“Sometimes the hardest challenge isn’t receiving acceptance from God or other people; it’s receiving acceptance from ourselves.” ~Leigh Finke, Queerfully and Wonderfully Made

Growing up as a pastor’s kid, I had to hide who I was. I was taught that love from parents was conditional. I was taught that mistakes were met with a strict hand and harsh words. I was taught that I had to prove over and over that I was deserving of love.

As I grew up and learned more about the world around me and myself, I had to come to terms with my own sexuality and gender. I had to hide these parts as well. I was constantly told that those parts of me were “of the world” and sinful. But no matter how much I prayed or tried to change, my identity was still pushing through.

There were times I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be queer. What I wanted was to be the perfect little “Christian Girl.”

But it doesn’t work out like that.

Because in the end, I didn’t have to choose one side or the other. These identities weren’t opposing sides, no matter how much others believed they were. 

What changed for me was when I had the space to actually be myself.

I was disowned by my parents and told that they would never respect my names, pronouns, or identity. So I moved out.

I went to college. I learned from my classes. I joined communities that fit who I was. I made new friends. I was around people that liked me for me.

I went to therapy. I slowly started to embrace who I truly was. I had the space and time to consider all parts and aspects of myself. I allowed myself to be authentic. And it was hard.

But I found my place in the world. I studied social work and got my bachelor’s and my master’s degree. I knew I wanted to help others in the way that I needed help.

To be authentic, I had to go against everything I was taught.

I struggled with being authentic and true to myself at first, because it meant that I wasn’t “acting like I was supposed to.” I had so many ideas in my head on how I was supposed to act, look, speak, and be. I was supposed to keep my long natural hair. I should never get tattoos or piercings. I was supposed to always be evangelizing about Jesus. I was supposed to be quiet and demure and never speak first.

But now, there was no one to report to. There was no one checking in on me. There was no one tracking what I did, what I said, what I changed.

So I started to slowly make changes. I quit going to things just out of obligation. I chose people that I actually liked to hang out with. I wore different clothes and I cut my hair. I started dating who I wanted to.

“But what if…” was always in my head.

Or “I don’t want to be too much…”

And then, “This is too weird…”

But I was hearing other phrases from people I had grown to care about, support, and love. They said the complete opposite. They said, “Go for it!” and “Why not?” Because I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

 What was different was that I wasn’t holding myself to someone else’s expectations.

“You look happier.”

I was leaning into my core self, what I wanted to be, and how I wanted to act.

I wasn’t happier just because I was being queer and presenting as myself. But that helped, of course. I was happier because I wasn’t holding myself back. I wasn’t constantly wearing a mask to be what others wanted.

But self-love came way after.

Self-love comes from within. And even though I was doing everything to be authentic, it wasn’t natural for me yet.

We are taught how to love from those who raise us, whether that is our parents, siblings, grandparents, caregivers, anyone. Our past relationships are the models for how we understand what love is. They also teach us what kind of love we “deserve.”

I was taught that “love” is very specific. It has to be constantly fought over. It can be taken away at any moment. And it was waiting for you to mess up and make a mistake.

I was still living under my parents’ version of love, even when it was just me. I wasn’t taught to love the “weird” and the “different” parts of myself. I had to learn to embrace them until it felt natural.

But I had my support systems. I had my community. I had my therapy. I had my loved ones.

They continued to show up and show me what love truly is. They taught me different types of love. They taught me that love is actually unconditional. Love is patient, kind, caring, supportive, and free.

I didn’t have to do anything to deserve their love.

Relearning love takes time.

Now, years down the line, I have relearned and retaught myself what love can be. I do everything I can to not only receive that love but to also give that love.

The motto that I am currently embracing is “to have community, you must be community.” As a therapist, I help individuals and couples work to look inside themselves to find their own answers. But in my personal life, I am reaching out to friends, sending letters, and keeping in touch with family. I try to go above and beyond to be there for others, in the same way others are there for me.

If you are looking for self-love, look at your authentic self first. What works? What doesn’t? What is easy to accept? What parts do you avoid?

Ask yourself, am I showing up for me or for someone else? Am I being who I want to be, or am I trying to be someone else? What would it look like if I actually was who I wanted to be?

We all have ideas about who we are, what we could be, and what our core self is. The main part is actually accepting it. Accepting can move to authenticity, which can then grow into love.

You are an ever-growing person. and there is always so much to learn, accept, and love.

You are deserving of love.

You are deserving of authenticity.

You are deserving of acceptance.

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On August 22, 2018, my husband collapsed in our bedroom.

Rudy was my best friend and my partner in every sense of the word. His last word was “911.”

I performed CPR while my youngest daughter and my father-in-law stood nearby, and my oldest daughter shielded our four-year-old in another room. The EMTs worked on him before taking him to the hospital, and my father-in-law and I followed the ambulance.

After what felt like forever, a nurse moved us into a small waiting room at the back of the ER. There was no urgency in the building. It was eerily calm.

Eventually, a doctor came in and quietly said, “I’m sorry.”

All I could say was, “Sorry? SORRY? How?”

Everything slowed, and my mind disappeared into a fog. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

But it was.

This was eight days before our fifteenth wedding anniversary, and our family was already grieving. My eldest son’s father had died just eighteen days earlier. In less than three weeks, all four of my children had lost their fathers.

It took me time to build up the courage to see Rudy. It took everything in me to remove his wedding ring. Then somehow, I was supposed to leave.

I remember walking through the hospital unable to understand how everything was still moving. Nurses continued down the halls. Cars kept driving outside.

Somewhere people were eating, laughing, sleeping, making plans for tomorrow.

How had the world not stopped?

When I got home, my children were upstairs together. I walked into the room and told them their father was gone.

Then I screamed.

It was a blood-curdling scream that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than my body. My soul screamed.

That is what I mean when I say my life burned to the ground.

The grief was unbearable, but I could not completely collapse. My children were grieving too, and I was now the parent still standing.

So I mothered while grieving. I planned a memorial and a funeral while unraveling. I prayed, led, handled paperwork, answered questions, and did what needed to be done even when I could barely breathe.

But my journal told the truth.

Surviving: I wrote down the as-found condition.

I have spent most of my professional life in planning, cost engineering, project controls, and project management. Early in my career, I planned refinery outages from shutdown through startup. Later, I helped manage complex projects worth millions and billions of dollars.

Before you repair a troubled project, you document the as-found condition: the honest current state, not the state you wish existed. If the starting point is wrong, the recovery plan will be wrong too.

Without realizing it, I began doing the same thing in my journals.

I am not sleeping.

I am angry at him for leaving.

I am angry at God for taking him away from us.

I do not know how to do this without him.

