The hardest thing I have ever learned to do was disarm.

Not because I wanted to fight.

Because I loved.

For years, I believed love meant holding on.

Holding people. Holding dreams. Holding relationships. Holding every version of myself I thought should have survived.

I thought if I loved deeply enough, understood enough, or sacrificed enough, I could somehow keep everything that mattered from slipping away.

But life does not work that way.

Neither does love.

When I was young, my aunt told me I was on a journey.

I don’t know if she realized it then, but those simple words became one of the greatest gifts she ever gave me. They quietly followed me through every season of my life. Because of them, I never betrayed myself by believing I was beyond repair.

I never judged myself for becoming. I understood, even if only in the smallest way, that I was here to learn and keep growing.

That did not mean I did not carry the water of my pain.

I carried it everywhere.

I carried the grief of the places where I had been hurt.

I carried the grief of the places where I had unknowingly hurt others.

I carried broken dreams, battle scars, unmet expectations, relationships that ended, and versions of myself I had not yet learned to understand or make peace with.

My ocean heart held all of it.

When I finally became conscious enough to look back over my life, I did not only see the ways I had been wounded. I saw the ways I had unknowingly wounded others while living from places inside myself I could not yet see.

I saw my blind spots. I saw inherited stories, unconscious patterns, and definitions I had unknowingly agreed to live by.

That realization did not make me judge myself.

It made me love more deeply.

Because I could finally see.

I had good relationships in my life.

I had wounded relationships in my life.

I was both good and wounded, too.

We met one another with the only love we knew how to give and receive at the time.

Some of it was beautiful.

Some of it was painful.

All of it mattered.

All of it became part of me.

So I went back.

Intentionally.

I became a thought surgeon.

Not because I believed I was broken.

Not because I wanted to relive the past.

I went back to find every place that still carried pain, and to love it through to the light.

The wounds.

The fear.

The grief.

The unmet dreams.

The expectations that never came to pass.

The relationships I could not hold.

The younger versions of myself who had learned to survive before they had learned to rest.

I became a detective of my own life.

I wandered the streets of my inner dialogue.

I inspected every memory.

Every relationship.

Every definition.

Every emotional pattern.

I followed every thread I could find because I wanted to understand why I became who I became.

Discernment became my chapel.

Intention became my scalpel.

Understanding became my practice.

For a long time, I believed freedom would come through understanding.

And perhaps, for many seasons, it did.

I rewrote the backdrop of my mind.

I retrained my Internal Dictionary of Self.

I slowly gathered the forgotten Pieces of myself and carried them home.

Looking back now, I can see that the thought surgeon was never trying to fix me.

She was retrieving me.

She refused to leave any part of me behind.

She returned again and again, gathering every frightened child, every broken dream, every abandoned hope, every unanswered question, whispering,

“Come with me.

You don’t have to stay here anymore.”

And then, one day…

Something changed.

I realized the detective could not solve this mystery.

The surgeon could not perform this operation.

Because God and love do not work that way.

They ask us to hold life differently.

Not because discernment was wrong.

Discernment brought me here.

But there comes a time when the surgeon must put down her instruments.

When understanding becomes trust.

When inspection becomes compassion.

When we stop reopening the wound to make sure it is healing and allow love to finish what understanding alone never could.

That…

was disarming.

Today, I am sugar-happy and grateful to realize I am no longer locked and loaded.

I notice the familiar flutter in my belly, or tightening of the jaw, and now I know what to do.

I breathe.

Deeply.

“I comfort myself with reminders that all good things happen in time to me through me.”

I stay with the feeling, letting it move through me instead of letting it become me.

For most of my journey, I called that feeling fear — or even the devil — a third party to my pain because that was the only language I had.

Years later, I learned about anxiety, stress responses, and the nervous system.

Suddenly, I understood something extraordinary.

Sometimes that feeling simply meant something mattered.

Not every racing heart is fear.

Sometimes it is anticipation.

Sometimes it is grief.

Sometimes it is awe.

Sometimes it is love arriving before the mind has caught up.

Sometimes it is simply my nervous system saying,

“Something is happening.”

The wisdom is no longer found in trying to transmute the feeling.

It is found in listening to what the feeling is trying to tell me before deciding what it means.

The wisdom is learning to discern whether it is a false alarm or a true invitation, and be where my feet are.

I have come to believe that we are both light and dark; strength and tenderness; certainty and mystery — swirling through the hallways of time.

We are made of paradoxes.

Of endless nuances.

Of beautiful constellations and contradictions.

The goal was never to erase one side of myself.

The goal was to become balanced within my light and my dark.

And to make decisions from my highest good rather than my deepest fears.

The goal was always to love all of me — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Now I do.

Fully.

I always thought I loved all of me.

But now I love myself all the way down to my toes.

I love, love all of myself —

the parts I know,

and the parts I have not met yet.

Not because I got everything right.

Not because I never hurt another.

But because I can finally see that love is all of these things.

Now I look back and simply see people trying to love with the understanding they had.

I see hearts carrying more water than they were ever meant to carry alone.

I see grace where I once could not see at all.

And this makes me smile deeply.

Because love was never asking me to hold everything.

It was asking me to hold it differently.

“Taking it by the hand and inviting it to dance with me upon my internal tight wire of hope and longing.”

You never know when all the notes of your life will finally tune themselves into a song.

That is what The Fall by Cody Johnson did for me one blessed day while I was driving home.

For years, they sounded scattered to me —

isolated notes,

unfinished melodies,

grief without resolution.

I cried out,

“Re-chord me, Lord.”

Then one day…

I heard the music.

Not because life had become perfect.

But because I had finally become present enough to hear it.

The hardest thing I have ever learned to do was disarm.

And beneath all the armor…

I discovered there had never been an enemy waiting for me.

Only a woman with an ocean heart,

walking her journey,

one breath at a time,

learning that love had been carrying her all along.

In love and light,

Kellie J. Wright

Internal Journeys | Internal Narcissus

Self-Love Karma | Internal Narcissa all along. carrying her all along.