Tag: life-lessons

  • Accepting Love

    One of the biggest lessons of my life was learning to stop fighting love.

    I think many of us unknowingly build walls around our hearts when we are young. Not just because of romantic heartbreak, but because of life itself.

    Friendships ending. Adults we trusted disappointing us. The death of loved ones. Loss in all its different forms. In my case, it even included the destruction of a forest where I spent much of my childhood, surrounded by trees I considered friends.

    At some point, closing the heart feels like the safest option. If I do not love, I cannot get hurt.

    At least that is what we tell ourselves.

    Fear has a way of making us contract. Like a flower closing its petals during a storm and forgetting to open them again when the sun returns.

    For a long time, I thought strength meant keeping my heart protected…

    …life had other plans.

    The love that eventually became one of my greatest teachers looked nothing like I expected it to look like. I spent a great deal of energy trying to outrun it, reason with it, deny it, fix it, move on from it, and explain it away.

    I genuinely tried. Until I became exhausted.

    What is difficult to admit is that the struggle was never really with another person.

    The struggle was with my own heart. Because every time I fought what I felt, I was fighting myself. Every time I rejected my own emotions, I was rejecting a part of myself.

    That does not mean we should chase people, force outcomes, or build our lives around another person.

    It simply means we stop arguing with our own experience.

    We allow ourselves to feel what is already there. Without shame. Without judgement. Without trying to make it disappear.

    There is a difference between being attached to someone and accepting that you love them.

    For a long time, I confused the two.

    Acceptance is quiet. Attachment is restless. One seeks peace. The other seeks an outcome.

    As I slowly let go of expectations, attachments, and the need for things to look a certain way, something unexpected happened.

    The walls around my heart began to come down. Toward everyone. Friends. Family. Colleagues. Life itself.

    The love I had spent so much energy resisting became the very thing that softened me back into my own life.

    Looking back, I can see that when I was running from my feelings, I was also running from myself.

    At the time, I did not understand that.

    I thought I was emotionally aware because I could sit with difficult emotions. I thought I had become independent because I no longer needed someone else to regulate how I felt.

    Yet there was still one thing I was refusing to acknowledge: My own heart. And it had been trying to get my attention for quite some time.

    What finally brought freedom was not getting what I wanted. It was letting go of the idea that I needed anything to happen at all.

    The love remained. The attachment did not. The expectations did not. The suffering gradually began to dissolve.

    That was the surprising part. Freedom did not arrive because love disappeared. Freedom arrived because I stopped resisting it.

    Because I stopped demanding that it become something.

    It became simply what it was. A feeling. A truth within my own experience. Nothing more. Nothing less.

    There is something deeply peaceful about that.

    When we stop fighting what is inside us, we stop turning our own hearts into prisons.

    The emotions themselves are rarely the problem. The resistance to them often is.

    Whether it is love, grief, anger, sadness, or joy, there is a certain freedom that comes from allowing ourselves to feel what we feel without immediately trying to change it.

    Life seems to teach this lesson over and over again, through experience.

    The more we run from ourselves, the more life gently turns us back toward ourselves.

    Eventually, we realise there is nowhere else to go.

    I thought freedom meant becoming free from love. I thought it meant forgetting. Moving on. Feeling nothing.

    Now I see it differently.

    Freedom is not the absence of love. Freedom is the absence of suffering around love.

    It is being able to let the feeling exist without needing to control it.

    Without needing it to become a relationship. Without needing it to become a story. Without needing it to become anything at all.

    Just love. Simple as that.

    Funny enough, this lesson appears throughout David Hawkins’ book Letting Go, a book that crossed my path for years before I ever opened it.

    By the time I finally received a copy, life had already taught me much of what was written inside.

    The long way. Through trial and error. Through resistance and surrender. Through holding on and eventually letting go.

    Perhaps some lessons can be learned from books. Others seem determined to become lived experience.

    Either way, love remains one of life’s greatest teachers.

    And sometimes it arrives in forms we never would have chosen for ourselves. Perhaps that is part of the gift.

    Because the life waiting on the other side of surrender rarely looks like the one we originally imagined.

  • In Between

    This might be a dark and depressing topic for some, but I find that it can be a necessary step when the time comes in our personal growth journeys: making peace with death.

