This morning I walked outside after Martin left for work before anyone else was awake. No reason. Just the trees and the night doing what they do. And somewhere between the first step and the fifth, I was eight years old again, because something reminded me of childhood. Because the quiet did.
There was a version of me who found her way outside every single day. Long afternoons. Stillness. The trees not needing a single thing from me.
I did not know at the time why that mattered so much. I just knew that out there, I could breathe differently.
What I did not understand until decades later was what I was breathing away from.
The tension in the room that I had named "normal." The unspoken things I had absorbed so completely I thought they were mine.
The little girl who adapted, and then kept adapting, and then one day woke up inside a life that fit... but did not feel like hers.
I thought my childhood was an adventure.
I was not wrong about that.
I was just missing the whole picture.
So why do I tell you this?
Because I’m not a struggling women. I’m a woman who adapted beautifully. Who made chaos feel familiar. Who called performance survival, and then called survival identity, and then called identity self.
I am sophisticated. Accomplished. Deeply invested in my own growth. And I am still living, quietly, inside something that I never had the words for.
The part of me that loved stillness still knows the way home. It has always known.
What I want you to do next is simple:
come sit with me.
My sponsor said that is where we begin. It is free. It is live. And it is the first room where you will not need to perform knowing the answer.
