We are truly free when we let go of the thought that the past could or should have been any different than it was. This is so hard.

The challenge is born from our desperate need to validate our feelings and experiences. It often feels like we are invalidating ourselves if we let go of the thought that the past should have been different. We have been through hell, experienced things most people don’t know about, and it initially feels so devastating to think of just letting it go like it never happened. Where is the justice in that?

I know; I have been there. Honestly, I still have moments when I pick up this thought and carry it around for a while because it just feels like the right thing to do. To honor myself and my experiences, I have to stay connected to the injustice of the choices that others have made—choices that dramatically impacted my life and created immense amounts of pain.

After almost nineteen years of marriage, my husband, my high school sweetheart, told me that he was gay and had never been attracted to me.

I promise, I know pain. I spent weeks wrestling with myself, trying to think of all the things that could have happened, or maybe should have happened, to avoid the situation that was causing me so much pain.

Things like wishing I had paid attention to the red flags when we were dating, listening to my therapists over the years when they tried to get me to work on the issues between my husband and me, wishing I had never met him or he had been honest with me (which would have been the best for both of us, as I’m sure the lying hurt him as well). So many things I wish I could change. It seemed insurmountable at times.

For months I didn’t even want to consider accepting my reality. This felt like the most invalidating thing I could do. The rejection I experienced over the course of my marriage is not something I would wish on anyone.

Was I surprised when my ex-husband told me he was gay? This is hard to answer. I knew something was wrong. I knew I felt crazy and invisible and ugly. The number of nights I went to bed in tears over being invisible to the man I married was too many to count.

Now that I finally get to live in truth, how do I move forward? There is a twenty-year mountain of grief I’m stuck carrying. I personally find this reality the worst: other people’s choices can cut us to the core. Others can hurt us, and the only way to live a healthy, fulfilling life is to be connected to other people.

I can’t tell you the countless nights this reality has kept me awake. I want more than anything to live on an island all by myself. For years I convinced myself I could be fully self-sufficient. I will earn my own money and take care of my own needs. I don’t want anything to do with being close enough to people for them to lie, cheat, and hurt me again.

I wish this worked. I wish there were a way, but I am here to tell you there is not.

You can go that route; believe me, I’ve tried. It only brings more emptiness and pain.

The truth is, we are hardwired for connection. We are mammals. We have to have others to survive. Those who are thriving have deep, meaningful, loving relationships. They feel the greatest highs and the pain of the deepest lows when someone breaks trust. This is the human experience.

Unfortunately, some of us have experienced deeper levels of pain, but what I know for sure is that we are all capable of healing.

I have had to reframe what letting go means. It will never mean that my ex-husband’s choices were okay. I will never say the pain was worth it or not that bad. Living in a catfished relationship for twenty years will never be okay. There will always be days I feel the pain and grieve the past. Thankfully, those days are getting further apart, but they definitely still happen.

Letting go is feeling the grief of my reality so I can accept what I cannot change. I cannot change his lies. I cannot change my choices to believe them. I cannot change that I abandoned myself and my needs for the sake of him and our kids. I cannot change any of that.

I can feel the deep, tormenting pain and grieve that pain until it stops tormenting me. When I allow myself to feel, to sit in those feelings for as long as I need to, I validate myself. I am not waiting on the day when he or anyone else validates my experience.

No one will ever know the true depth of our pain. The days we sat in our closets and wept or cried ourselves quietly to sleep. We can validate that for ourselves, though. We can share our stories so others know they are not alone in their pain.

I know many of you reading this know my pain. Your story might be different, but your pain is not. If you feel stuck in moving forward, please know that the greatest gift you can give yourself is to fully feel all your feelings. “Go there,” as they say.

You don’t need to do it alone. Allow a therapist, mentor, or trusted friend to sit with you while you feel the depths of all your feelings. There is freedom on the other side. I promise. It is not perfect; my grief is not forever gone, but I am free. I am free of his choices, and I am free to create a life I didn’t know I could dream for myself while I was still tied in his web.

The work is scary, hard, and only for the courageous and brave. There are so many people who are here to cheer you on and stand beside you while you do the work. Be brave and start the journey of letting go. You are worth it.

—

I recently heard someone say that compassion is the intersection of love and suffering. I feel like I carried suffering around for so long, and I know that my ex has too. My ability to truly let go and be free came when I was able to also see my ex’s suffering and lovingly let him go.