    For me, this came up after almost getting hit by a bus. I have had near misses at least once a year for the past ten years, and every time, I had clung onto life a little harder. FOMO would hit me like a brick. An adrenaline rush, followed by the sudden urge to connect with people I honestly did not want to leave this life without having spoken to.

    Sounds sentimental, right?

    This time was different.

    The day after, something shifted. I found myself in a state that I can only describe as profound peace. Kind of my own version of an NDE, perhaps, without the physical repercussions and without the visual or spiritual experience we usually associate with one. Instead, I was city-watching on a rainy day. I did not see anything extraordinary, and yet somehow, there it was.

    The knowledge. The peace. The bliss. The acceptance. The love.

    Since then, I have been thinking about death, which was a subject I had avoided for a long time because of fear.

    I have always had a strange feeling that I died young in what seem to me like memories of past lives, and I never really felt like I would make it to old age in this one either. I do not know if any of that is true, and honestly, it does not matter much.

    If you have spent the majority of your life believing in some sort of afterlife, I think there eventually comes a point where you consider the possibility that this might just be it.

    That we might get to be conscious in a physical body just once.

    Everything is happening all at once.

    We are opening our eyes as a newborn, taking our last breath in a body, falling in love, leaving home, losing someone we love, getting through a breakup, making love, laughing, crying… all at once.

    And perhaps, in another sense, we are also our neighbours, parents, enemies, lovers, friends, exes, children. The trees, the air, the water, the wind.

    Everything at once.

    And yet, we are consciously present in just one body, right?

    Whether any of this is provable, right or false ceases to be the important point. The point is that there can come a moment when you accept that this might be the only physical existence you will ever experience.

    And somehow, that can be freeing.

    There is no longer a reason to postpone the things that matter with a whimsical “I will do that in my next life” or “maybe in another life.”

    You simply accept the possibility that this is it.

    And let go of the FOMO: Fear of missing out on life.

    Many of us do not necessarily fear death itself. We fear having lived an unfulfilled life. Not having enough time. Not getting to experience everything we wished to experience. Not becoming everything we imagined we could become.

    And this is where things get interesting.

    Whether we understand it as the path our soul chose, fate, circumstance, or simply the strange unfolding of life, there comes a point where we have to make peace with the fact that life does not always look the way we imagined it would.

    Sometimes, it looks completely different.

    Perhaps the mind has one idea of what a fulfilling life should contain, while life itself has another.

    And if there is such a thing as a path our soul has chosen, maybe we do not get to know exactly what that path is supposed to look like while we are walking it.

    Maybe we only get to walk it. There is a strange kind of relief in that.

    You cannot miss what you were never meant to experience. You can only miss what the mind decided you were supposed to have.

    And somewhere in there comes the “it is what is” mindset.

    Not in a defeated way. In a deeply accepting way.

    The melting of the heart walls. Being one with life, surrendering to your own path, immersing yourself in love.

    By that point, it helps to have a nervous system that feels safe enough to hold it. It does not sound particularly impressive when written down, but there is something incredibly profound about being able to simply let life be what it is.

    To see that everything is constantly happening within a much larger web of things.

    The planet does not ask whether the rain should fall today. Trees do not wonder whether they are growing fast enough. Rivers do not seem particularly concerned with whether they are taking the right turn.

    And somehow, life keeps moving.

    Perhaps our lives have something of that same interconnectedness. Things balance and change in ways we cannot always see from where we are standing. Sometimes we understand it later. Sometimes we never do.

    And perhaps that is okay too.

    It can look from the outside as though one has given up on life. But it can actually be the opposite. One starts caring more. Loving more. Feeling more.

    Just without gripping so tightly. Without attaching the same meaning to every outcome. Without needing everything to become what we thought it should become.

    It all becomes what is.

    Not what was. Not what will be. Not what might have been, would have been, or should have been. It just is.

    Does that mean I am like this every single day now?

    No. It takes practice. Awareness. Practice. Boundaries.

    There are still storms. There are still difficult days, old patterns, fears, desires, and all the wonderfully human things that come with being alive.

    But perhaps making peace with death is not really about becoming less attached to life.

    Maybe it is about becoming less afraid of living it.

    About allowing life to be exactly as it is, without constantly asking it to become something else.

    And somewhere in that space in between holding on and letting go, there can be a kind of bliss.

    I have had a glimpse of it. And I would wish that glimpse for everyone. Not necessarily through the same experiences, beliefs, or paths. Just through whatever path eventually brings them a little closer to peace.

