There was a time I stayed too long with my pain.
I babysat it. Held onto it. Slept beside it. Tried to make sense of it.
In the beginning of healing, I didn’t understand that part of me was simply trying to honor what had happened. My inner child needed someone to finally stay. To finally listen. To finally say that hurt. That mattered. You mattered.
But somewhere along the way, I made a home inside the pain.
I grooved it deeper into my being. Into my nervous system. Into the pathways of my mind and body.
It took time to understand that healing is not only remembering.
Sometimes healing is also rewiring.
Softening.
Returning in love to the places where fear became identity.
I had to go back and see the child, the young woman, the brokenhearted version of me who kept repeating the same cycles because she did not yet know another way. She wasn’t the enemy. She was part of the story. Part of the relay. Carrying pain forward, hoping someone would finally stop and help her carry it differently.
There is something beautiful about slowing down enough to heal.
About turning around instead of continuing to run.
About reaching your own hand and saying:
Come back. Let’s go find the places you abandoned yourself.
Let’s sit with what was never processed.
Let’s love the parts that were shamed, hidden, denied, and pushed into the deepest drawers of the mind.
There is beauty in resurrecting.
In crucifying old ways of being, so something truer can live.
And freedom — real freedom — never goes out of style.
Celibacy Was Never the Point
For a long time, I thought celibacy was something a person did.
A discipline.
A sacrifice.
A promise made in hopes that one day it would be rewarded.
Now I see it differently.
There are seasons of life when love stops reaching outward and begins asking to be discovered within. Not because the world has nothing to offer, but because there is something unfinished inside us that cannot be completed by another person.
There comes a quiet shift when your life is no longer organized around being chosen.
Not out of deprivation.
Not out of fear.
Simply because your attention has turned inward.
There may be years when work, purpose, healing, family, animals, creativity, and faith weave themselves together into a life so full that time seems to loosen its grip. You stop measuring your life by milestones and begin measuring it by presence.
Desire doesn’t disappear.
It simply stops leading.
What once felt urgent becomes patient.
What once felt necessary becomes optional.
Many people imagine celibacy as the absence of intimacy. Yet perhaps its deeper invitation is learning intimacy with yourself first.
Not the self built from performance.
Not the self searching for approval.
The self that remains when there is nothing left to prove.
During that season, something unexpected often happens.
The pull that once governed your life begins to lose its authority.
There was a time when intensity felt like truth. Urgency felt like destiny. Every emotion demanded an immediate response.
Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the nervous system learns another way.
The same emotions still arrive.
The same memories may still visit.
The same longings still appear.
But they pass through like weather instead of becoming commands.
The pull still arrives — but it no longer decides.
This is not the absence of feeling.
It is the birth of discernment.
At some point, many people realize they have been living differently for years before ever giving it a name. Sometimes we call it celibacy. Sometimes we call it healing. Sometimes we simply call it peace.
Eventually, even the label becomes less important.
Because the goal was never to become someone who avoided love.
The goal was to become someone who no longer abandoned themselves in search of it.
Perhaps that is the quiet miracle of self-love.
Not that we stop wanting connection.
But that we become rooted enough to enter connection without losing the ground beneath our own feet.
There are no perfect relationships.
There are only people who have learned to stand on solid ground before inviting another person to stand beside them.
And maybe that is what awakening has been asking of us all along.
To discover that love is not something we chase.
It is something we become.