I met him with compassion. It wasn’t easy. Compassion didn’t come quickly, and some days it is still hard. We were both raised in a culture that valued being good and loyal over happy and seen.

Our tragic story is the product of valuing rules and goodness over love, happiness, and self-expression. I know we are not the first generation to suffer from this mindset, but I pray we are the last.

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“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” ~Laurell K. Hamilton

My older sister had four years over me. As a kid, I worshipped the ground she walked on. She was so smart, so pretty, so cool. I wanted to be wherever she was, doing whatever she was doing.

I was desperate for any crumb of attention she might throw my way. I even let her loosen my baby teeth so she could pull them out one by one. In those moments she was lavishing me with attention.

Other than that, she wanted nothing to do with me. I mean nothing.

At first, I thought that was normal. The age gap was big enough that she had her own friends, her own interests, her own life that didn’t include a tagalong little sister. That is how it goes in a lot of families.

What I didn’t realize was that this wasn’t a phase. It was a pattern that would follow me for the next fifty years.

She was verbally abusive. That part is easier to name and to point to. She would call me names, talk down to me, even get her bullying friend to join in.

She could make me feel stupid in an instant. Sometimes she was physically abusive too. If I ever called her out on her behavior, I was met with a hard slap or punch.

That violence was dismissed as “sibling stuff” in our family. I never hit her back, but it was considered normal.

But honestly, the physical stuff I could mostly handle. It didn’t happen often because I had plenty of incentive not to confront her. The verbal stuff I could sometimes laugh off.

What destroyed me was the ignoring. She wouldn’t acknowledge my presence. Not occasionally. Consistently.

I would walk into a room, and she’d continue talking to the other person as if I hadn’t walked in. I would say hello and get nothing. Not even a glance. It was like I was invisible, a ghost drifting through her periphery.

When I tried to have actual conversations with her, she wouldn’t listen. I could be in mid‑sentence, and she would interrupt, change the subject, talk over me, or check out entirely. Her arms would cross, she’d scowl, and her eyes would drift somewhere past my head as if I’d stopped existing in real time.

The message was clear, even if it was never spoken. You are annoying. You are beneath me. You’re not worth the energy it takes to acknowledge.

And I believed her; why wouldn’t I? She was my older sister. She was supposed to love me, see me, protect me in a world that can be so cruel.

Instead, she became one of my first lessons in what it feels like to be treated like you don’t matter. Those lessons, learned in childhood, become the foundation you build your entire self‑image on.

The thing about being ignored is that it doesn’t announce itself. There is no dramatic reveal, no smoking gun. It is incremental.

It seeps into your nervous system like water finding cracks in a foundation. You start to question your own reality. You replay conversations in your head, searching for the moment you did something to deserve it.

And that questioning is where the real damage happens.

When someone consistently ignores you, your brain treats their silence as data. It catalogs it. It builds a narrative.

I am not worth responding to. I am not worth acknowledging. My words, my thoughts, my presence is immaterial.

You wouldn’t let someone stand in front of you and tell you these things to your face. But when they say it through absence, through the quiet of an unanswered text, through the empty space where eye contact should be, it feels different. It feels like they are reflecting back a truth you have always suspected about yourself.

That is the trap. That is where the wound deepens.

Research on relational trauma shows that chronic emotional neglect activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. Your body cannot tell the difference between being ignored and being hit. The same areas of the brain light up. The same stress hormones flood your system.

In a landmark study published in Science, Naomi Eisenberger and her team scanned people’s brains while they played a virtual ball‑tossing game designed to make them feel excluded. What they found was striking. The same regions of the brain that activate during physical pain, specifically the anterior cingulate cortex, also activate during social rejection.

Your body literally cannot tell the difference between being ignored and being physically hurt.

The message from your nervous system is unambiguous. This hurts.

And it is not just acute rejection that causes damage. Research on childhood emotional neglect from Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child shows that the persistent absence of responsive care disrupts developing brain architecture, especially in areas responsible for executive function and emotional regulation. When a caregiver consistently fails to respond to a child, the brain adapts to this absence.

It builds neural pathways around the expectation of being unseen.

