Continued from Part 2.
When I left San Francisco, I didn’t heal.
I relocated with my wounds intact.
Utah offered space, but I carried old narratives with me. Beliefs about productivity, worth, and survival. I told myself this burnout would pass. That I could push through. Instead, my body intervened.
A low back injury ended my ability to punish myself through movement. It forced me into something slower. Pilates. At first, it was just rehabilitation. Then it became awareness. Then presence. Then something else entirely. For the first time in years, I returned to my body without domination.
I was agnostic, still suspicious of religion, still wary of belief, but my body was beginning to speak again.
Yoga followed. Breath. Sensation.
Still, I hid.
For nearly a decade, I repeated the same cycle: uncover → panic → recover → hide
I couldn’t stand my life. I couldn’t stand my marriage. I felt unseen. Misunderstood. Trapped.
I wanted to run.
Again.
This time, my husband didn’t.
He turned inward. Found a therapist. Started doing the work himself. And once again, he invited me.
I had refused before. This time, something was different. Maybe I was just too tired to keep running.
So I leaned in.
Not gracefully. Not optimistically. I leaned in because I was exhausted. Because every escape route I had relied on before no longer worked. Because running had finally become more painful than staying.
Therapy did not feel like relief at first. It felt like exposure. Sitting in a room where there was nowhere to perform, nowhere to be right, nowhere to hide behind intelligence or productivity or humor. It stripped me. I couldn’t outthink my way through it. I couldn’t logic my way out. I couldn’t blame fast enough to avoid what was being reflected back to me. For the first time, I had to look at my life without the familiar scaffolding of resentment.
I had built an entire identity around being misunderstood. Around being unseen. Around being wronged by systems, by people, by circumstances that never quite fit me. And while much of that was true, while there were moments of real harm, real neglect, real betrayal, I began to see something else alongside it.
I had also been protecting myself by staying hidden.
I had learned, very early, that visibility was dangerous. That asking questions destabilized rooms. That expressing need invited correction, not care. So I adapted. I became palatable. Capable. Impressive. Low-maintenance.
I learned how to survive by not asking for what I actually wanted.
In therapy, that pattern unraveled slowly and painfully.
I saw how often I waited to be chosen instead of choosing.
How often I declined invitations and then grieved the distance.
How often I longed to be known while guarding my inner world like contraband.
I saw how I had recreated the same dynamic again and again, seeking intimacy while withholding truth, craving connection while bracing for abandonment.
And for the first time, instead of assigning blame, I felt something else rise up.
Responsibility.
Not the heavy, shaming kind.
The liberating kind.
The kind that says: If I participated in creating this, I can participate in creating something different.
That realization cracked something open. I began to forgive, not because what happened didn’t matter, not because it was acceptable, but because carrying it had begun to cost me my life.
I forgave my parents for not knowing how to protect me when they were overwhelmed themselves.
I forgave authority figures for choosing certainty over curiosity.
I forgave the people who projected their fear onto my body, my questions, my becoming.
And slowly, much more slowly, I forgave myself.
For surviving the only way I knew how.
For hiding when it wasn’t safe to be seen.
For building armor and forgetting how to take it off.
Something unexpected happened when the blame loosened its grip. Faith returned. Not the faith of my childhood. Not belief bound to doctrine, obedience, or fear. A quieter faith.
One that didn’t need answers.
One that didn’t require certainty.
One that could sit comfortably inside I don’t know.
I didn’t return to religion. I returned to trust. Trust in my body. Trust in my intuition. Trust that there is something larger moving through all of this, even if I can’t name it, define it, or prove it.
For the first time since I was a child, belief didn’t feel like submission. It felt like choice.
I didn’t need a system to tell me how to be good.
I didn’t need a hierarchy to grant me worth.
I didn’t need a doctrine to access meaning.
I needed faith.
And faith, I realized, is not the absence of doubt. It’s the willingness to remain open anyway.
I had spent decades swinging between extremes: belief and rejection, devotion and dismissal, certainty and exile. Now, I could hold the middle. I could be spiritual without allegiance. Devout without dogma. Open without surrendering myself.
This wasn’t a return to who I was before. It was a remembering of something older than all of it. A sense of connection that existed before shame entered the room. Before questions became dangerous. Before love was conditional.
I am not a human searching for meaning.
I am a soul having a human experience.
And that soul does not require permission to believe.
Continued in Part 4.
