For most of my life I was already somewhere else. Not physically, but in my head, in my hunger, in the direction I was always leaning. I would reach a goal, a milestone, a version of myself I had been chasing, and before I could even sit with it, something in me was already moving…
There are moments when the world feels genuinely overwhelming. Not in an abstract sense — but personally, viscerally. Watching conflict spread across screens, listening to voices that shout where they could speak, seeing my children grow up inside a world increasingly shaped by reaction rather than reflection. In those moments, I feel the pull myself….
There is an image that comes to me sometimes. Not exactly a memory, but more like a vision that arrives uninvited in the quiet moments, when the noise settles and something older surfaces. I am at the end of my life. And I am looking into someone’s eyes. Maybe it is my son. Maybe it…
The shadow doesn’t disappear with success. It follows us there, and waits. Because the real question was never about what we could achieve — it was always about whether we believed we were enough to deserve it.
We stumble into parenting armed only with ideals and whatever we absorbed from our own childhoods. The guilt is real. But healing doesn’t begin with getting it right — it begins with showing up honestly.
There was a moment at an ATM I have never forgotten. I saw myself completely in a stranger’s face. That moment opened something in me I didn’t have a name for yet.