Here is what that means in practice. When your family member ignored you, your developing brain was learning something profound. It was learning that your voice did not matter, that your presence was irrelevant, that the effort it took to speak into a room where no one would respond was not worth it.

Your brain built itself around that lesson.

This is why being ignored as a child cuts so deep. It is not just a memory of hurt. It’s etched into the architecture of how you relate to other people, how you see yourself, how you move through the world expecting either silence or safety.

We like to think we are more sophisticated than our ancestors, that we have evolved past the primitive wiring that kept us attached to the tribe for survival. But our nervous system has not gotten the memo. It still treats social rejection as a threat to life.

For most of human history, being cast out meant death.

So, when you’re being ignored, you’re not just feeling hurt. You’re experiencing a threat response. Your body thinks it is dying.

That’s why being ignored can feel catastrophic, all‑consuming, and completely outside your ability to think clearly about what is happening. Your nervous system is screaming at you to fix it, to restore connection, even if that connection is harmful. Even if it is killing you slowly.

I finally broke things off with my sister, not because of a grand realization, but because I found myself again. Over years of working on myself from the inside out, learning what toxic behavior was and how to recognize patterns, I figured it out. I began to see it for what it really was.

It did not stem from my shortcomings. I was not her problem.

The night I made the decision, I felt something shift. Like a bone popping back into place after being dislocated for so long you forgot it was supposed to move differently. The pain did not stop immediately.

The wound didn’t heal overnight. But the first step was recognizing that I’d been slowly starving in plain sight, surrounded by the appearance of normal.

What I came to understand is what being ignored teaches you about yourself. Those lessons, when left unchecked, become the lens through which you see every future relationship. You start to expect silence.

You start to prepare for it. You begin to build walls around yourself not because you want to but because your body learned that open spaces are where the hurt comes from.

If you are reading this and it resonates, I want you to know something. The damage from being ignored is real, but it isn’t permanent. Your brain learned to expect silence, and brains are remarkably good at learning new things.

You can teach yourself that you’re worth hearing. It takes time. It takes surrounding yourself with people who prove the silence wrong, who show up, who reflect back to you the value that someone’s absence tried to erase.

But first you have to stop accepting the silence as something you deserve. You do not.

The fact that you’re here, reading this, looking for understanding, tells me you already know something is wrong. Trust that knowing. Your intuition is not the problem.

The silence is.

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“Music gives color to the air of the moment.” ~Karl Lagerfeld

I used to think I was a good listener. I could hold eye contact, nod at the right moments, ask thoughtful follow-up questions. But one afternoon, sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat in a small studio in Rishikesh, I realized I had never truly listened to anything, not even myself.

The teacher asked us to close our eyes and simply notice the sounds around us. A ceiling fan turning slowly overhead. A dog barking somewhere down the street. My own breath, uneven and shallow. And then, beneath all of it, something I can only describe as stillness with a texture—a living, vibrating quiet I had been too busy to notice before.

That was my first deep encounter with Nada Yoga, the ancient Indian practice of yoga through sound. And it quietly dismantled everything I thought I knew about being present.

When We Fill Every Silence

For most of my adult life, I moved through the world with background noise as a constant companion. Music while cooking. A podcast during my morning walk. The television murmuring as I fell asleep. I told myself I simply liked sound. But if I am honest, I was afraid of what might surface in the quiet.

There is a kind of noise we manufacture not for pleasure, but for protection. It keeps us from sitting with the difficult questions: Am I living the life I actually want? Why does this relationship feel so hollow? What am I really feeling underneath all this busyness?

I had been using sound as an escape from sound, from the deeper sound of my own interior life. And I had no idea.

The feelings I was most afraid to face in the quiet were a sense of purposelessness and a deep uncertainty about whether the path I had chosen, dedicating my life to music, was truly mine or simply what I had always known. Growing up steeped in classical Indian music, it was hard to tell the difference between a calling and conditioning.

In the silence, those questions got louder. Am I teaching because I love it, or because it is all I know how to do? Am I connected to this practice, or have I simply built an identity around it? There was also grief in there for relationships I had let drift because I was always traveling, always teaching, always immersed in sound while somehow missing the people right in front of me.

The noise kept all of that at a comfortable distance. It was only when I truly sat with the silence that I stopped running from those questions and started letting them shape me into someone more honest.

