Journey

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I decided to cross the threshold into this intentional spiritual life, nor can I trace the precise hour my eyes began to truly open. In so many ways, simply being alive is the spiritual journey. It is a slow, quiet unfolding of our truest selves, a gentle dismantling of the old stories we used to tell ourselves, and the sudden, breathless realization of our own divinity.

I believe this unraveling happens naturally for everyone, whether we are paying attention or not. Life is a patient teacher, constantly leaving breadcrumbs, constantly challenging us to grow. Whether you call it God, spirituality, or simply "the work"—it is all alchemy. The pace at which we transform, however, depends entirely on our willingness to look squarely in the mirror, to examine the quiet spaces between ourselves and the people we hold close, and to surrender to the process.

Yet, if I am looking for the exact coordinates where my life split into a before and an after, I actually can find it. It happened two years ago, ten minutes into 2019.

Yesterday, I sat down and wrote a post that bared every raw, aching detail of how I ended up on this side of the horizon. I traced the intricate, painful anatomy of what it meant to reject a New Year’s Eve marriage proposal from someone I loved with my whole soul. A guy who loved me just as fiercely. I wrote about the conscious, heart-wrenching choice to walk away from a love that meant everything to both of us, simply because I knew staying and taking that leap would mean abandoning myself.

The prose was beautiful. It was poetic, soft in some places and sharp in others. For the very first time, I was able to put those memory-heavy words on paper without my vision being blurred by residual tears or anger. In the stillness of that writing, I uncovered quiet insights I had been too close to the fire to see before.

But emotion is a beautiful, dangerous prism; it has a way of bending the light and distorting the truth of what actually happened. And perhaps that is why the fact that those pages vanished into cyberspace feels less like a glitch and more like a quiet act of divine intervention. Maybe those raw, bleeding details were never meant for the world to see. At least, not in the way I initially laid them out.

In the past, I leaned on writing and blogging as a way to process my life, sharing my heartbreaks and victories as if they were absolute, universal truths. And at the time, they were truths for me. They were the honest reflections of my own perspective, shaped by how deeply I was invested and how hard I was hurting. But in doing that, I often overlooked the quiet hearts of the others involved. I accidentally reduced the people I loved to mere characters in my own sweeping drama, rather than honoring them as the complex, beautifully flawed human beings they were and still are.

That kind of raw exposure might make for a gripping novel, but real love demands a gentler touch. Not every sacred, broken thing is meant for public consumption. Choosing to be an open book is my own vulnerability to bear, but other people deserve the sanctuary of privacy. That is a lesson I had to learn the hard way, through the painful fallout of my last blog.

This time, I am stepping back onto the page with a more mindful heart. I am still figuring out the deeper rhyme and reason behind my need to speak to the void, but I know this: I want to document my journey with a profound, tender care. I want every word to be rooted in love and a radical acceptance—of myself, of the people who have crossed my path, and of whatever beautiful, messy history has transpired between us. I am no longer interested in getting lost in the dramatic retelling of the story. I am only here to share the lessons left behind in the quiet after the storm. And maybe someone somewhere will get something out of it.

XO.