I will never abandon myself again.

I wish someone had told me I don't need to be afraid of who I'll become — and that I can trust myself to make wise choices.

To not yet know how fully you're allowed to exist feels like maddening rage mixed with the warm glow of a fire that wants to fully take care of you and cherish your existence.

Before I knew I could embrace being all of it, I carried shame and repressed desire around my sexuality. Isolation and loneliness around not belonging. Somatic waves of fighting, fawning and proving around expressing myself.

These weren't separate struggles. They were the same one, wearing different masks.

I once called pleasing and contorting myself loyalty. I mistook withdrawing as an invitation for safe love and belonging — as though making myself smaller would make me easier to be with.

My body knew differently. Long before my mind was ready to hear it, my body knew I was both a wild dancer and a sensitive soul capable of yielding to great depths. It held that truth patiently, waiting for me to catch up.

The cost of not yet knowing how fully you're allowed to exist isn't just felt in your mind. It lives in the body — in the contorting, the withdrawing, the waiting.

The turning didn't arrive as a revelation. It arrived as a meltdown.

After that moment I made myself a promise — that I would never abandon myself again. That I could ask for help. That I could begin to discern how to trust others in my path, even when it was messy. Especially when it was messy.

I will never abandon myself again.

That was the moment everything before it became the cost — and everything after it became possible.

Real love feels calm in my body. It feels spacious, a sigh of relief, and like a meandering and creative river — compared to the fearful versions of clinging and performing I was experiencing before.

As I decided to become more of myself, soulful, powerful and intuitive women began to show up. Not because I went looking for them. Because I finally showed up as myself — and like recognises like. And I’m still walking this path, inviting a receiving of more.

Community, I'm learning, is not something you build from the outside. It emerges from the inside out, when you are willing to be seen as exactly who you are.

To the woman before the meltdown and before the river that you can trust emerges — know that you no longer have to do this alone. I see your strength and I love you in your entirety.

Photo : Brooke Cagle