The Practice That Changed Everything

Nada Yoga is rooted in the understanding that all of existence is vibration. From the hum of the universe to the rhythm of the human heartbeat, sound is not merely something we hear. It is something we are.

The practice begins simply. You sit. You listen. You resist the urge to fill the silence with thought, judgment, or anticipation. You let sound move through you rather than bounce off the surface of a distracted mind.

In the early days, I was terrible at it. My thoughts would sprint ahead to the grocery list, the unanswered email, the conversation I should have handled differently. My teacher would say, gently but firmly: “Come back to the sound.” And slowly, I began to.

Then came the music. We would listen to a single drone, a tambura, a singing bowl, sometimes just a held note on a harmonium. And within that note, the mind would find something extraordinary: a place to rest.

It was not silence in the way we usually think of it, as an absence of noise. It was silence as a presence, wide, unhurried, and completely real.

What Sound Teaches Us About Being Here

There is something uniquely powerful about using sound as a path to presence, because sound demands nowness. You cannot hear yesterday. You cannot hear tomorrow. Sound exists only in the living moment, and to truly listen is to arrive there with it.

I began to notice how this changed the texture of ordinary life. I would wash dishes and hear the water differently, not as background noise but as something worth attention. I would sit with a friend and actually hear the quality of their voice, the hesitation between their words, what they were not quite saying.

The practice had given me new ears. And with new ears came a new kind of presence, not the performed presence of eye contact and nodding, but a genuine settling into the here and now.

I also began to understand something about my relationship with music. I had always loved it deeply, but I had used it the way many of us do, to manage my emotional state, to push feelings up or push them down. Nada Yoga invited me to stop managing and start meeting.

To let music meet you where you are, without needing it to take you somewhere else, is a profound act of self-acceptance. It is the difference between using sound as a tool and experiencing sound as a truth.

Three Practices to Begin

You do not need years of dedicated study to begin exploring sound as a doorway to presence. Here are three simple practices that have transformed my relationship with both sound and stillness:

1. The Two-Minute Deep Listen.

Once a day, stop whatever you are doing and close your eyes. For two minutes, simply notice the sounds around you without labeling them as good or bad, welcome or unwelcome. The refrigerator hum, the distant traffic, your own breath. Let everything be exactly as it is. This is the foundation of Nada Yoga: non-judgmental listening.

2. Conscious Music Listening.

Choose one song and listen to it with your full, undivided attention. No phone. No multitasking. Notice the silence between the notes as much as the notes themselves. Notice what the music brings up in your body. Notice the moment your mind wanders, and gently return. What you are practicing is the same as seated meditation, but the sound becomes your anchor instead of the breath.

3. Sit with a Single Tone.

Find a singing bowl, a tuning fork, or a single sustained note on a piano or guitar. Let it ring out and follow it with your full attention until it completely fades. Where does the sound end? Where does the silence begin? Sitting with that question, not to answer it but to inhabit it, can open something very deep.

Coming Home to the Present

I still love background music. I still enjoy a podcast on a long walk. But something fundamental has shifted. I no longer need sound to fill a void. I have learned, slowly and imperfectly, that the quiet is not empty. It is full of everything I was too distracted to receive.

Presence is not a personality trait. It is a practice. And sound, in all its richness, in all its subtlety, in its capacity to arrive and dissolve in the same breath, is one of the most accessible teachers we have.

All you have to do is listen.

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“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” ~Rumi

I grew up in a council house in the 1970s, in a world where children were seen and not heard.

We were kicked out in the morning and told to come back when the streetlights came on. On the surface, it looked normal. But what was happening behind closed doors didn’t feel normal at all.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but I always felt different.

People thought I was shy. And I was. But it was more than that. Being around people felt overwhelming, like I was constantly on edge, scanning for something I couldn’t name. I didn’t feel safe, even when nothing obvious was wrong.

When I was six, my parents divorced.

My mum left and started a new life with my sister. I stayed behind with my dad. I didn’t understand the full picture at the time—only that everything had changed overnight.

Before she left, my dad told me that if I went with her, he would kill himself.

I believed him.

As a child, you don’t question those things. You take them in as truth. So I stayed, carrying a weight that no child should ever have to carry—the belief that someone’s life depended on me.

Looking back, that’s when the fear really took hold.

My dad was deeply hurt by the breakup. He drank heavily and didn’t work for long periods. I didn’t understand his pain at the time—only how it showed up.