    Because even in the middle of the storms, the direction can still be worth it.

  • Accepting Reality

    Acceptance has never exactly been my strongest skill.

    Give me a problem and I’ll find ten solutions. Give me a closed door and I’ll start looking for windows. If that doesn’t work, I’ll build a ladder.

    I’ve always been the type of person who believes things can change. If something isn’t working, fix it. If fixing it doesn’t work, try another approach. If that doesn’t work, love it into submission. If life doesn’t fit, create a different one.

    Not necessarily because reality is wrong, but because my imagination has always been louder than reality.

    Then came the knee injury. And then another. And then another. (Yes, seriously.)

    Three injuries in ten months. At some point even I had to stop and ask: “Alright. What exactly are we doing here?”

    The answer was annoyingly simple. I wasn’t accepting reality. Not the spiritual reality. Not the cosmic reality. The physical one.

    The very boring reality that a damaged ligament has limitations. The reality that healing takes time. The reality that my body doesn’t care about my plans. The reality that optimism is not a substitute for recovery.

    Humbling. Very humbling.

    The funny thing is that during the same period I had done more inner work than ever before. I learned how to soften. How to stop controlling everything. How to surrender. How to let my walls come down. How to choose myself. How to speak honestly. How to love myself. How to hold boundaries without closing my heart. How to stop abandoning myself. How to sit in peace.

    At times I even touched states of consciousness I genuinely don’t know how to describe any other way than enlightenment, whilst getting my baseline up to profound peace, without getting bored. Because it was absolutely boring at first. If you know, you know.

    And yet. A re-torn ligament still didn’t care.

    Life has a remarkable ability to keep us honest. You can have mystical experiences on Tuesday and still be heartbroken by your knee on Wednesday.

    Both can be true.

    One thing I know for sure for myself is that life keeps teaching the same lesson through different classrooms. For me, acceptance wasn’t only showing up through my body.

    It was showing up through my emotions too. Especially love.

    Now, whether you frame that through spirituality, psychology, attachment theory, destiny, a twin flame journey, or pure coincidence is entirely up to you.

    I don’t care what label people use, because I do not use one, it is what is. Literally. A label does not change the experience of the observer.

    What I know is that for years I tried running from certain feelings. And every time I did, life seemed to have an absolutely incredible ability to sit me back down.

    Sometimes literally. Started with a hip injury. Back injury. Knee injury. Knee injury again, and then again.

    At some point the universe wasn’t sending subtle hints anymore. It was practically throwing folding chairs at my body. Maybe I have just run out of WD-40 though, who knows?

    Run where exactly? The feelings came with me. The lessons came with me. The work I wanted to avoid, feelings I did not want to process came with me. Reality came with me.

    So eventually I stopped trying to outrun them. Not because I suddenly became enlightened. Trust me, if enlightenment were that easy, I would have taken that shortcut years ago. The problem is that you don’t go floating into timeless bliss while hauling around twenty-eight years of emotional luggage. At some point, the baggage starts opening itself. Life kindly – and by kindly I mean by absolutely dragging me by my hair – humbled me until fighting it felt more exhausting than feeling it.

    And that’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions about Instagrammable growth and healing. They treat acceptance as feeling good about something, and detaching completely.

    It doesn’t. You don’t suddenly become a hard rock, it’s the opposite. Acceptance simply means seeing something clearly, and sitting with it without tweaking it into an alternate reality.

    You can accept something and still dislike it. You can accept reality and still wish it were different. You can accept your injury and still be scared. You can accept your feelings and still cry about them. Acceptance isn’t agreement. It’s letting go of control, especially when things do not look the way you want them to.

    And honestly? Some days I’m incredibly peaceful. Some days I feel like sunshine wrapped in human form. Some days I look at my life and think: “Everything really is unfolding exactly how it needs to, it really is what is.” Some days I successfully separate myself from my thoughts – and if you have ADHD level association and mind chatter, Virgo level overthinking, you know how blissfully quiet this could be.

    And then there are days when my knee hurts, and I have to accept now my full healing will take a year, which ultimately reminds me something someone said about how short a year actually was (sir, it has been more than a year in that context, and I still don’t find a year short), and suddenly my mind is taking over things I thought I’d already mastered.

    Enlightenment who?

    The older I get, the more I think real growth looks less like becoming some perfectly calm spiritual master and more like shortening the distance between reaction and awareness.

