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Category: Reflections

  • Reconnection and the Work Still Ahead

    Reconnection and the Work Still Ahead

    I recently reconnected with someone I knew thirty years ago, and it surprised me by revealing how much quiet healing I’ve done — and how much is still ahead.

    For the most part, we’ve picked up as if no time has passed. Our conversations flow easily, and I find myself feeling safe enough to share parts of me that have been hidden for far too long. That safety is new. It’s tender. It’s something I’m still learning how to trust.

    Being open again is wonderful, but it’s also revealing. It’s showing me how much healing I still have left to do. I notice how hard it is to trust what’s being said — and even harder to trust my own feelings. For so many years, I doubted everything. I was taught not to believe my own reality. Now, even in moments of kindness and care, fear rises up like muscle memory.

    I’m trying to stay present, to let things unfold without rushing to protect myself. Vulnerability feels like standing in sunlight after years in shadow — warm, but blinding. I keep asking myself: When will I trust myself again? When will I trust others again? And maybe the answer isn’t about choosing between trusting myself or trusting others. Maybe it’s both. Maybe they grow together.

    This reconnection is teaching me that the work is never done. Each new experience reveals another layer of what I lost and what I’m fighting to reclaim. It’s hard. It’s scary. And it’s beautiful.

    If any part of this met you where you are, I share more reflections by email.

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  • The Quiet Return of Myself

    The Quiet Return of Myself

    There are little moments that hit me harder than I expect. Not dramatic ones — not the big life changes or the milestones — but the tiny, ordinary flashes that make me realize just how much of myself I had lost.

    Singing at full volume in the car. Dancing around the kitchen while I make dinner. Picking up my guitar again, even though I still barely know how to play it.

    These small things used to be effortless parts of who I was. Joyful, instinctive, unselfconscious. And somewhere along the way, I stopped doing them. Not all at once, not in a way I noticed. They just slipped quietly out of my life, one by one, until the silence felt normal.

    I didn’t realize how long they’d been gone until recently, when they started coming back.

    It wasn’t intentional. One day I just started singing out loud, and halfway through the second or third song, it hit me: I haven’t done this in years. The realization landed with a mix of sadness and relief — sadness for how long I’d been holding myself small, and relief that something inside me was finally loosening.

    As these pieces return, they bring waves of emotion with them. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. Sometimes it’s tender. Sometimes it’s a grief I didn’t know I was carrying. I’m sad that I let these parts of me disappear for so long. I’m sad that I learned to quiet myself to fit into a life that didn’t make space for me.

    But I’m also deeply, fiercely grateful.

    Grateful that I’m reconnecting with the things that make me feel alive. Grateful that I’m remembering who I am when I’m not shrinking. Grateful that I am, slowly and steadily, coming back to myself.

    This return isn’t loud or dramatic. It’s happening in the kitchen, in the car, in the soft corners of my everyday life. And maybe that’s the most beautiful part — that I’m finding myself again in the places I didn’t realize I’d abandoned.

    I’m learning to take up space again. I’m learning to feel joy without apologizing for it. I’m learning to be myself, fully, without hesitation.

    And I’m not losing her again.

    If any part of this met you where you are, I share more reflections by email.

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  • When Old Wounds Echo Through New Moments

    When Old Wounds Echo Through New Moments

    This week, something small and seemingly unrelated cracked open a place in me I didn’t expect. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t even about me. But it stirred up emotions I’ve carried for a long time — the kind that sit quietly until life brushes against them just right.

    My mom is preparing to move to a new state, and her new HOA only allows one pet. She has three. Two of them are registered emotional support animals, which technically means she could make the case to keep all of them. I don’t know what thoughts she wrestled with or how heavy the decision felt for her. All I saw was the simple, swift act of rehoming two animals she has loved for years — one for almost a decade.

    And it stopped me in my tracks.

    My heart didn’t break for her, though I’m sure she had her own heartbreak to carry. My heart broke for the animals — for the sudden shift in their world, for the loss of the security they trusted, for the feeling of being left. They were being sent somewhere partially familiar, but not home. Not the place where they had been loved.

    The intensity of my reaction surprised me. It was deeper than empathy. It was personal.

    If I’m honest, it’s because I’ve felt that kind of abandonment before. More than once. During my parents’ divorce, when my mom seemed to choose a new man over me. And again at the end of my freshman year of high school, when she chose to move to Florida and I stayed behind. Those are stories with layers I’ll unpack in other posts, but the truth is simple: those moments shaped me.

    They made me someone who fights for the underdog. Someone who cannot bear the thought of anyone — person or animal — feeling unwanted, unseen, or unloved. Someone who steps in, even when it costs me.

    And that part of me, the part that aches at the idea of abandonment, is also the part that led me into an abusive marriage. I kept believing that if I could just love him enough, make him feel wanted enough, prove he wasn’t alone, everything would finally be okay. I didn’t realize I was reenacting an old wound — trying to save someone so I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of being left again.

    This week reminded me that the things we carry from childhood don’t disappear. They echo. They surface in unexpected places. They shape the way we love, the way we protect, the way we choose.

    And sometimes, they show us exactly where we still need healing.

    If any part of this met you where you are, I share more reflections by email.

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  • The Breaking Point – Part 1: The Pattern

    The Breaking Point – Part 1: The Pattern

    There was a stretch of years when I kept believing we were on the edge of change. We sat in virtual therapy rooms, session after session, trying to untangle the same knots. He would make promises, soften his tone, say the right words just long enough for me to think we were finally moving forward.

    But the progress never held.

    It always circled back to the same place: I would do something he didn’t like, and he would react with anger — yelling, insults, blame.

    Toward the end, I brought it up again in therapy. I needed him to hear how deeply the volatility was affecting me. The counselor asked him why he reacted that way, and every answer was a variation of the same refrain:

    She made me. It was her fault. She caused it.

    She tried to help him see that he had control over his reactions, that he could walk away instead of exploding. He disagreed. Eventually she stopped trying because there was nowhere for the conversation to go.

    I remember sitting there, feeling the weight of a truth I didn’t want to face: he wasn’t interested in changing. And I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t see how hurtful his behavior was, or why he wouldn’t even try to get help.

    I kept hoping that if I explained it clearly enough, if I loved him hard enough, if I stayed patient long enough, something would shift.

    But nothing shifted.

    By the time we left that session, something in me had changed. I didn’t say it out loud, and I didn’t fully understand it yet, but a quiet truth had settled in my body: I was the only one fighting for change.

    And when you are the only one trying, you are not in a partnership — you are in a cycle.

    Part I ends here — in the fog, in the ache, in the slow unraveling of hope.

    Part II begins with the moment everything snapped into clarity.

    If any part of this met you where you are, I share more reflections by email.

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