I spent years believing unconditional love was something you gave everyone else. Then I discovered the person I’d forgotten to include was me. Healing didn’t teach me to become someone worthy of love—it taught me to love the woman who had been here all along.

What if the world isn’t simply happening to you? What if, more often than we realize, it reflects the way we’re relating to ourselves? This is the story of how changing my inner conversation slowly began changing the life I experienced.

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.