Relearning How to Belong to My Own Life

I’m not bracing anymore.

I’m here.

In me. At home.

This journey didn’t give me back the life I used to have. It didn’t return me to who I once was. I don’t even remember that girl. I

t slowly, tenderly, patiently guided me here… to a version of myself I had never met before.

A woman who knows how to want again.

Who lets herself need.

Who can receive goodness without apology.

Who can feel safe inside tenderness.

Who can stay when love shows up.

Who can trust her own voice.

Who can hope.

Who can love.

Who can live.

But I need to be honest: I am not doing this perfectly.

Not even close.

It’s messy.

It’s hard.

Sometimes it is deeply, aching-ly heartbreaking.

There are days my nervous system still lives like danger is everywhere, like I still have to hold every single thing together or it will all fall apart.

Years of being strong for everyone else don’t just dissolve.

Years of caregiving, crisis-managing, late-night worrying, advocating, pushing through my own exhaustion…

Years of feeling unseen, unheard, or unheld…

That doesn’t evaporate just because life is safer now.

My body remembers.

My heart remembers.

And sometimes I still brace without meaning to. I still shrink sometimes. I still over-function. I still forget I’m allowed to rest and be cared for.

There are moments I question whether I really deserve softness… or whether it will be taken away if I trust it too much.

But I keep showing up.

I keep trying.

I keep choosing honesty when hiding would be easier.

I keep choosing connection when shutdown feels familiar.

I keep choosing love instead of self-abandonment.

I keep choosing life.

None of this came in one breakthrough. It has been a thousand quiet, ordinary acts of courage…

to soften instead of harden,

to stay instead of vanish,

to believe instead of numb out,

to come back to myself again and again when I am tempted to disappear.

Healing hasn’t been “going back.” It has been a remembering. A rebuilding. A homecoming.

And it took time — so much time — to trust that this gentler life wasn’t going to collapse beneath me.

To stop bracing for loss.

To let rest feel safe.

To let joy feel real.

To let my body learn what peace feels like.

I am finally learning that I don’t have to earn my place in the world. I don’t have to be endlessly strong to deserve tenderness.

I don’t have to carry everyone else to be worthy of love.

I get to be human again —

not a shield,

not a soldier,

not the one constantly absorbing the storm.

Just me.

Here.

Alive.

Allowed.

This isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning of a life I am finally able to inhabit.

And for the first time… not perfectly, not without fear, but with steady, growing courage…

I feel like I belong here.