Into Becoming:

There’s a woman I haven’t met yet. She’s older than me and she is quieter than me. She moves through the world with a kind of authority I haven’t yet earned, the kind that doesn’t come from knowing all the answers but from no longer needing to pretend she has them. And she is me. But she is also not this me. She is another I entirely. One who is being built, right now, in the marrow of everything I am living through. In the decisions I am making and the ones I am avoiding. I

You want an answer and now. I know, I get it. You want someone to tell you what to do, how this ends, whether the thing you’re feeling is the right thing or the wrong thing or the thing that will save you or the thing that will ruin everything. You want certainty the way you once wanted love, desperately, with your whole body, convinced that without it you will not survive the night. I know because I have been there too. Standing in the middle of my own life with my hands ful

There is a before and after story I can fall prey to telling in order to excuse my past and justify my present. It involves the fall and then the redemption. The version where I did terrible things, hit rock bottom, saw the light, and emerged on the other side as someone worthy of respect. Someone ‘cleaned up’ and redeemed. It’s a valid story. It has a clear arc, a satisfying resolution, and it can excuse some of the person I was. It allows me to make some sense of all the lo

There is a quiet moment, that when you open to it - it changes your whole understanding. Its an 'ah ha' moment when you realise that the voice in your head is actually not you. At the very least, not the whole of you. And this is huge,. When I fully comprehended this I felt the shift. The voice nagging you daily is not the final authority on who you are, what you are worth, or what is going to happen next. It’s just a voice, a part of you, not all of you. Yes it’s annoyingly

The past is not going anywhere. That is the first thing you may wish to accept if you want any chance of being free of it. Whatever happened to you happened. The childhood that shaped you, the relationships that broke you, the years you lost to survival or addiction or silence or somebody else's chaos. None of it can be undone. There is no amount of therapy, no breathwork, no journal entry, no middle of the night revelation that will reach back through time and make it not ha

This was a question that was posed to me when I began turning my life in another direction. Getting into a recovery process, getting stable, getting to the other side of the crisis that was consuming me at the time. Recovery gave me my a life back. But I then realised that getting your life back is not the same as knowing what to do with it. Because once the dust settled, once the immediate danger had passed and I was no longer in survival mode, I was left standing in the mid

We are sometimes told that things will work out. That if we try hard enough, hold on long enough, believe with enough conviction, the outcome will eventually swing our way and sometimes it does. Sometimes the fight pays off, the persistence lands, the story bends toward the ending we wanted. But not always. And yet nobody talks enough about the not always. Because sometimes you do everything right and it still falls apart. Sometimes you fight with everything you have and the

I used to say it with certainty: I am anxious. I am overly sensitive. I am thin-skinned. What began as an observation slowly hardened into identity. It stopped being something I experienced and became something I believed I was. And once a trait fuses with identity, it no longer feels like a choice. You stop examining it and you stop challenging it and you simply inhabit it, like a room without an exit. None of it was entirely false. I am prone to anxiety. I do feel things de