Anger.

I became the place where that anger landed.

Some days, he would be waiting for me when I got home from school. If I was even a few minutes late, I would be hit. It wasn’t a one-off. It became a pattern. Something I learned to anticipate, even when I didn’t know what I’d done wrong.

You start to live differently when you grow up like that.

Always alert. Always careful. Always trying to get it right.

And somehow always feeling like you didn’t.

My dad wasn’t a bad man. I can see that now. But he wasn’t capable of being a father in the way I needed. There was no warmth, no reassurance, no sense of safety.

I wasn’t allowed to sit in the living room.

Most days, I stayed in my bedroom with nothing to do but look out the window and imagine a different life. I built entire worlds in my head just to escape the one I was in.

I had friends, but I was always on the outside. I couldn’t go out as often as they did. Slowly, I got left behind.

At night, the fear would come out in ways I didn’t understand. I wet the bed until I was around twelve. I carried shame without knowing why.

Something in me already felt… wrong.

By the time I was eleven or twelve, I found my first escape.

Butane gas.

I used to steal lighter refills from a local shop. The shopkeeper left a small window open behind the till, and I’d reach in and grab them. I’d spray it into my jumper and inhale it.

For the first time, I could leave my head.

It didn’t stop there. Glue. Petrol. Then cannabis and amphetamines by the time I was fourteen.

It wasn’t about getting high. Not really.

It was about not feeling what I was feeling.

That became my life for the next twenty-five years.

Getting out of my head wasn’t just something I did—it was something I needed. Substances became a daily habit, and eventually, they took over everything.

I lost friends. I lost direction. I lost any sense of who I was.

But in a strange way, I also found something I’d never had before.

Belonging.

The people I used with became my world. In that chaos, I felt understood. There were no expectations. No pressure to be anything other than what I was.

For the first time, I didn’t feel like the odd one out.

And that made it even harder to leave.

Because how do you walk away from the only place you’ve ever felt accepted?

Then in the late eighties, something changed again.

Ecstasy arrived.

And with it came something I had never truly experienced before—what felt like love, connection, openness. For the first time, I felt close to people. I felt part of something.

It was overwhelming in a different way.

Beautiful. Powerful. Addictive.

I didn’t want it to end.

But it wasn’t real—not in the way I needed it to be. It was a chemically created version of something I had been searching for my entire life.

And once you’ve felt that, even artificially, it’s hard to go back to emptiness.

So I stayed.

For years.

It took a long time before something began to shift.

There wasn’t a single moment that changed everything. It was slower than that. Subtle. Almost unnoticeable at first.

But somewhere along the way, I started to see that the life I was living wasn’t the only option.

That maybe… just maybe… there was something else.

And more importantly, that I had been ignoring it.

Life had been trying to show me another way for a long time. But I wasn’t ready to listen.

As soon as I did, things began to change.

I began to change.

Stepping away from that world was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not just because of the substances, but because I had to face everything I’d spent years trying to avoid.

The fear. The loneliness. The sense that I didn’t quite belong anywhere.

And the truth that along the way, I had hurt people who cared about me.

That’s something I had to sit with.

But I don’t carry regret in the way I once did.

I carry understanding.

Because something unexpected happened when I stopped running.

I began to understand myself.

I started to see that I wasn’t broken.

I had simply adapted to an environment that didn’t feel safe.

The anxiety, the withdrawal, the need to escape—it all made sense when I looked at it through that lens.

My body had been trying to protect me all along.

That realization changed everything.

Because when you stop seeing yourself as the problem, you can finally start working with yourself instead of against yourself.

Now, at fifty-six, my life looks nothing like it did back then.

I live on the other side of the world. I have a family I never believed I’d have. I’ve built something meaningful out of experiences I once thought had ruined me.

But more importantly, I feel something I didn’t think was possible.

A sense of safety within myself.

That doesn’t mean life is perfect. It isn’t.

There are still hard days. There are still moments where old patterns try to creep in.

But now I understand where they come from.

And that changes how I respond.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:

What looks like “brokenness” is often adaptation.

The things we judge ourselves for—the anxiety, the coping mechanisms, the ways we try to escape—often began as ways to survive.

And survival is not something to be ashamed of.

It’s something to be understood.

