Coming Back for Her
A letter to the little girl in the hospital bed, and to anyone still waiting to be told they deserve to be here
by Nina Ajdin
The Letter
You deserved to live.
Even though everything around you smelled like death and made you feel undeserving of it. Even though the sounds outside were gunshots and grenades and people screaming. Even though you were four years old and skin and bones in a hospital bed, and everyone around you had quietly started waiting for you to die.
You deserved to live. And no one told you that.
You didn’t deserve to see and survive so much darkness at such a young age. No child ever should. You deserved all the love, compassion, and understanding you never got. You were allowed to take up space, to breathe in as much air as you needed.
You shouldn’t have had to learn how to survive so well at just four years old. How to shrink yourself to the point of disappearing, because it makes others more comfortable. You deserved to explore the world and life with awe, wonder, and curiosity, instead of seeing it as something that could never be safe, something to get away from, to avoid, to protect yourself from.
• • •
What Was Happening Outside That Room
There was a war outside.
My parents came from a mixed marriage, my mother Catholic, my father Muslim, though neither was particularly religious. It didn’t matter. In that time and place, the lines between people had been drawn by others, and we fell on no one’s side cleanly. I was denied help from both sides. A four year old, caught between two worlds that had decided she didn’t fully belong to either.
My father was away with the army. My mother was not allowed to stay with me at night. So I lay there alone, in a hospital bed, in a country coming apart, while my body tried to decide whether to stay or go.
The doctors tried everything. Nothing worked. And then, at the last possible moment, one doctor gave me several infusions of plasma. It saved my life.
I survived. But the little girl who came out of that hospital had already learned something that would take decades to unlearn: that she was not sure she was allowed to be here.
• • •
What the Body Remembered
Decades later, my skin started burning.
What followed was fourteen years of Topical Steroid Withdrawal, a condition most doctors don’t acknowledge, caused by the very medication prescribed to help me. Skin that cracked and peeled and burned. Nights without sleep. A body in extremis, again. Waiting, again, to see if anyone would come.
I spent years trying to heal it the way I’d been taught to heal things, finding the right treatment, the right diet, the right protocol. Some things helped. Nothing was enough.
What I didn’t understand then, what I wish someone had told me at the very beginning, is that the body doesn’t separate the physical from the emotional from the spiritual. It holds all of it, together, in the same tissue. The same skin. What my body was carrying wasn’t just a reaction to a medication. It was everything that little girl had stored away and never been allowed to release.
• • •
The Session
In a regression session, I went back to her.
I found myself in that hospital room again, four years old, alone, the sounds of war outside. And as I sat with that memory, I noticed something happening in my body in real time: I was shrinking. Pulling my lungs smaller. Breathing less. Taking in less air.
Because I had learned, in that hospital bed, that I was not sure I deserved to breathe fully. That taking up too much space, even the space of a full breath, was something I hadn’t earned.
In the session, I connected to something I can only describe as spirit, or source. Something larger than the story I’d been living inside. And in that connection, I found the belief, small and old and buried very deep, and I untangled it. Dissolved it. I felt tingling move through my crown as it released. Not metaphorically. Physically. In my body.
And then I turned to that little girl in the hospital bed, and I told her: you deserved to live.
At first she didn’t believe me.
But after a while, she had a smile on her face.
• • •
What I Wish I Had Known
This is what I wish someone had handed me at the beginning of my healing journey:
Not a better cream. Not a stricter diet. Not another specialist.
The knowledge that what was happening in my body was connected, deeply, inseparably, to what had happened to my soul. That the physical and the emotional and the spiritual are not three separate problems with three separate solutions. They are the same wound, expressing itself in different layers.
And that it is possible to go back. To find the moment the wound was made. To bring your adult self into that room and say the thing that was never said. To feel the belief dissolve in your body, not just understand it in your mind, but feel it leave.
I found this through therapy, through hypnotherapy, through compassionate inquiry, through Traditional Chinese Medicine, through dozens of regression sessions that took me back to places I had never consciously remembered. None of it was linear. None of it was quick. But all of it was real.
And when I finally let myself breathe fully, when I felt what it was to be one with everything, to be alive, to be life itself, I understood that the healing I had been looking for was never only about my skin.
It was about a little girl in a hospital bed who needed someone to come back for her.
It was about learning, after everything, to be that person.
• • •
If You Are in Your Own Hospital Bed
I don’t know what your fire looks like. Maybe it’s your skin. Maybe it’s an illness that has no name yet, or a name that no doctor takes seriously. Maybe it’s the weight of something that happened so long ago you’ve stopped connecting it to how your body feels today.
But if you have ever felt, somewhere beneath the symptoms and the appointments and the searching, that you are not quite sure you are allowed to be here. That something in you learned, very early, to shrink. To take up less space. To breathe a little less than you need.
I want you to know that belief is not the truth. It is a layer. And layers can be reached.
You deserved to live then.
You deserve to be fully here now.
— Nina
Nina Ajdin is a writer and fourteen-year Topical Steroid Withdrawal survivor. She writes about chronic illness, trauma, healing, and the layered journey of becoming whole at healingthelayers.com
