Healing didn’t erase my past. It changed the way I remembered it. What if the people who hurt us aren’t the heroes or the villains of our story… but simply humans who unknowingly helped shape who we would become?

I thought I was grieving the end of a relationship. What I was really grieving was the life that was never mine to begin with.

I had become so practiced at surviving that I stopped giving myself credit for it. Now life is asking something entirely new of me—not to endure more, but to let peace become as natural as survival once was.