There was a time I was always reaching. Reaching for someone to tell me I was enough, to hand me back the love I kept giving away. I didn’t know then that what I was looking for couldn’t be found out there. I was searching in the wrong direction entirely.
Then came the dark night. And everything I had been clutching fell away.
What grew back surprised me. It was quiet. It was small. It asked nothing of anyone.
Now I wake in the morning and the first thing I feel is gratitude. Not the performed kind. Not the kind you write in a journal because someone told you to. The kind that rises on its own, before you’re even fully awake, because the light is coming through the curtains and your cats are nearby and the day is just beginning and somehow that is everything.
I feed Merlin and Maya. I step outside and tend the garden. I scatter seed for the birds and the small creatures who have made a home near mine. I make my tea with intention, the warmth of the mug in both hands a kind of prayer. Then I sit down to write, not to impress, not to perform, but because I have something to offer and I know now that offering it is the whole point.
This is what I have come to understand: the life I was chasing was always noisier and emptier than the one I was already living. I was so busy looking outward that I missed the sacred in the ordinary. I missed myself.
Materially, nothing dramatic has changed. But I am changed. Because I stopped outsourcing my worth and started inhabiting my life. Because I discovered that self love is not a concept you adopt. It is the way you move through a morning. It is the care you bring to a cup of tea, a potato patch, a bird at the feeder. It is choosing authenticity over approval, every single day, until one day you realize you have stopped choosing. It has simply become who you are.
My purpose now is service. To the people who are still reaching. To the ones who don’t yet know that what they are looking for is already inside them, waiting quietly, waiting patiently, in the small and sacred ordinary of their own lives.
You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to acquire it. You don’t have to become someone else to deserve it.
That is freedom. And it costs nothing.
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