This Part: An Open Letter from the Middle of the Mess
Well… this is awkward.
We somehow created a platform that does the very thing we’ve spent years avoiding:
Talking about our feelings.
For two former emo-scene kids, you’d think this would come naturally.
But no. We got good at stuffing things down, making dark jokes, and powering through while pretending everything was fine.
(Spoiler: it wasn’t.)
Grief? Caregiving? Identity loss?
Real grown-up, soul-wrecking shit?
It was deeply uncomfortable. Plus, when you’re in the trenches of parenting, caregiving, working, managing appointments and chemo schedules, and trying to make sure your house doesn’t fall apart around you too …well, there just honestly isn’t time to process.
So we intellectualized it. We over-functioned. We disassociated. We did what high-achieving, high-anxiety people do best: kept it moving.
Until we couldn’t.
Somewhere along the way, between the surgeries, diagnoses, caregiving chaos, and total identity whiplash, we hit a wall. Hard.
And we realized: if we don’t do something with all of this, it’s going to break us.
Not in a poetic “break you open and let the light in” kind of way.
More like “your eye is twitching and you just screamed at a sock” kind of way. (Seriously, where do all these socks even come from, and why are they everywhere?!?)
It didn’t happen in some revelatory, slow-motion scene. It was more like a sudden jolt awake from a life we didn’t consent to, realizing the daze we’d been moving through was survival, not stability.
And the thing about survival mode? It has an expiration date. We’re not meant to live in survival mode for years at a time.
What we couldn’t face started showing up anyway. In tension that settled into our shoulders like lead. In panic attacks that hijacked our breath. In blood pressure that screamed what our mouths refused to say.
Our bodies were sounding the alarm: feel this or be consumed by it.
This wasn’t just stress; it was the cost of pretending we were okay. And the bill had come due.
And instead of collapsing… we picked up the pieces and started making something that made sense to us. We started writing, we started creating, and we prioritized fun again. We started remembering the pieces of us we somehow lost along the way.
We don’t have the answers. We’re not trying to be anyone’s guru.
We just knew the silence was killing us.
We needed somewhere to put the truth. The unfiltered, unpolished, uncurated truth.
We couldn’t find that space, so we built it.
That’s what This Part is. It’s a reclamation of voice, of truth, of self.
Not in spite of the pain, but because of it. It’s a soft, feral place for the ones still standing.
The ones holding it together with sheer nerve, wild hope, and the occasional poorly timed joke.
We’re not here to inspire.
We’re here to interrupt the silence, the shame, the polished grief narrative.
Because here’s what we know:
You can be grateful and angry.
You can love your people and feel crushed by the weight of caring for them.
You can survive something traumatic and still feel like you’re unraveling years later.
You can laugh harder than ever before, because once you’ve seen how fragile it all is, joy feels like rebellion.
If you’ve ever felt like your pain didn’t “qualify” because it wasn’t big enough or visible…
If you’ve ever been told to be strong when what you needed was space to fall apart…
If you’ve ever tried to explain what you were going through and got met with silence or spiritual bypassing…
We see you and get it.
You're just in this part. And yeah, it sucks.
But you’re not alone.
This platform won’t fix you. (We can barely fix ourselves.)
But it will meet you where you are.
It will hold your stories with reverence.
It will make room for whatever’s real.
So, welcome.
To the middle of the mess.
To the truth-telling, the tender rage, the exhausted hope.
To This Part.
We’re so damn glad you’re here, and we’re sorry the world gave you a reason to need this.
But hey, misery loves company, and so does radical honesty.
So pull up a seat. Bring your rage, your grief, and your weird coping mechanisms.
You’re one of us now.
🖤
Kristina & Ryan
Co-founders of This Part