A few weeks after Rudy died, I made a list called The Things I Lost When Rudy Died.

My companion. My lover. My best friend. My confidant. My protector. My encourager.

Then came the ordinary things: my mechanic, my grill master, my handyman, the person who shared my private jokes.

I began to understand that I was not grieving only a person. I was grieving an entire life’s architecture built around another human being.

The journal gave me a place to stop performing “fine.” It let me tell the truth about where I actually was.

That was the first lesson of rebuilding: start with reality.

Stabilizing: I made the world smaller.

Less than a month after Rudy died, I wrote, “The days are getting harder as reality sets in. I feel strengthened and broken at the same time.”

I also wrote, “As a planner, I’m always trying to plan ahead, thinking of the future, but now there is no future with him physically.”

Planning was not simply what I did for work. It was how I oriented myself to life.

There was always a next milestone, a contingency, something ahead. Now the future I had been planning had disappeared.

I knew how to plan for risk. I did not know how to plan for absence.

Thirty-four days after Rudy died, I wrote another prayer: Teach me how to rest.

I stopped trying to solve the rest of my life. I reduced the scope.

Take care of my children.

Take care of myself.

Rest.

Do not make every decision today.

One second. One minute. One hour. One day.

Eventually my body told the truth my mouth had been avoiding. My hair began falling out. I had been functioning so well that even I had confused functioning with healing.

It wasn’t healing.

Remembering: I went looking for Angie.

Rudy and I had spent eighteen years together, fifteen of them married. We truly operated as a we, and that was beautiful.

Death ended the we without my consent. Suddenly there was only me.

I had to decide. I had to parent. I had to build a life I never asked to build.

And somewhere in that transition from we back to me, I ran into a question I was not expecting:

Who is me?

As part of my healing, I began looking much further back than my marriage.

I went looking for Angie.

Angie is what my siblings and the people who knew me growing up call me. If someone calls me Angelina, of course I respond. But if someone calls me Angie, I turn around differently.

If you call me Angie, I know you know me. You know my beginning. You know my origin.

I kept thinking about my nine-year-old self. She was fearless. She spoke her mind.

She was independent.

And I realized I could not find her.

I could not remember where I lost her. I could not remember where I last saw her. I could not remember where I put her.

So I started excavating.

I looked for the places where pain had taught me to hide, shame had taught me to dim myself, and fear had taught me that being fully seen could be dangerous.

There was no single moment when Angie disappeared. The burial happened in layers.

I grew up, achieved, served, mothered, built a career, and became very good at carrying enormous responsibility. From the outside, I was functioning extraordinarily well.

But functioning and being fully yourself are not the same thing.

I also spent decades in male-dominated industries, sometimes learning to soften what I knew so I would not seem threatening and at other times becoming harder because hardness seemed to be the language the room respected.

Those strategies helped me succeed. That is why I did not immediately recognize what they had cost me.

My life had burned in 2018. What I had not known was that parts of me had been buried long before the fire.

The fire made the ground visible.

And when I kept digging, I found her.

Angie was still there.

As I reconnected with her, dreams returned. Pieces of my personality returned. I remembered aspirations, stories, and parts of myself I had not thought about in years.

I remembered myself.

But remembering also uncovered pain I had never fully processed, shame I had learned to live around, and things I needed to forgive or release.

I was grieving my husband, and I was grieving how far I had traveled from myself.

Both needed healing.

Rising: I learned joy did not have to wait for grief to leave.

One of the clearest signs of healing was hidden in an ordinary journal entry from those first weeks.

I had written about how broken I felt. Then, almost casually, I wrote: Went to the beach with friends. We had a nice time.

For years I barely noticed that sentence.

Now I think it tells the truth about returning to life better than almost anything else I wrote.

My husband was dead.

I was devastated.

And I had a nice time at the beach.

Both things were true.

Joy had entered the room without asking grief to leave first.

That changed how I understood healing. Moving forward did not mean leaving Rudy behind. Loving the life still available to me did not mean I had loved our life any less.

Strategy helped me make decisions about the life I could influence. But strategy could not return my husband or make reality become something other than what it was.

That required surrender.

Not surrender as giving up, but surrender as releasing my demand that reality change before I allowed myself to live again.

Looking back, I can see a pattern I could not see while I was inside it: survive, stabilize, remember, rebuild, rise.

I did not follow a framework. I lived it first. The language came later.

If your life has become something you never planned, you do not need to solve all of it today.

Start with what is true.

Make the next thing smaller.

Notice what you are carrying.

Ask what you have been hiding.

And if you no longer recognize yourself, look back with tenderness instead of judgment. You may not be gone. You may simply be buried beneath years of becoming who you needed to be.

I could not remember where I had put Angie either.

But she was there.

She had been there all along.

Given the choice, I would choose Rudy. I would undo this loss in a heartbeat if anyone would let me.

But no one will.

So I stopped waiting for my old life to return. I began tending to the life that remained.

And somewhere beneath the grief, the roles, the armor, the fear, and all those years of becoming who I needed to be, I found the person who remained too.

Angie was still there.

And so was I.

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“We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.” ~Albert Schweitzer

I pick up my phone even though it has not made a sound.

No missed calls. No new messages. No invitation asking what I am doing or whether I would like to come over. I put it down, but before long I check again.

Still no one.

The only other heartbeat in the house belongs to Oliver, my five-pound chihuahua. He brings me more joy than something so small should be able to carry. I talk to him constantly, and he listens with great interest when he thinks the conversation might involve food. Otherwise, he is not very good at holding up his end.

Most days follow the same routine. I go to work. I go to the gym. I take Oliver for a walk. On the weekends, I take myself to brunch. Occasionally, I travel on my own.

I know how to be alone. That has never been the problem.

The restaurant I go to most often in Buffalo is Roost. I always sit at the bar because, even if no one else talks to me, I know I will have at least some interaction with the people who work there.

I am a regular. Paige always says hello. Martin, the owner, always speaks with me, and when he has time, he will sit down and talk for a little while. Their kindness is genuine, and I value it. I do not walk into Roost unnoticed.

But the people sitting beside me seldom engage beyond hello.

I have tried going at different times: Friday dinner, my usual Saturday brunch, even the busier Sunday brunch, hoping more people might create more opportunities to meet someone.

I follow the advice. I keep my phone out of my hands. I make eye contact. I smile. I keep my posture open. I try to look approachable without looking as though I am trying too hard to be approached.

Most of the time, I finish my meal and go home.

When someone does begin a genuine conversation, something inside me settles. I feel visible. I feel as though, for a little while, my presence matters to someone other than me. The interaction does not have to become a friendship or lead to future plans. It can still relieve the loneliness for the rest of the day.