My story is a success story—but not because everything turned out perfectly.

It’s a success because I can now see a way through.

And if you’re in a place where it feels like there isn’t one, I want you to know this:

There is.

Your life can improve when you begin to empathize with yourself and take even small steps toward change.

And when you do, something begins to shift.

You begin to move.

You begin to heal.

And eventually, you begin to build a life that feels like your own.

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“Only when we realize that our time is limited do we begin to appreciate the value of every single day.” ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

I didn’t expect the trip to begin the way it did.

In December 2003, I decided to take a holiday over Christmas. I booked an eco-tour of Sri Lanka, traveling around the country and staying in different locations. It was something I had been looking forward to for a long time.

But during the flight on Christmas Eve, I started to feel unwell. At first, I thought it was just a stomach issue. Nothing unusual when traveling. But the discomfort quickly turned into something more serious. I began to feel a deep, persistent pain in my lower back.

By the time we landed, I knew something wasn’t right. I made it to the first hotel, where a doctor was called. I remember lying there, trying not to make a fuss, as he examined me. The diagnosis was a severe kidney infection. I was given strong pain medication and told to rest.

It was Christmas Day. Not quite the start I had imagined.

My room was a small bungalow on the beach. I could hear other holidaymakers outside enjoying themselves while I lay in a darkened room, trying to get through the pain.

The next morning, a note had been slipped under my door. The tour was due to begin later that day, but because I had been so ill, the hotel manager had agreed that I could stay behind and recover.

The idea of missing the tour didn’t sit well with me. I had come all this way, and I wasn’t about to spend it lying in a room while everyone else left. So I made the decision to go.

I took the medication with me and told myself I would manage.

Looking back, there was no sense that anything significant was about to happen. No warning. No feeling that this decision carried any weight beyond whether I would enjoy the trip or not. I just didn’t want to miss out.

We left the hotel and headed inland, beginning the early part of the tour. It wasn’t until the following day that something felt off.

We saw news footage on a television, but it was in a foreign language, and it was difficult to understand. There were images of destruction, water, confusion—something about a tsunami.

Our tour guide told us it was Thailand. That was partially true. As the day went on, bits of information started to come through.

At that time, only a couple of people on the tour had mobile phones. They began receiving messages—short, unclear, but enough to cause concern. Both of them were being told that they had been listed as “missing.” It didn’t make sense.

Then I managed to call a friend back in the UK. She answered the phone in tears. She kept saying, “Thank God… thank God.”

I didn’t understand at first.

And then it became clear. People believed we were dead. The hotel we had stayed in—the one we had left that morning—had been flooded.

The scale of what had happened was still unfolding, but the reality was already there. We had been in that place, at that time, and for reasons that had felt completely ordinary, we weren’t there anymore.

There was no dramatic moment. Just a quiet, sobering understanding that things could have been very different.

Once our families were able to confirm that we were safe, the immediate tension eased.

Later, we asked to be taken to the area that had been affected. It was much closer than we had expected.

The rest of the trip took on a different tone after that. As a group, we did what we could to help where possible. It didn’t feel like much in the context of everything that had happened, but it felt important to try.

When I returned home, I wasn’t prepared for the reaction.

The messages, the calls, the number of people who had been concerned—it was overwhelming. People I hadn’t spoken to in years had been following the news, trying to find out if we were alright.

It was an emotional time, but not in the way I might have expected.

What stayed with me wasn’t just what had happened—it was how many people had cared.

I had never really stopped to think about that before.

Life had simply carried on, as it tends to do. But being placed, even briefly, on the other side of that—being someone people thought they might have lost—brought a different kind of perspective.

It shifted something. Not suddenly, but enough. Over time, that shift became more noticeable.

I began to look at things differently—what mattered, where my attention went, what felt important and what didn’t. I found myself drawn towards helping in ways I hadn’t previously considered.

That eventually led me to spend time in Southeast Asia, volunteering and working with communities in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. At one point, I was invited to stay and work in a Buddhist monastery, helping support blind students.

There was no single moment where I decided to change direction. It was quieter than that. More of a gradual turning than a sudden leap.

Looking back now, I think about how it all began. Not with the tsunami. But with the illness I didn’t want. The inconvenience I tried to push through. The thing that felt like it was getting in the way.

At the time, it was something to work around, something to ignore.

