For as long as I can remember, I carried a tremendous weight in my heart. My heart used to break easily over everything: a dead bee, a fallen tree, leaving a place that felt like home, opening myself to someone and allowing myself to love them. Every little scratch stayed with me. Every disappointment, every loss, every goodbye.
Over time, those drops filled the dam. When the dam began overflowing, the tiny construction workers in my heart got busy. They built the walls higher. Stronger. Thicker.
I became more guarded. I preferred casual connections. I kept people at arm’s length. It felt safer that way. If nobody got too close, nobody could hurt me.
The problem is, I am not built for that. I don’t think any of us really are.
Humans are built for connection. We are built to care for one another, to nurture ourselves and the people we love, to offer kindness even when it isn’t immediately returned. Living behind walls may feel safe, but it isn’t the life I wanted to live long-term.
Ever since I learned about the connection between my knee injury and my heart, about how deeply that injury affected me emotionally, I knew I had work to do. It wasn’t just my ligament that had been hurt. The injury broke my heart in ways I hadn’t fully acknowledged.
This time, I knew I had to go all in. I wasn’t falling apart, but I had finally become strong enough to hold what was there without collapsing under it.
People often say acceptance is the key to healing. What I’ve learned is that acceptance isn’t something you declare. You can’t simply say, “I accept this,” and move on.
That’s only the beginning. You have to feel it.
You have to let yourself feel the emotions you’ve been avoiding, the grief you’ve been outrunning, the disappointment you’ve been carrying, the pain you’ve been trying to outthink. You have to stop resisting what already exists.
Only then can release happen. Real release arrives when acceptance moves from the mind into the body.
Last night, sitting in a hot spring pool inside a dimly lit cave spa, I finally allowed myself to feel things I had been avoiding for a long time. One by one, they surfaced. One by one, they left. Then came the cold plunge. System reset. Later, floating beneath the stars in the outdoor pool, another layer came up. This one arrived with tears.
Turns out spas aren’t only for physical healing. Sometimes they become a place where the heart gets a chance to catch up too.
For me, much of this journey has involved healing my inner child. I think many of us eventually find ourselves there.
Children are incredibly resilient, but they are also incredibly fragile. Like butterfly wings, they can be marked by experiences that seem small at the time but leave lasting impressions.
That doesn’t mean we all had terrible childhoods. I certainly didn’t. In many ways, I had a beautiful childhood, and I’m deeply grateful for it.
But gratitude and hurt can coexist. You can have loving parents and still carry wounds. You can have wonderful memories and still have parts of yourself that need healing.
For a long time, I never considered healing my inner child because I assumed there was nothing to heal. Then life started bringing old themes back to the surface. Memories appeared. Patterns became visible.
And slowly, I began tending to the parts of me that had been quietly waiting for attention all along.
Little by little, the younger version of me got what she needed.
A bandage here. A hug there. A little more understanding. A little more compassion. A little more love.
And eventually, she got to go back to being what she was always meant to be: A child. Playful. Curious. Free.
Since this reset, something feels different. I no longer feel the need to close myself off to stay safe. I can remain open while still having boundaries. Soft without being weak. Loving without abandoning myself. Accepting that life is largely outside my control. Accepting that not everything will go the way I hoped. Accepting that people and circumstances often arrive not to punish me, but to teach me something.
And most importantly, I’ve learned to trust myself, and stop fighting love.
Or perhaps more accurately, I’ve learned to trust the version of me that can already see further down the road. Whether you call it intuition, higher self, future self, or something else entirely doesn’t really matter.
I’ve gathered enough evidence in my own life to know that some deeper part of me has been guiding the way all along.
And if time isn’t quite as linear as we experience it, perhaps the future version of me is helping the present version in the same way I now help the younger version of myself. Perhaps we’re all leaving breadcrumbs for ourselves across time, and calling it the “universe” guiding us. Well, babe, we are the universe, apparently.
And am I done healing? Nope. Now an entirely different layer I am ready to work on have arrived: deep ancestral healing at the root. Things that began long before I arrived here.
The work continues. There was a time when that realization would have devastated me. Now it doesn’t. Now I simply accept it.
Healing isn’t a destination you arrive at one day. It’s a relationship. And for the first time, I think I’m at peace with that.
With love.