    You still get triggered. You just don’t react.

    You still get scared. You just don’t build a house there.

    Your mind still takes over. You just have awareness to realize what is going on and know how to process what is coming out. 

    You still have emotions that belong to the lower frequencies. The difference is that you stop treating them like a crisis. You let yourself feel them, process them, and move through them instead of building a summer home in them. Then, when you’re ready, you consciously return to the state you want to live from. Apparently that’s called emotional mastery. My exes are probably laughing somewhere. Sorry guys, I didn’t have that skill installed at the time. Turns out you were right about a few things. Don’t let it go to your heads.

    And oh, accepting that I am human has turned out to be a surprisingly important lesson. You’d think after twenty-eight years I’d have that one figured out by now, right? Apparently not.

    Intellectually, I know I’m human. Experientially? That’s a different story. Most of the time I feel more like the wind than the person standing in it. Like the clouds drifting overhead, a bird crossing the sky, water deep in the ocean, a grain of sand on a distant beach, a sea star, a wandering spirit, consciousness itself.

    What I rarely felt was human.

    Human with limitations. Human with needs. Human with emotions. Human with a body that gets injured, tired, overwhelmed, heartbroken, and occasionally has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.

    There is a strange kind of bittersweet peace in finally accepting that.

    And maybe that’s the point in this day and age. Not becoming immune to being human. Not transcending humanity. But becoming more compassionate and aware with the human experience.

    Because no matter how much peace we cultivate, life will eventually hand us something difficult. A loss. A disappointment. A heartbreak. A diagnosis. A torn ligament that apparently has strong opinions about our life choices.

    And then we get another opportunity to practice. Not perfection. Acceptance.

    Again. And again.

    And again.

    Until one day we stop fighting reality long enough to realize that reality was never the enemy in the first place.

  • Why Empaths Are Finally Turning Up the Heat

    For years, the narrative around being an “empath” has been defined by permeability. We were told to be sponges, to hold space, to soften our edges, and to let the world flow through us. We were a combination of Earth, Air, and Water. Grounded, observant, and fluid. But we were living in a state of constant maintenance. We were the builders, but we were never allowed to own the building.

    We lived with a “leaky” OS, subconsciously broadcasting “I am available for emotional extraction.” We let crowds and environments drain us, treating our own capacity as a public utility for anyone who needed a recharge.

    But there’s a glitch in that code. Empathy without boundaries is just self-erasure.

    There is a version of us that has always existed, a version that wasn’t designed to just “receive” the world, but to transmute it. For a long time, I lived without the Fire. I had the stability of Earth, the logic of Air, and the depth of Water, but I lacked the ignition protocol. I lacked the ability to set a boundary that wasn’t just a fence, but a forge.

    “Fire” isn’t about aggression. It’s about sovereignty. It is the power to stop being a drain-point for the world and start being an engine.

    The most profound shift happens when you stop asking the environment to be “quiet” so you can survive it, and start demanding that the environment fuel you.

    I used to walk into crowded rooms and feel the static of a thousand different frequencies pulling at my nervous system. I would leave exhausted, my own code overwritten by the noise. But when you reverse-engineer your empathic system, you change your permeability. You stop being a sponge and start being a processor.

    Now, those same environments don’t drain me, they charge me. I’ve stopped defending against the world and started dictating my interaction with it. I treat external chaos as raw data, and I use my internal “Fire” to convert that data into momentum.

    This isn’t “re-invention.” It’s activation. It’s the realization that the power was never outside of you; you were just waiting until you were ready to hold it.

    You stop asking for permission to be powerful. You stop looking for external anchors to hold your structure because you’ve finally built an internal foundation that can withstand the heat.

    Earth provides the blueprint. Air moves the data. Water fuels the flow. Fire protects the borders and turns chaos into fuel.

    When you integrate all four, you stop “feeling” the world and start operating it. You stop being a character in other people’s dramas and start being the System Administrator of your own reality.

    I’m no longer afraid of the intensity of the world. In fact, I’m using it. The environments that once threatened to burn me out are now just fuel for my furnace.

    The old way was to survive the world. The new way is to command it. Let the burning begin.

    And if you have a sensitive, empathetic system navigating these waters… let your fire out, and let the fun begin. 

  • Your Life is Rigged (by You) 

    At the end of The Matrix Revolutions, the Architect tells the Oracle, “You’ve played a dangerous game.” And she responds with, “Change always is.”

