The Broken & Beautiful

For a long time, I thought coming home to myself was the goal. If I could just figure out who I was — untangle the knots, reconnect with the quiet parts — then I would be done. What I didn't understand was that finding myself and caring for myself were two very different things. Finding myself was only the beginning. The deeper work of self-connection came afterward. The work of learning how to stay. And eventually, of learning to mother myself home.

For years, my body was speaking. The anxiety that arrived like weather I couldn't predict. The exhaustion sleep couldn't touch. The way my system would lock up around the people I was supposed to feel safest with. I called it confusion. I called it malfunction. What if it was never either of those things? What if your body isn't broken — what if it's been telling you the truth all along, and you just haven't been given permission to believe her?

One of the questions I hear most often sounds like this: "If I know this pattern isn't helping me anymore, why do I keep doing it?" The answer rarely lives in what happened to us. Sometimes it lives in what was never fully given — what was absent, inconsistent, or longed for but never securely received. And the patterns we formed to survive that absence? They don't release us just because we've grown up.