On the outside, I look put together, independent, and confident. I go to work, exercise, travel alone, and take myself to brunch. I appear to be a woman who is perfectly comfortable on her own.

On the inside, I sometimes feel like a flashing billboard:

Here I am. See me.

Being able to do things alone does not mean I want to experience my life that way. Independence and loneliness can occupy the same chair.

By Christmas 2025, I was tired of spending the holiday at home, feeling sad while imagining everyone else gathered with the people who belonged to them. I decided to try something different. If I was going to be by myself, I could at least be somewhere new.

So I booked a trip to Asheville.

On Christmas Eve, I went out for brunch. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the restaurant was busy. I took a seat at the end of the bar. The first couple beside me did not engage beyond a polite hello.

After they left, an older couple named Terry and Al picked up their drinks from the other end of the bar and moved into the empty seats beside me.

“We are not going to let you sit alone,” they said.

They began talking to me as though crossing the room to include a stranger on Christmas Eve was the most natural thing in the world. When Terry learned I was visiting Asheville on my own, she gave me an entire itinerary of things to see and do. We had a lovely conversation and exchanged phone numbers.

After I left, I texted to thank them. Later that day, they invited me to meet them at Sparky’s Bardega.

I went.

The people there were warm and welcoming. A gentleman came over and started talking to me. Later that evening, after I had left Sparky’s, Terry and Al texted again and invited me to join them for dinner. I met them and had a drink before leaving to continue my conversation with the gentleman I had met earlier.

On Christmas Day, Terry reached out once more and asked if I wanted to meet later. I was tired and leaving the following morning, so I did not go.

But every invitation mattered. Terry and Al had not simply spoken to me at brunch and returned to their lives. They kept remembering me. They continued making room for me.

For that brief time, my presence had registered in someone else’s life.

I have never forgotten how that felt.

It also left me with a question I have not been able to answer: Is it me, or is it where I live?

I have lived in Buffalo for nine years, yet in my experience it can still be a difficult city to enter as a transplant. Many of the people I meet are surrounded by the families and friends with whom they grew up. They share decades of birthdays, weddings, illnesses, children, losses, and ordinary dinners. I have been invited into people’s homes, but those invitations have not developed into the steady connection I long for. Months, and sometimes years, can pass between them. If I make the effort, people are often receptive. But being friendly to someone is different from making room for her in your life.

I do not blame them. They already have people.

There is a stability in being known by someone who remembers who you were before you became who you are. I can recognize that as a blessing and still envy it. I have never had that kind of permanence.

Would life be different if I moved somewhere with more transplants, people who arrived without established circles and were also searching for connection? Would I meet more people willing to pick up their drinks, cross the room, and make space for someone they did not know?

Or would I unpack the same loneliness in a different house?

I know a new city cannot fix everything. Wherever I go, I will take myself with me. I will carry the same tendency to make myself small, to interpret silence as rejection, and to wonder what I could have done differently.

But I have been doing the work. And Asheville makes me wonder whether sometimes the place matters, too.

There are still evenings when the loneliness becomes so overwhelming that I go to bed simply to make the hours pass faster. It is not that I have nothing to do. I can always find something to fill the time.

Lately, I write. It gives the hours somewhere to go.

What I cannot always find is someone with whom to share them.

On the hardest days, the loneliness gives rise to a more unsettling question: If something happened to me inside this house, how long would it take before anyone noticed? Who would find me, and when?

What I want is to know that my presence registers in someone else’s daily life. That someone would notice if I did not text in the morning, arrive when expected, or answer the phone.

Oliver would notice. He notices when I leave the room for five minutes.

I am grateful for him in ways he will never understand. But my heart still longs for a person with whom I can share my life, someone to sit across from at dinner, tell the small details of my day, travel with occasionally, and love Oliver with me.

The cost of loneliness is not only the absence of company. It is the way that absence turns inward. A silent phone becomes evidence. An empty evening becomes a verdict. Instead of asking why connection can be so difficult to find, I ask what must be wrong with me that no one is looking.

I suspect I am not the only person asking.

Somewhere, another person is following the same advice. They have put away their phone. They are making eye contact, smiling, and trying to appear open. They may be surrounded by people and still wondering whether anyone will choose the empty seat beside them.

Perhaps that is one of loneliness’s cruelest tricks: it convinces each of us that we are the only one no one chose.

Knowing there may be others does not make the house less quiet. It does not make the phone ring or place someone across from me at dinner. But it reminds me that loneliness is not proof that I am uniquely unworthy of being loved.

I do not know yet how to make the loneliness end.

For now, I go to work. I go to the gym. I walk Oliver. I take myself to brunch. I write. I keep putting myself in places where connection might happen, even when it does not.

After Asheville, I returned to the same routine, the same quiet house, and the same silent phone. Nothing had been solved. But the kindness I found there left me questioning the conclusion I have carried for so long.

When do we stop asking what is wrong with us and begin asking whether we are trying to belong in the wrong place?

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When I was little, I often felt as though I lived in two completely different worlds.

My parents’ home was like an ice castle. Everything looked beautiful. Everything was orderly. Everything appeared exactly as it was supposed to. But it was cold.

My mother rarely let me do what I genuinely wanted to do. Instead, I was expected to only do what had to be done.

Many evenings I went to bed exhausted, frustrated, or quietly holding back tears.

Whenever I complained, my mother would simply say, “You have to endure it. That’s how everyone lives.”

Then there was my grandmother’s world.

Her home was filled with warmth.

It was never perfectly tidy because she was always creating something—baking, sewing, planting flowers, or trying a new recipe simply because it made her happy.

She cooked what she genuinely enjoyed eating, and she never forced me to eat food I didn’t want.

She adored animals.

On warm summer nights, she loved sleeping outside in the garden beneath the stars and always invited me to join her. My mother never allowed it.

My grandmother wasn’t perfect. But she taught me something my nervous system has never forgotten:

Balance.

You don’t have to force yourself through everything. Some things flourish when they’re done with inspiration instead of obligation.

And when the day has already been stressful, don’t continue the race after you get home. The day may have been exhausting. Home doesn’t have to be.

Take a warm bath. Eat something you truly enjoy. Wrap yourself in your favorite blanket. Go to bed early.

Sometimes healing is much simpler than we imagine.

We’ve all had those days. The kind that leaves you emotionally drained before dinner.

Your shoulders ache. Your thoughts refuse to slow down. And all you want is something—anything—that will make the stress disappear.

Unfortunately, many of the habits we reach for after difficult days don’t actually help us recover. They simply distract us long enough to postpone what we’re really feeling.

From my own experience, here are five habits that quietly make tomorrow even harder—and the healthier alternatives that help your nervous system truly reset.