    If you know the movies by heart, you know the Architect is referring to the game the Oracle played: the orchestrated sequence of events that ultimately broke the machines’ cycle. The illusion of the One. The destruction of each version of Zion. The rebuilding of it with the people the One chooses. And ultimately, getting Neo to the Machine City by introducing Trinity into the equation.

    And if you’ve seen The Matrix Resurrections, you already know why Trinity matters. Or, if you’re like me and understood her significance before the fourth movie ever came out, then you probably didn’t need the fourth movie to confirm it.

    But I’m not here to nerd out about The Matrix. I’m here to tell you that your life is a game. You’re Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, the Oracle, Smith, the machines… all of it.

    You’re playing a game designed by you, for you.

    The Oracle also said something equally important: “You’ve already made the choice. You’re here to understand why you made it.”

    That’s it. Our consciousness makes choices, and then continues orchestrating events in our lives that eventually lead us toward the destination it already chose.

    Did Neo know exactly what he was doing while going to work? No. But he went anyway.

    Change is difficult. So if you’ve found yourself on a path that’s dismantling your ego so that who you truly are can emerge. Whether you call it a twin flame journey, a spiritual awakening, a healing journey, or simply growth, you’re not alone. You were never alone.

    Now, how does knowing any of this help when your payment is late, your tax deadline is approaching, your retirement contributions are due, and your neighbor’s bathroom fan has apparently been running continuously since the Jurassic Period?

    Well, you continue doing the work. You continue shifting your internal state toward emotions that serve you, rather than automatically surrendering to anxiety, frustration, fear, and annoyance.

    It’s not easy. But it can be trained.

    Once you’ve felt a state enough times: peace, gratitude, trust, safety, joy, you can find your way back to it. Your system remembers. Sometimes all it takes is recalling what that state felt like, and your system begins responding again.

    Because nervous system safety is priority number one. If we don’t cultivate it consciously, we fall back into survival mode, the very place we worked so hard to leave behind.

    Eventually, the goal becomes non-attachment and allowance.

    Allowing reality to organize itself around your internal state rather than trying to force specific outcomes.

    Some call it visualization. Some call it imagination. Some call it observation.

    Whatever label you prefer, the point remains the same: stop gripping so tightly to one particular outcome.

    Because what the ego wants isn’t always what actually fits.

    If your internal state is dominated by scarcity, lack, fear, self-doubt, and unworthiness, then those are the patterns you’ll continue noticing reflected around you.

    But if your internal state begins vibrating with trust, love, abundance, safety, and self-worth…

    Well. Isn’t that a much nicer reality to live in?

    You don’t need to “manifest” your dream life. You need to become the version of yourself that naturally reflects it.

    Then allow reality to rearrange itself accordingly, without desperately clinging to how, when, or through whom it arrives.

    Because you’ll be okay regardless. You’ve got you. Your “future self” is looking out for you, as there is no such a thing as the future. And if you’re conscious enough, you know you’ve been looking out for your “past self” just as much. 

    And if you’re desperately gripping onto something? Well… Let’s just say the “Universe” tends to find desperation about as attractive as most people do.

  • Why Some Flow Naturally, and Why Some of Us Had to Engineer It

    There is an unspoken assumption in both spiritual and self-development circles: that there is a “right” way to arrive at wholeness. We are told to meditate until we dissolve, or to study until we understand. But if you observe the spectrum of human behavior, you realize that the path to a healthy individual is far more diverse, and often, far more mechanical than we are led to believe.

    At our core, the default human mode is a remarkable feat of systemic design. We are built to be self-loving yet selfless, deeply connected yet fundamentally sovereign, and capable of total surrender while maintaining an unwavering sense of direction. It is a state where “flow” is not a chore; it is an operating system.

    Yet, for many of us, this wasn’t our starting point. We didn’t enter the world with this software pre-installed.

    Humanity seems to be divided by a “calibration gap.”

    On one side are the Naturalists. These individuals possess an inherent, somatic intelligence. They understand “flow” without needing a definition. They don’t need to study the double-slit experiment to understand that their observation shifts the field, they feel it in their nervous system. They move through life with a natural permeability that allows them to be connected to everything, yet they never lose the boundary of their own existence.

