you followed the rules. Once you grow up and step into society, you face pressure no less than men do. At work you keep scrambling and struggling, through countless moments when your confidence collapsed and what you wanted stayed out of reach; on every lonely rainy night you gritted your teeth and got through it, and finally learned to hold up your own umbrella.
At home you have to give everything to play the role of the “good wife and mother,” but is your effort really understood — or simply taken for granted?
You long to be seen, cherished and loved, yet reality leaves only a mess of small troubles and a soul with nowhere to rest.
Dear girl, please stop and step out of habit. Have you chased stability so hard that you’ve neglected what your heart truly longs for? Work is not only a way to make a living, and family shouldn’t be the whole of your life. The passions you keep pushing down, the dreams withering day by day in silence — those are the sparks that can truly wake your soul.
As the philosopher Bertrand Russell saw it, people do not live merely to survive, but to pursue some noble aims. The meaning of life has never been in what you “have,” but in what you “become.”
If we pin our happiness on some person or some thing, we will be disappointed in the end — because the world is impermanent, and no one can give you security forever except yourself. Stop waiting for someone to put the glass slipper on your foot. Be your own fairy godmother, and make your own miracle.
Dear girl, if no one has ever told you, “life takes fighting,” then let me tell you now: yes, you need to fight; life really is a battle. And the point of this battle is to reach your true self — the vast, free, one-of-a-kind you.
True freedom comes not only from financial independence, but even more from an endlessly rich inner world.
Always remember: on this train of your life, your parents, partner, children and friends are fellow travelers. Treasure their company, but whatever happens, never let anyone but you decide the direction.
Once you have a firm grip on the wheel, you can ask yourself the next question: “What is my mission?” “What kind of presence do I want to be?”
Dear girl, when you were young, perhaps no one told you that the value of a life isn’t limited to the family, and can reach out into far wider fields; that your effort should be aimed at your own gifts, your work, your mission — not at another person.
Do you know? Your life is not lived for anyone else. You came into this world to feel the truest shape of your own soul, and to release your light into this wide world.
Dear girl, life is like a puzzle, and the wholeness of your soul is the destination you will finally reach. The setbacks and pain along the way are like shadows; they make you hesitate, waver, and doubt yourself.
But please believe that every hardship in life, while it seems to be breaking you, is actually making you. In the end you’ll find that when hardship has built a solid core in you, the things that once hurt you so much reveal their meaning — they made you more real, more whole, closer to the very center of who you are.
Only the experiences you grind out with your own hands can truly complete your soul.
Dear girl, you have let some time slip by in this life. But now is still the best moment. Please live again — seriously, passionately. Love yourself with everything you have, carve yourself, pursue something “bigger than yourself,” and then spend this life in a way you love.
Born into this world, you can’t just drift with the current. You have to see heaven and earth, see all beings, and finally, see yourself.
Dear girl, remember, you are not alone. In this world there are countless others like you, working hard to find a meaning of their own.
We are awakening. Women of our generation are all contributing our awareness, wisdom and strength, using our limited lives to write our own answers for our time.
May you and I all be stars, shining on each other across the night skies of our lives, and together carve the most stunning stroke into the monument of this age.