1. Scrolling until you forget why you picked up your phone

It feels harmless. Just a few minutes on social media. Then thirty minutes become two hours. Instead of feeling rested, you somehow feel even more overwhelmed.

Our brains often look for distraction because slowing down means finally noticing how emotionally exhausted we really are.

And perhaps the strangest part? The algorithm rarely shows us what we actually wanted to see.

Instead, it floods our minds with endless recommendations, strangers’ opinions, and content we never asked for.

That’s why I now rely on much simpler rituals. The kind that quiet my mind instead of filling it. The kind that gently return my attention to myself and my own inner world.

Try this instead.

Do absolutely nothing for ten minutes.

Make yourself a cup of tea or whatever feels comforting.

Watch the sunset. Few things are more beautiful than watching the sky slowly change colors. Even better if you can share the moment with someone you love.

Sit beside an open window.

Spend a few minutes near water.

Take a bath.

Take a shower.

Your nervous system doesn’t always need more stimulation. Sometimes it simply needs silence.

I especially love being surrounded by nature and water.

Even spending a few quiet minutes in the small green space near my apartment helps my body relax.

I don’t live in a house with a garden like my grandmother did, and I can’t place a bed beneath the stars the way she loved to. Sometimes I miss that.

But I’ve noticed something surprising. Choosing not to scroll Instagram gives my mind far more inspiration than thirty minutes on Pinterest ever could.

2. Ignoring your emotions

Many of us learned to wear emotional masks long before we became adults.

“I’m fine.”

Even when we’re not.

“It wasn’t that bad.”

Sometimes that’s simply another way of saying, “I don’t believe I deserve better.”

“I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

Occasionally, that’s a healthy choice.

But when tomorrow becomes next week and next month, our emotions don’t disappear. They wait.

Eventually, they can return as anxiety, irritability, exhaustion, or emotional numbness.

Healing begins the moment we allow ourselves to say one simple sentence:

“Today was hard.”

Many of us were taught that being strong means pretending we’re okay.

In reality, acknowledging your emotions is one of the strongest things you can do.

I wore that mask for most of my childhood. My mother believed that maintaining the appearance of “everything is fine” was simply part of life.

I was expected to smile, even when I didn’t feel like smiling. Maybe that’s why, as an adult, I no longer force myself to pretend.

If I need to cry, I cry.

And I’ve never asked my daughter to pretend she’s okay when she isn’t.

I want her to know that every emotion has a place. That feelings don’t make us weak. Pretending they don’t exist does.

3. Treating stress like a personal failure

We often see stress as proof that we’re not strong enough.

We criticize ourselves for feeling overwhelmed instead of asking a much more important question:

What overwhelmed me in the first place?

Stress is information.

Sometimes it tells us we’ve taken on too much. Sometimes it tells us we need rest. Sometimes it reminds us that our boundaries quietly disappeared.

And sometimes, the stressful day wasn’t entirely our fault.

We can’t control other people’s behavior. People ignore boundaries. They disappoint us. They create unnecessary pressure. The only thing we truly control is how we respond afterward.

When I was little, my grandmother used to joke that emotions were like tiny worms.

“If you keep them trapped inside,” she’d laugh, “they’ll start nibbling at you from within.”

Because of her, those little ‘worms’ never had the chance to stay inside me for very long.

I’m not afraid of my emotions anymore. I love every one of them. I let myself feel them. Then I let them go.

I don’t carry yesterday’s stress into tomorrow. Each morning, I try to begin again—as if someone has placed a clean sheet of paper in front of me.

4. Trying to earn rest

Many of us believe we have to finish just one more thing before we’ve earned the right to rest. One more email. One more load of laundry. One more hour of work.

The problem is that one more thing rarely stays just one thing. There’s always another task waiting. Another notification. Another reason to postpone taking care of ourselves.

The finish line keeps moving.

We forget that rest was never supposed to be something we had to earn. It’s a biological need.

Your brain can’t recover while it’s constantly waiting for permission to slow down. And the truth is, very few people will stop to protect your well-being if you never do.

That’s why putting yourself somewhere near the top of your own priority list isn’t selfish. It’s healthy.

No one has ever found lasting happiness by treating life as one endless race.

I know that because I lived that way for a while.

At first, it even felt productive. I believed I was working hard. I believed I was doing everything I was supposed to do. But after some time, I began to notice something.

Many of my days were filled with automatic habits that consumed my time without bringing meaningful results. I didn’t recognize them until I slowed down.

That’s the strange thing about constantly rushing. When you’re always running, you rarely notice where you’re actually going.

Our minds are full of invisible fears.

The fear of falling behind.

The fear of missing an opportunity.

The fear that everyone else is moving faster than we are.

It’s easy to confuse constant motion with meaningful progress. That’s why balance matters so much. Not balance between work and laziness. Balance between creating and recovering. Between giving your energy away and allowing yourself to restore it.

When I finally let go of the habits that weren’t serving me, something unexpected happened.

My body thanked me. My nervous system thanked me. But so did my creativity. My work became more colorful. More alive.

For the first time, I realized that before, I hadn’t really been creating. I had been producing. I was making content for someone else.

For expectations. For the algorithm.

There was nothing wrong with what I made. Some of it was beautiful. But when I look at my work now, the feeling is completely different.

Now my creativity feels alive. It breathes. And even when I don’t say a single word, it speaks for me.

5. Looking for instant relief instead of real recovery

After a stressful day, comfort feels irresistible.

Sometimes it’s food.

Sometimes online shopping.

Sometimes alcohol.

Sometimes another episode of a TV series.

Sometimes just one more hour on our phones.

None of those things are wrong simply because they’re enjoyable. They only become a problem when they become the only way we know how to cope.

Real recovery usually looks much less dramatic.

A meaningful conversation.

A quiet walk.

Gentle movement.

Music.

Reading.

Journaling.

Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

None of these things promise instant escape. What they offer is something far more valuable. Healing.

Because healing doesn’t place a beautiful mask over our pain and call everything okay.

Healing gently turns toward the pain itself. It listens. It understands. And little by little, it allows the wound to become something other than an open wound.

For me, letting go of my own “I’m fine” mask wasn’t easy. It took years. And perhaps I’m still learning.

But the moment I admitted that I had been wearing it, it felt as though someone had lifted a heavy weight from my shoulders.

I no longer have to keep patching my soul with temporary distractions, hoping they’ll make the pain disappear.

Instead, I can finally care for the part of me that was hurting all along.

Stress Doesn’t Mean You’re Failing

Perhaps the biggest misconception about stress isn’t that we experience it. It’s that we believe we shouldn’t.

The real problem is that we often punish ourselves simply for feeling overwhelmed.

My grandmother used to tell me something I’ll never forget.

