There is a difference between boundaries and walls, between protecting myself and exiling my soul. I’ve learned to call it self-care, this quiet retreat into silence and shields, but I wonder how much of what I protect is sacred, and how much is simply tired.
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I am so tired. Tired of being told that my sensitivity is a flaw. That my body’s weariness, my mind’s wandering, my heart’s aching, is weakness. As if the trauma woven into the very air we breathe should be overcome quietly, gracefully, with a smile and a schedule and a positive affirmation.

But I do not owe anyone my survival story tied up with a ribbon and sold as resilience. There is a grief I carry that has no name. A mourning for the world that was supposed to be, a world where love is not conditional, where care is not earned, where we are held, not judged, when we falter.

And still, there has been a tear in my heart where I fell away from you. I lived my life lost in a hell so scary I forgot how to reach for light. And when you applied harm, and I applied harm, when wounding met wounding, when protection became a weapon, the true sight of ourselves and the journey disappeared. I felt lambasted by the world, by you, by myself. Ego defense wears a thousand costumes, and culture rewards the most convincing masks. We are blind in both directions, blind behind our own mask, and blind to the pain behind theirs. Threatened by one another, when all we ever wanted was safety. All we ever needed was love.

I look around and I see projection everywhere, everyone flinging their pain outward like daggers because it’s easier than holding it like a child. And I feel it. The weight of it. The sharp edges pressed against my skin as I step outside my door and brace myself against the world.
And then I come home. Home, where the world narrows down to my husband’s arms, to the loyal eyes of my dogs, to the tiny sacred rituals with my children. This is my village now, not large, not loud, but real. Still, I ask myself quietly, where are the others like me? The ones who feel too deeply to keep pretending? The ones who want to build something softer, slower, together?

I can’t be friends with podcasts. I can’t heal in a culture that shames pain. But I can root. I can remember. I can speak. Because the essence of who we are is not meant to be locked away. We were never meant to build fortresses around our truth. We were meant to be held. In community. In ceremony. In love.

Healing is possible. Even through boundaries, especially through boundaries. They are not a rejection of love, but a container for it. We are never too far to turn around. It is never too late to redeem ourselves. We can always create our dream, regardless of what’s happening in the world. No matter how much noise, no matter how much pain, we are still allowed to imagine beauty.

We were meant to evolve in circles that nourish. Not in cages disguised as classrooms or prisons masked as progress. We were meant to be seen by each other, not just filtered, scrolled, managed.

There are some who never find their way back to the light. And there are those of us who claw toward it anyway, even when it feels like trying to climb a mountain from the bottom of a well. We do not rise through escape. We rise through shadow. Through grief. Through truth. Through the courage it takes to sit with our own wreckage and say, still, I am not done.

This is not a spiritual bypass. This is not a cry for rescue. This is the knowing that I am of Earth, and of Spirit, and of bloodlines that remember how to heal. I am not asking to be saved. I am asking to be witnessed. To live in a world where utopia is not a dirty word, but a direction. Where longing is not pathetic, but holy.

This is my manifesto, written not in ink, but in breath and bone. I remember. And I will not harden. I will soften without crumbling. I will speak, even if I shake.
I will walk toward the light, again and again, no matter how long the night.