I don’t try to explain what happened. I don’t feel the need to give it a meaning or attach a conclusion to it, but I do see it differently now.

Not everything that disrupts us is against us.

Not everything that feels like a problem actually is one.

And not everything important announces itself in a way we immediately recognize.

That trip began in a way I resisted.

It unfolded in a way I didn’t understand.

And it left me with something I didn’t expect.

I still think about how close it all was. But more than that, I think about what came after, and how easily I might have missed that too.

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“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” ~Søren Kierkegaard

A few years ago, I was catching up over coffee with an old friend I’ll call Ray, a trusted mentor. He’s a few years older than me, silver-haired and down to earth, the kind of man who listens with his whole heart.

We were at a small coffee shop near my house. I told him about my first year as a director, how I’d gone from being a counselor whose identity was built around listening and connecting to suddenly managing budgets, writing evaluations, and holding people accountable.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said, “and I feel like I’m bothering people every time I ask for help.”

Ray nodded slowly. “Sounds tough,” he said. “It makes sense that you’re struggling with the transition.”

I kept going, adding to the list, building my case. “And the criticism I get doesn’t help,” I said. “People say I’m too nice, that I’m not strong enough on policy, that I don’t hold firm enough on limits. But they also want the freedom.”

“I’m not sure how much longer I can do this,” I told him.

He let me finish. Then he leaned forward a little. “Can I tell you something I’m noticing?”

“Of course,” I said.

“You’re seeing yourself as a victim,” he said. “Like life is just happening to you and you’re waiting for it to stop.”

I sat there for a moment, hoping for him to follow up with some advice.

But I knew Ray better than that. He always gave you the truth as he saw it and then trusted you to find your own way through.

I drove home with a headache. I told myself it wasn’t fair, that Ray hadn’t heard everything, that I had reasons for feeling the way I did. But the word he’d used had somehow gotten into the car with me.

It was still there when I tried to sleep. Still there at two in the morning when I was staring at the ceiling.

Victim.

I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t put it down.

I turned the word over in my mind the way you turn a stone over in your hand, looking at it from every angle. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I started to see something true inside of it.

I’d been holding onto grievances that I never expressed. I’d been quietly accumulating a sense of being wronged without ever saying a word or trying to change things. That has a name, and the name, as much as it stung, was the one Ray had just handed me.

I had a picture in my mind as I lay there in the dark. I saw myself wearing a wooden sign around my neck, the kind you might see in an old photograph, hung there like a label.

And the word on the sign was “Victim.”

The hard part was that I knew I wasn’t being punished by someone else. Some part of me was choosing to wear it. That image stayed with me, and it changed something.

I started asking myself a question that felt more useful than feeling sorry for myself. If “victim” was the word I didn’t want to carry, what was the word I did want? What would it look like to stand in the opposite place?

I ran through different words. Hero, victor, agent, creator, survivor, overcomer. They all had something to teach me, but none of them were what I needed.

Then a word began to rise up from a deep place. Of all the words it could have been, this one caught me off guard. The word that came to me was “Steward.”

I looked it up that night, and the word “steward” has been around for a long time. At its root, it meant the keeper of the house, someone trusted to look after what belonged to a larger story than their own.

I didn’t go looking for that word, and maybe that’s why it felt so significant. I found myself asking why it had surfaced, what it was pointing to, what it wanted me to understand. It felt less like something I had thought and more like something I’d been given.

I learned that a steward is someone who takes care of what’s been given to them, stays present with intention, and recognizes that what they’ve been given, including the difficult parts, is worth caring for.

It wasn’t the opposite of victim exactly, but it was the antidote in my case. A victim is defined by what’s been done to them. A steward is defined by what they choose to do with it. 

Now, years later, the challenges of leadership are still here. I still struggle with criticism, especially when I feel like I’m already giving my best. But what’s different now is perspective.

A few weeks ago, one of my strongest staff members asked for a formal meeting. She sat down across from my desk, composed and direct, and told me that the flexibility I was giving others was making her job harder.

“When people don’t follow through and there are no consequences, the ones who do the work end up carrying more than their share,” she said. “It doesn’t feel fair.”

Inside I was already forming my response. I wanted to tell her that I’d been trying to ease the pressure people were feeling, that I saw how stretched everyone was and I was trying to give them room to breathe.