“A stressful day doesn’t mean you’re weak. It doesn’t mean you’re failing. It doesn’t mean you’re doing life wrong. It simply means your mind and body are asking for care instead of criticism.”

For years, I didn’t fully understand what she meant. Now I do.

Recovery isn’t about escaping your emotions. It’s about creating enough safety to finally experience them without drowning in them.

Whenever I have a difficult day, I try to remember something that changes everything.

I imagine that the exhausted version of me isn’t an adult at all. She’s a little girl who had a very hard day.

Would I criticize her?

Would I tell her she should have worked harder?

Would I expect her to smile when she felt like crying?

Of course not.

I’d make her a cup of warm cocoa.

I’d read her a bedtime story.

I’d wrap her in the softest blanket I could find.

I’d stay beside her until she felt safe enough to fall asleep.

So why should I treat my adult self with any less kindness?

Perhaps that’s what healing really looks like.

Not becoming tougher. Not pretending nothing hurts. Not forcing yourself to “stay positive.” But learning to become the safe place you’ve been searching for all along.

Because sometimes the healthiest thing you can do after a stressful day isn’t becoming more productive.

It’s becoming gentler. More patient. More compassionate. Especially with yourself.

And maybe tomorrow won’t begin with the weight of yesterday. Maybe it will begin the way every new day deserves to begin—like a clean sheet of paper.

The world will probably continue asking us to do more.

Move faster. Achieve more. Stay available. Stay productive.

But healing often whispers something completely different.

Slow down. Breathe. Come home to yourself.

The to-do list will still be there tomorrow.

Your nervous system deserves your attention today.

Because your worth has never depended on how much you accomplish in a single day.

Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is allow yourself to rest.

And trust that tomorrow, you’ll begin again—not because you pushed yourself harder, but because you finally gave yourself permission to recover.

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“Being easy to please is often mistaken for having no needs at all.” ~Unknown

We’d been together four years when my husband turned to me in the car and asked, completely out of nowhere, “What’s your favorite color?”

I laughed, assuming he was joking. He wasn’t.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I realized I don’t actually know. I know mine’s blue. I don’t know yours.”

I opened my mouth to answer, and nothing came out. Not because I didn’t have a favorite color. Because I genuinely couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked me a question like that, and my mind went blank trying to locate an answer that belonged only to me.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

He looked at me like I’d told him I didn’t know my own middle name.

For most of my adult life, “easy” was the highest compliment I thought I could earn.

Easy to date. Easy to room with. Easy to work with. My college roommate used to tell people, “She’s so chill, she genuinely doesn’t care what we do,” and I wore that sentence like an award. My first serious boyfriend told his mother I was “low-maintenance,” and I remember feeling a warm flush of pride, like I’d passed some invisible test.

I didn’t examine it beyond that. Being easy meant being good. Being easy meant people wanted me around.

What I didn’t examine—what took me years to even notice—was that being “easy” required a constant, invisible sanding-down of my own preferences. Where do you want to eat? Anywhere is fine. What movie do you want to watch? Whatever you’re in the mood for. Where should we go on vacation? I don’t mind. You pick.

I said some version of those sentences so many times that I stopped noticing I was saying them. They weren’t even really answers. They were reflexes.

The car ride with my husband cracked something open that I spent the next several months poking at, uncomfortably, like a bruise I kept forgetting was there.

I started paying attention to how often I did this. Not just with him—with everyone. A friend would ask where I wanted to grab coffee, and I’d feel a tiny jolt of panic before saying, “Oh, wherever’s easiest for you.” My sister would ask what I wanted for my birthday, and I’d say, “Honestly, don’t worry about it. I don’t need anything.” And I’d mean it in the sense that I had genuinely stopped letting myself want things enough to name them.

I brought it up with my husband a few weeks later, half-joking, half-not. “I think I actually don’t know what I like anymore.”

He didn’t laugh. He said, “I’ve kind of noticed that. I used to think you were just really chill. Now I think you might just be really good at disappearing.”

That sentence sat in my chest for days.

I want to be clear that nobody forced this on me. My husband never once said he needed me to be easy. My friends never demanded I have no preferences. If anything, the people closest to me kept gently asking what I wanted, over and over, the way you’d tap on a door to see if anyone’s home.

I was the one who kept answering “whatever’s fine” long after it stopped being true.

I think I learned somewhere, a long time before any of these relationships, that having strong preferences made me a target. Growing up, my parents’ moods could shift a room in seconds, and I got very good, very young, at reading which way the wind was blowing and adjusting myself to match it before anyone had to ask. Agreeing was safer than wanting. Wanting gave people something to say no to.

By the time I was an adult, “I don’t care, whatever you want” wasn’t a personality trait. It was a decades-old survival reflex wearing a very convincing disguise.

The hardest part wasn’t realizing this. The hardest part was trying to undo it.

A few weeks after the color conversation, my husband asked where I wanted to go for dinner, and I made myself say an actual restaurant. Not “wherever,” not “you pick,” but an actual name, out loud.

He blinked. “Oh! Yeah, let’s do that.”

That was it. No argument. No disappointment. No one accused me of being difficult. And still, my heart was pounding like I’d done something reckless.

I sat in the passenger seat on the way there, feeling this strange mix of pride and exposure, like I’d walked outside without a coat I’d worn so long I forgot it was optional.

It kept happening like that, in small, almost embarrassingly tiny ways. Telling a friend I actually wanted to see a different movie than the one she suggested. Saying I didn’t want to host Thanksgiving that year. Admitting, out loud, that I do have a favorite color, and it’s green, and I like it because it reminds me of the woods behind my childhood house, a detail nobody had ever bothered to ask me about because I’d never once given them the opening.

Every single time, I braced for the relationship to reveal itself as conditional. For someone to say, “Actually, I liked you better when you didn’t want things.” No one ever did.

I’ve since wondered how many of my relationships were built on a version of me that wasn’t quite real. Not fake, exactly. Just edited. A person-shaped space where my actual preferences used to be, filled in instead with whatever would keep things smooth.

I don’t think anyone loved that edited version more than they would have loved the real one. I think I just never gave them the chance to find out.

My husband and I still laugh about the color conversation sometimes, though it doesn’t feel entirely like a joke to me even now. It was the first crack in a wall I didn’t know I’d built. Four years into a marriage, and he was asking a question you’d expect on a first date, because I had made myself so easy that I’d made myself unknown.

I’m not easy anymore, not in the way I used to be. I have opinions about restaurants. I have a favorite color. I’ve disappointed people in small, survivable ways, and the relationships held anyway, which was the thing I never quite believed until I tested it myself, over and over, in tiny increments.

