The stories we get from others

I wasn’t a difficult pregnancy.But I was born into a life that didn't want me...

My parents were just 18 when I arrived—teenagers trying to raise a baby while navigating chaos, domestic violence, and a constant lack of stability. Somewhere in that storm, the story formed that I made everything worse.

I was told I was a “bad baby.”Too loud. Too needy. Too much.So much so that when my mom got pregnant with her third child—my brother—people cried. They offered condolences, help in getting an abortion and support she didn’t ask for. They questioned her choices, because no one liked Melanie.

Their message was unmistakable:

“Why do this again? Melanie is awful.”

And that theme carried through my early life.I was “an awful toddler.”“Hard to love.”“Hard to even like.”

My world shifted constantly—times of plenty, times of nothing, safe homes and unsafe ones. Through it all, the only person who loved me freely and fiercely was my older brother. He loved me big. I wasn't enough he left me, he loved drugs more.

But for most of my life, I carried the narrative handed to me before I had language for it:I am hard to love.

In my longest relationship, these ideas were reinforced daily—fat, hard to love (exact wording), nobody likes you—until those words carved themselves into my self-worth. So I tried even harder. I over-gave. I over-performed. I worked to earn love I thought I had to barter for.

Because if I couldn’t be loved easily, maybe I could at least be liked. Maybe I need to earn my way into people's lives and perhaps I will wiggle my way into their hearts and be a part of their lives.  

Now I’m 47—successful, surrounded by family and friends who genuinely love me—and yet the old wound still whispers that I don’t quite fit. That I’m still the difficult child. Still outside the circle.  Still...Too loud. Too needy. Too much.

They say you eventually find “your people.”And I have people.But believing you’re lovable is a very different journey.

And then today… something happened that has never happened before.

In a meeting in a vulnerable moment someone I love and respect said: 

“Melanie is easy to love.”

And for a moment, it felt like my heart cracked open.

No one has ever said those words about me.Not in childhood.Not in adulthood.Not in any relationship.Not in nearly five decades of living.

Hearing them—unexpected, unprompted—didn’t erase the old stories. But it shifted something. It felt like a light turned on inside a room I’ve kept closed all my life.

Maybe I was never hard to love.Maybe I was just born into a world that didn’t know how to love me.And maybe, finally, the world I’m in now is different.

Maybe I’m different too.