There are times when you look at yourself and grieve. You miss your old energy, softness, hope, discipline, confidence, or the version of you that felt more alive before heartbreak, mistakes, grief, illness, or tiredness changed something inside you. It hurts when your own soul feels unfamiliar and the past begins to look kinder than the present.
Missing who you were can become another kind of loss. You compare yourself with an earlier version and wonder whether that person is gone forever. Yet healing does not always mean becoming exactly who you were.
Allah can return what was good, remove what was harmful, and grow qualities in you that could only have been learned through what you survived.
Ya Al-Jabbar, mend what has become broken in me. You know the seasons that weakened me and the parts of myself I miss. If I have lost something good, restore it in a purer, steadier form. If I am not meant to return to who I was, shape me into someone wiser through what I have lived.
Do not let grief over my old self make me blind to the work still happening in me. Replace numbness with presence, heaviness with clarity, and self-disappointment with patient effort. Help me rebuild through small acts of worship, rest, honesty, and care. Let me notice quiet progress instead of dismissing it because it looks different now.
May Allah heal what feels lost, return goodness to what changed inside you, and make the person you are becoming more sincere, peaceful, and anchored in Him. Ameen.