If I’m honest, I still catch the old reflex sometimes. Someone asks what I want, and “whatever’s fine” rises up automatically, halfway out of my mouth before I stop it. But I stop it more often now. I make myself answer the real question underneath: not what’s easiest to say, but “What do I actually want?”

It still feels a little dangerous every time. Wanting things out loud always does, if you spent long enough believing it wasn’t safe.

But nobody’s left yet. And every time they stay, it gets a little easier to believe they were never staying for the easy version in the first place.

They were staying for me.

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“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” ~Toni Morrison, Beloved

My father was on the other side of my bedroom door, banging hard on it with the flat of his hand, screaming at me to get back to the table and finish my plate.

I told him there was no way I was going anywhere near my sister after she’d just hit me.

That’s when he said the thing that gutted me.

“Well, you know, I used to give your mother a good swift kick in the ass when she deserved it. You act like that, and you get what you deserve.”

I was maybe fourteen. I remember my darkened bedroom, the window unit air conditioning humming loudly as water droplets dripped from it, the damp, stark coldness of the room, my bedroom door, the hallway light underneath it, my own breathing. I don’t remember much of anything that evening after that.

What I do remember is that up to that point, my father had spent my entire life denying he ever laid a hand on my mother. Denied it during the divorce. Denied it to her parents. And here he was, in two sentences, confirming it and using it to tell me I’d earned my sister’s slap.

The pain in the ass finally had a name—and for once, it wasn’t mine.

I just didn’t know that yet. It would take me another forty-five years to figure it out.

The Dinner Table

Here’s what led up to that door.

For as long as I can remember, dinner with my dad came with a side of commentary, and the commentary was always about me. I was a picky eater, and every single meal—not most, every—my father would regularly bring it up. How long I was taking. How much I talked. How I’d negotiate for dessert like I was closing a business deal.

He had a voice he saved just for mocking me. It was nasal, pinched, annoying as hell, like a cartoon villain doing a bad impression of a little girl. In that voice, he’d say, “How many bites ‘til I get dessert?”

He said it teasingly, like it was a bit we were doing together, but we weren’t. A bit you’d sit through every dinner you shared with your dad during your childhood stops being a bit. It becomes the story of who you are.

He called me a pain in the ass. Royal pain in the ass. Not once. Constantly.

And here’s the detail that I sat with for decades but could never reconcile: my sister could leave her plate half-eaten and ask for dessert too, and it never landed on her. It was never about the plate. It was all about me.

I had a sister four years older, and she was, by any measure, the more remarkable of the two of us. Physically very attractive. A gifted student, a varsity-lettered athlete, had a flair for playing musical instruments, for singing, too, and even became multilingual by the time she was a young woman.

I was, by comparison, aggressively average.

Nothing about me stood out on paper. What did stand out—what none of us had language for yet—was that she was also mentally ill and could even be physically dangerous when she unraveled. I write about how that impacted me in Why Being Ignored Causes Such Deep Pain and Damage, so I won’t retell it all here.

What matters for this piece is just this: in a house where one daughter was breaking, at times dangerously, in ways the adults couldn’t or wouldn’t fully face, the other daughter’s dinner-table chatter became a very convenient place to put his anger and frustration.

I became the family’s designated and annoying pain in the ass. It was a role. I didn’t know that yet either.

The Night It Became Permanent

The one summer afternoon, I’m fourteen-ish, visiting my dad and sister in New York, my sister and I go get ice cream downtown. Baskin-Robbins. Nothing unusual about that. That night at dinner, my father starts in on me—the same routine; this time it was about my eating ice cream before dinner. It was always something.

I looked at my sister’s plate. Not empty. Looked at mine. Looked him in the eye and said something like, “How come you always come for me, and you never say anything about the fact that Jill was right there with me eating the same ice cream and didn’t finish her plate either?”

That pissed her off. She lunged across the table at me so fast I barely saw it coming. I was out of my chair, trying to get away, and she caught my back with an open hand hard enough to leave a mark. I ran past my father and locked myself in my room.

That’s the bedroom door this piece opened on. And the brutal sentence that was uttered on the other side of it.

I want to be precise about why that sentence did so much damage, because it wasn’t just that it was cruel. It’s that it fused two things together that had no business being fused: the violence he’d always denied and the idea that I was the kind of person who brought violence on herself.

In one breath, he told on himself and blamed me for it.

I didn’t have the tools at fourteen to separate those two things. So I didn’t. I just absorbed both of them as fact.

What Forty-Five Years of Being “the Pain in the Ass” Actually Cost Me

Here’s a piece of the puzzle I only discovered recently. A 2025 meta-analysis published in Child Development combined sixty-five studies and more than 19,000 adolescents and found a measurable link between growing up with a critical, rejecting parent-child dynamic and a teenager’s tendency toward shame.

It wasn’t simply the absence of warmth that mattered most. It was the active presence of criticism, rejection, and love that came with conditions attached. The specific, repeated message that you were only acceptable when you behaved a certain way.

I got the message enough times.

By the time I started dating, “pain in the ass” wasn’t an insult anymore. It was a punchline I told on myself, first, before anyone else could. I’d joke about it three weeks into seeing someone new, like I was saving them the trouble of finding out.

And then, without fail, I’d find a way to prove myself right. I was good at getting a man’s attention. I was never good with keeping it. And I kept choosing the exact kind of guy who would confirm it, over and over, for decades.

For a long time, I believed that I was the problem. I was wholly unworthy of a man’s continued love, faithfulness, and affection.

Psychologists call this repetition compulsion. It’s the unconscious pull to recreate a painful childhood dynamic in adulthood, not because we enjoy the pain, but because some part of us is still trying to master it, to get a different ending this time from an authority figure who once failed us.

Truth is, I wasn’t unworthy. I was stuck at age fourteen, still standing in a dark, bone-chilling cold bedroom, staring at a door, trying to get a kinder sentence out of the other side of it.

I carried that shame for decades before I ever traced it back to that moment.

The Other Side of Him

I want to be honest about the rest of it, because the rest of it is true too.

My dad generously paid for my entire college education without blinking, something he’d probably decided to do before I was even born. Once I graduated and landed on my feet in a sales career, something shifted between us.

He was floored that I was so successful and used to tease me, “I never would’ve imagined you’d be doing so well. I thought all you cared about was your hair!”

But underneath the ribbing, he was genuinely proud and, for the first time in my life, actually interested in what I had to say.

We talked business for hours upon hours on the phone. He became a real mentor to me, not just a father. That relationship was not fake. It was one of the best of my adult life.

And near the end, when Alzheimer’s had started taking pieces of him, something in him softened that had never been soft before. I used to end our phone calls with “I love you” and get a flat “Okay. Thanks, hon, bye.” This was his normal response for years and years.

