I didn’t lose myself because I was weak.

I lost myself because I didn’t trust myself.

I became very good at looking around a room, figuring out who I was supposed to be there, and becoming her.

I wanted to be a good Christian woman.

So I asked everyone else what “good” looked like and followed the blueprint.

The strange thing about self-abandonment is that sometimes it looks responsible.

Polite.

Acceptable.

Good.

Sometimes people even applaud it.

Healing has been the process of learning to ask different questions:

Do I actually believe this?
Do I actually want this?
Would I still choose this if nobody called me good?

And slowly, one honest yes at a time, my life started looking like me again.

For years, I think some part of me believed that if humanity became conscious enough, healed enough, loving enough, we would eventually arrive at the same conclusions.

But now I think that misunderstands oneness.

Oneness does not mean we become identical.

It means our differences were never proof that we were separate.

A garden is one ecosystem, but it does not contain one flower.

The rose gets to be a rose.

The sunflower gets to be dramatic.

The cactus gets to mind its own prickly little business.

None of them has to become the others in order to belong.

Maybe humanity is the same.

I can let you be fully you while I become fully me.

The flowers were never supposed to match.

They were only ever supposed to bloom.