    On the other side are the Engineers. These are the individuals for whom this flow was not a birthright, but a problem to be solved. Perhaps they started as “rocks:” rigid, guarded, unable to surrender to the flow because their nervous system couldn’t perceive it as safe. Or perhaps they started as “sponges:” so open and unified that they lost their own physical presence, becoming unintentional “energetic hospitals” for the chaos around them. Or possessed a strange combination of both.

    If you are an Engineer, your path to health looks different. You cannot simply be told to “surrender” or “love yourself,” because your system doesn’t have the files for it.

    You had to learn it.

    Some of us learned it through the lens of spiritual experience: a radical, often overwhelming data download that forced us to recognize that separation is a structural illusion. Others, perhaps those who needed the cold, hard logic of matter to feel safe, learned it through theoretical physics, or some of us by both. By understanding the quantum reality that matter is largely energy, and that entanglement does not mean loss of self, the logic of “sovereignty” finally clicked into place.

    These journeys are diverse because the “corrupt files” were different for everyone. But the destination remains identical: the healthy, sovereign individual.

    If you had to consciously build your own bridge to this state, do not view it as a disadvantage. You are now an architect of your own consciousness.

    Those who flowed naturally may not be able to articulate the mechanics of how they arrived here, but you, having had to reverse-engineer the human operating system from the ground up, now have the capacity to teach it. 

    You can explain the “woo” to the materialist, and you can ground the “woo-seeker” into the physics of reality.

    It does not matter if you were born with the ability to surrender to the current, or if you had to spend years studying the physics of the water to understand why you were sinking. 

    The outcome is the same: the moment you realize that sovereignty and connection are not opposing forces, but two sides of the same equation. You are no longer “learning” to be whole: you are simply returning to the default mode that was there all along.

    Are you someone who naturally floats with the current, or are you an engineer who had to learn the physics of the water to find your own way to shore? 

  • The Joy of Not Rushing Anymore

    On the spiderweb of life. Everything is connected, and change is inevitable.

    There it was. The simple sentence mumbled under my breath as I was walking into the bathroom to escape a long-winded misunderstanding. The kind of circular conversation that solves nothing, the kind only two people-pleasers can have because neither of them wants to face the consequences of actually saying what they mean.

    “I hope I never turn into someone like you.”

    Fast forward through a few intense middle-of-the-night soul surgeries (you know, the kind where you feel like the universe is performing open-heart energy work on you while you’re wide awake). The metamorphosis began.

    Now apparently I am the last person to board the plane, when once upon a time, I’d be queuing anxiously twenty minutes before they even called my row. I thought being first in line meant I was efficient, responsible, likable. But really, it just meant I was volunteering for extra stress, breathing recycled airplane air longer than anyone needed to, and giving my energy away like free peanuts.

    These days, I don’t audition for stress anymore. I don’t even show up to the casting call. If something is stressing me out, I don’t rise to the challenge. I just say, “Not for me,” and move on. And if it’s a responsibility I am obligated to deal with, I know how to regulate myself.

    I reply to texts when I want, not on the old “five-minutes-or-less” timer I used to guilt myself into. Sometimes it takes a week. Sometimes longer. And I used to hate him for doing that. Now? I get it. And somewhere deep down, my old self feels guilty for all the times she made such a big deal out of it.

    I stopped making other people’s problems my problems. I stopped drowning myself in sympathy just because my empath wiring told me to. Turns out, you can opt out. Who knew?

    And on top of everything, which was something I had to learn for myself, I learned to be independent. I learned how to manage and regulate my nervous system and emotions without escaping them. To sit with them. To let them flow. To not hand them to someone else and hope they’d fix it for me.

    And honestly? It feels amazing. My peace, my zen mode, my sanity… All intact.

    Turns out some of the things I resisted in him were the things I actually needed to learn for myself… not because I turned into him, but because I turned into the real me after life peeled off the layers until I was back to the core, and funny enough, some of those traits I once criticized in him were actually part of the unbothered, self-honoring version of me all this time.

    I called him selfish at the time, maybe even to his face, though I don’t quite remember. Now I get it. And I’m not going to let myself feel guilty about that. I didn’t know any better then. But now I have resonance, and that resonance changes everything. It makes it easy to make peace with the past.

    So here I am. The last one to board the plane. Calm. Collected. Feeling my emotions instead of them letting them control me. Carrying only what’s mine. And for the first time in a long time, I like where this flight is going, middle seat or not.