Toward the end of his life, he started saying it back, freely, easily, even effusively, like it had always been so simple. And he would light up when I entered the room. He would blanket me with the warmest, most beautiful feeling of full, complete unconditional love.

He even told me, in one of those late-in-life conversations, that he’d been really disappointed when he found out he was having girls. He’d wanted sons. He said it almost gently, somewhat shamefully, like a painful admission he’d been carrying around a long time.

It wasn’t just a comment. It was a heartfelt confession, an acknowledgment that he now understood how wrong he’d been. It stung for a moment, but I realized what the underlying message was, and I was truly grateful for his candor.

I don’t tell you this to let him off the hook for the door, or the dinner table, or my shame-laden forty-five years. I tell you because it’s the part that makes this hard to write cleanly.

He was the man who justified my sister hitting me by admitting he’d hit my mother. He was also the man who made sure I never once went without, who later became my best friend, the closest advisor I ever had, and who finally learned to say the words I’d been waiting on since I was a kid.

What I Know Now

It wasn’t until decades passed, several actually, that I began putting all of the pieces together:  The label I carried and the conflicting feelings about my dad were all twisted up into the same emotional wound.

When I try and reconcile what happened with my brain, it becomes too difficult to do. But when I do it from my heart, it tells me he was a good, generous, loving man who did some awful things, too.

If you’re standing at your own version of that door, still carrying that label handed to you by a parent capable of providing both love and emotional abuse, here’s what I want you to remember:

The label was never a fact about you. It was a story someone else needed to be true so their own worst behavior would make sense.

It’s time to stop identifying with the role you were handed. You’ve carried it long enough.  You’re also allowed to be furious at the person who handed it to you while you still let yourself remember the parts of them that were loving, real, genuine, and kind.

Both things can still be true.

People, even the ones who hurt us the worst, are rarely all one thing. Mine wasn’t. I’m not either.

If you’re still carrying a label someone else handed you at your own kitchen table, I hope you’ll take today as your invitation to hand it back.

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In 2014, at the age of thirty-one, I was told that I might soon have serious difficulty walking.

For months, my body had been sending me signals I did not understand. I experienced numbness, vertigo, falls, loss of coordination, difficulty reading, disorientation, bladder problems, and other neurological symptoms.

I would walk down the street and suddenly lose my balance. I would look at a page and struggle to process the words. Parts of my body stopped feeling familiar.

Eventually, an MRI revealed more than thirty lesions in my brain and more than twenty in my spinal cord.

I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Because of the number and location of the lesions, I was warned that my mobility could deteriorate significantly within six to twelve months.

I remember the feeling of hearing those words more clearly than the words themselves.

It felt as though somebody had reached into my future and erased it.

Until then, I had believed that life could be made safe through effort, planning, and control. I worked in banking, had a stable professional career, and knew how to organize, calculate, anticipate, and prepare.

But I could not calculate my way out of this diagnosis.

I could not make a spreadsheet that guaranteed I would continue walking.

For the first time in my adult life, control failed me completely.

When Fear Disguised Itself as Discipline

After the initial shock, I began searching for anything that might help me.

I changed my nutrition, paid closer attention to my digestive health, started meditating, and explored different forms of movement. I began practicing yoga and Pilates and, later, incorporated regular strength training.

I also started examining the emotional patterns that had shaped my life: chronic stress, anger, perfectionism, fear, and the need to control everything around me.

Many of these changes supported my well-being.

My symptoms gradually receded. A later MRI showed no new lesions, and I have now lived for more than twelve years without another clinical relapse.

Today, I lead an active life and train regularly.

But there is another part of the story that is less inspiring and perhaps more important.

At first, I approached my health with the same perfectionism that had governed the rest of my life.

I wanted the perfect diet, the perfect supplement, the perfect routine, and the perfect emotional state.

I believed that if I did everything correctly, I could guarantee my future.

Every meal became a test. Every physical sensation became evidence. Every tired day made me wonder what I had done wrong.

Had I eaten the wrong food?

Had I been too stressed?

Had I failed to meditate enough?

I had begun making healthier choices, but fear was still in charge.

My lifestyle had changed, yet my relationship with myself had not.

I was trying to heal through control.

The Difference Between Responsibility and Blame

There is enormous value in taking an active role in our health.

We can improve how we eat, move, sleep, rest, relate to others, and respond to stress. We can ask questions, seek support, and participate in decisions about our care.

But responsibility and blame are not the same thing.

Responsibility asks, “What can I do today that may support me?”

Blame says, “If I am still struggling, I must have done something wrong.”

Responsibility creates options.

Blame creates a verdict.

For a long time, I confused the two.

I thought that taking responsibility meant I had to control every possible factor. I thought that if a symptom appeared, it was proof that I had failed.

But human bodies are not moral scorecards.

People can eat well, exercise, meditate, follow medical advice, and still experience illness or setbacks.

That does not mean they lacked discipline, faith, positivity, or courage.

It means they are human.

Realizing this helped me soften.

I could continue caring for myself without treating my body as a project that had to perform perfectly.

Rebuilding Trust Through Small Actions

One of the hardest parts of illness was losing trust in my own body.

Before the diagnosis, I rarely thought about walking, reading, balance, or coordination. After the diagnosis, every ordinary action felt uncertain.

Movement became one of the ways I rebuilt that trust.

At first, the goal was not to become strong. The goal was to feel safe inside my body again.

Yoga and Pilates helped me reconnect with movement and awareness.

Later, strength training gave me something different.

It allowed me to experience my body not only as vulnerable, but also as capable.

Each repetition became evidence that my body could learn, adapt, and become stronger.

The change was not only physical.

When I lifted more weight, moved with greater stability, or completed a workout I once thought impossible, I began to imagine a different future.

Not a guaranteed future. A possible one. That distinction mattered.

Hope became less about predicting what would happen and more about discovering what was still available to me.

Letting Go of the Perfect Recovery

For years, I searched for the exact formula that had produced my improvement.

Was it the nutrition?

The meditation?

The digestive work?

The movement?

The emotional changes?

The reduction in stress?

The truth is that I cannot prove that one specific action caused my recovery.

My experience is personal. It is not a universal treatment plan, and it is not a reason for anybody to abandon appropriate medical care.

What I can say is that the process transformed my relationship with my health and my life.

I became more aware of what supported me.

I learned to notice when fear was driving my decisions.

I learned that consistency was more useful than intensity.

I learned that a sustainable habit practiced imperfectly was more valuable than a perfect routine I could not maintain.

And I learned that recovery does not always mean returning to the person you were before.

Sometimes it means becoming somebody new.

When a Diagnosis Changes More Than Your Health

My diagnosis eventually forced me to look at the rest of my life.

I had built a secure career in banking, but security was no longer enough.

I began asking questions I had avoided for years.

Was I living according to my own values?

Did my work feel meaningful?

Was I choosing my life, or merely maintaining it?

Leaving a stable profession was frightening. There was no guarantee that a new direction would work. But illness had taught me that certainty was never truly available, even when life appeared secure.

I began writing and supporting others who were navigating health challenges, stress, burnout, and major life changes.

My diagnosis did not automatically give my life purpose.

But it forced me to stop postponing the search for it.

What I Would Tell Someone Who Has Just Received a Frightening Diagnosis

I would not tell them that everything will be fine.

Nobody can promise that honestly.

I would not give them a list of rules or suggest that their future depends on doing everything perfectly.

I would tell them that the first chapter is not the entire story.

I would tell them that fear is normal, but it does not need to make every decision.

I would encourage them to keep appropriate medical support, ask for help, and begin with small actions that are sustainable in real life.

Eat one supportive meal.

Take one walk if walking is possible.

Rest without treating rest as failure.

Speak honestly to somebody you trust.

Find a form of movement that helps you reconnect with your body.

Make one decision based on care rather than fear.

Small actions may not feel dramatic, but they create movement.

And movement creates possibilities.

Hope Without Guarantees

More than twelve years have passed since I was warned that I might lose my mobility.

Today, I train regularly, live actively, and continue building a life that once seemed impossible.

I do not know exactly why my evolution has been so positive.

I do not know what the future will bring.

But I no longer believe that hope requires certainty.

Hope is not pretending that illness is easy. It is not denying medical reality or forcing ourselves to remain positive.

Hope is leaving room for outcomes we cannot yet see.

It is refusing to reduce ourselves to a diagnosis.

It is continuing to participate in our lives, even when we cannot control the result.

My diagnosis changed my life.

But it did not get to decide everything that came afterward.

Neither fear nor certainty built the life I have today.

I built it one imperfect, hopeful choice at a time.

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In my second year of Ayurvedic medical school, my eyes started burning around nine o’clock every night.

I did what most students do. I rubbed them, blinked hard a few times, and went back to the screen. Exams were close. The lecture slides were on my laptop, the reference texts were PDFs, and the practice questions were on my phone. My whole education had quietly moved onto glass, and I was reading it for twelve or thirteen hours a day.

The irony took me an embarrassingly long time to notice. By day I was memorizing Shalakya Tantra, the branch of Ayurveda that deals with the eyes and the head. I could recite the old lists of what aggravates the eyes: too much close focus, too little rest, dryness, grief, staying awake into the night. By night I was doing nearly every one of those things, with the textbook open in front of me telling me not to.

I treated my eyes as equipment. They were the instruments that moved information from the screen into my memory, and when they hurt, I filed the pain under friction. Something to push through.

If you had asked me, I would have told you I was paying attention better than at any point in my life. Twelve hours a day. Total focus.

But I was not paying attention. I was narrowing it.

One night that winter the power flickered, and I looked up from the laptop into the sudden dark. When the light came back a moment later, I could not quite focus on the far wall of my room. Everything past arm’s length stayed soft, like a photograph taken in a hurry. It sharpened again within a few seconds, the way it always does, and there was nothing medically dramatic about any of it. Still, those few seconds frightened me, and the fear was not really about my eyesight.

It was the realization that I could not remember the last time I had looked at anything far away.

My desk sits beside a window. Past it there is a neem tree, a water tank, and a long view over rooftops that turns pink for about ten minutes every evening. I had not seen that view in weeks. The sunset had been happening at the edge of my vision, six feet from my chair, while I stared at a rectangle forty centimeters from my face. Nothing had blocked the window. I had simply stopped being a person who looked.

That was the part that stayed with me. Nobody takes your attention from you. You hand it over in small amounts, without ceremony, until looking at one small bright thing feels like the only kind of looking there is.

And the narrowing had not stopped at study. I was eating at the desk without tasting much. Friends’ messages got skimmed and half-answered. My mother would call, and some part of me would keep scrolling while she talked. The eyes were only where the constriction finally became painful enough to notice.

I started with them because they were what hurt. Ayurveda keeps a set of small, undramatic practices for the eyes, and I tried the ones my professors had described. Palming: rub your hands warm, cup them over closed eyes, and sit inside the dark of your own hands for a minute.

Distance gazing: lift your gaze from near work and let it rest on the farthest thing available, without hurrying it.

Splashing the eyes with plain cool water in the morning.

Closing them fully, several times an hour, instead of the shallow half-blinks a screen trains into you.

I want to be careful here, because honesty is the habit my education is supposed to build. I cannot tell you that these practices are proven therapies. Some have barely been studied at all. What I can tell you is what happened when I did them, and it had less to do with my eyes than I expected.

Palming turned out to be the first time in months I had been in darkness while fully awake. A minute is long when there is nothing to look at.

I could feel my heartbeat in my palms, and underneath it, how fast I had been going. My jaw was clenched. My shoulders were up near my ears. My breath had gone shallow in the way it does when the body has quietly decided the whole day is an emergency. None of that was new information. All of it had been happening while I studied. I just had not been present for it, because every part of me was pressed up against a screen.

Distance gazing did something stranger. When my eyes settled on the far rooftops, my thinking loosened. Thoughts became slower and less insistent, the way conversation drops when you step out of a loud room. I do not believe this is mystical. The eyes and the mind seem to strain in the same posture: fixed, close, gripping. Offer one of them a horizon and the other appears to accept it too.

Slowly, I understood that my tired eyes had never been an obstacle to attention. They were a message about it. The strain did not come from seeing too much. It came from looking at one thing, too close, for too long, and calling that focus.

Whatever attention actually is, it seems to need what the eyes need: distance as well as closeness, darkness as well as light, and the regular admission that a world continues past the edge of the current task.

My eyes still get tired. I am still a student, the screens are not going anywhere, and I would not want them to. What changed is smaller than a cure and more durable.

When the burning starts now, I do not push through it, and I do not resent it either. I close my eyes for a while, or I go find the neem tree, and I take the interruption as what it is: one of the more honest parts of me, reporting where my attention has been.

I used to think rest was what attention cost. Now I think rest is what attention is made of.

The pink light over the rooftops still lasts only ten minutes. Most evenings now, I am at the window for it.

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For most of my career, I trusted my ability to assess risk.

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“What stands in the way becomes the way.” ~Marcus Aurelius

I’ve had two strokes, and after each, there were things I had to relearn. Walking wasn’t what it used to be. My balance became a problem. There are days when my head is foggy, and I have trouble concentrating. My body doesn’t always cooperate with what my mind wants to do.

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