This was accurate, but it was also the victim talking, the one saying, “What about me?” A steward doesn’t protect himself from hard feedback. A steward tends to what he’s been given, and what I’d been given in that moment was the truth.

The victim in me wanted to be understood. The steward in me knew I was serving something bigger than my own comfort. The department was mine to care for, not to hide behind.

“You’re right,” I said. “And I’m grateful you came to me directly.” I told her I’d been working on holding clearer limits, that her feedback was going to help me do that better, and that the people who do their work with excellence deserve a leader who protects that standard.

The movement from victim to steward is an ongoing process. I haven’t perfected it, and I don’t expect to. I still stumble, still feel the sign settling back around my neck, and have to find my way back.

I used to experience the difficulty of leadership as something happening to me, as if the pressure and the criticism were evidence that I didn’t belong. What shifted was the recognition that this season of my life was asking something of me, not punishing me. I was being called into service whether I felt ready or not.

I’ve thought about stewardship a lot since that night. About what it means to stop merely surviving my life and start tending to it. Those are two very different relationships with the same experience.

That night at the coffee shop, Ray knew me well enough to tell me an uncomfortable truth. He wasn’t gentle about it. But gentleness isn’t always what we need.

Sometimes we need the sign around our neck pointed out to us by someone standing close enough to see it.

I’m not carrying that sign anymore, or at least, I’m trying not to. On the days when I feel it settling back around my neck, I remember the word that replaced it.

Steward.

Someone who tends to what they’ve been given. Someone who asks what life is expecting of them, listens, and answers the call.

That’s the person I want to be.

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“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.” ~Doug Larson

I don’t miss Zinia.

I miss the Zinia I made up.

The real Zinia—the one who fought with me for hours over things that became bigger than they should have, who said things I told myself I’d never forgive, who was wrong for me in ways I kept pretending weren’t there—I got rid of all of that somewhere along the way.

I kept the laugh. The chemistry. The way she got my humor without me having to explain it. The conversations that ran till Fajr and still didn’t feel finished. Everything else I quietly dropped without noticing I was doing it.

I then spent years missing that version. Like she was something I lost.

She wasn’t something I lost. She was something I built.

Memory doesn’t preserve things. It rewrites them. Every time I went back to think about Zinia, I wasn’t remembering—I was repainting. And each time I repainted her, a little more of the ugly stuff faded out. After enough years, what I had left wasn’t even a real memory. It was a portrait I’d made of one. Careful. Flattering. Mostly not true.

The Zinia in my head never fought with me. Never said anything that landed wrong. Just stayed frozen at her best moments forever. Of course I missed her. I’d been quietly designing her to be missed for years without ever noticing that’s what I was doing.

The actual Zinia, though—she was why I stopped eating properly for months. Why sleep just wouldn’t come. Why I spent so long crawling around inside my own head that I forgot what it felt like to just exist normally. That was real. All of that actually happened.

I knew it the whole time. And still missed her anyway.

Because the Zinia I built was so much easier to love than the real one ever managed to be.

Here’s the part that finally broke something open in me. I wasn’t missing Zinia at all. I was missing who I was when she was still around.

That version of me. Everything felt turned up. Whatever I was feeling, I was feeling all the way, nothing at half volume. I called it love, but honestly, it was more like drowning slowly and deciding that drowning was just what real depth felt like.

I laughed differently with her around. Moved differently. Like I was more switched on somehow. And when it ended, that person just left. Went with her like he was always part of her life and never really mine.

Nobody talks about that grief. Losing yourself alongside the other person. Losing whoever you were inside that specific relationship, that specific version of your own life.

I spent so long convinced I was grieving Zinia. Lying awake thinking about her. Going over old conversations. And the whole time I was actually grieving a version of myself that wasn’t coming back. That’s a completely different loss, and I didn’t have words for it for a long time.

Then I ran into her again. Years later. Somewhere I had no way of avoiding. And within maybe ten minutes of standing there talking, I noticed something had gone very quiet inside me. Nothing dramatic. The woman in front of me just had almost nothing to do with whoever I’d been carrying around all this time. The nostalgia didn’t break. It didn’t even sting. It just went flat, like a feeling that had already finished before I caught up to it.

Driving home, I kept landing on the same thing—I was never missing Zinia. I was missing a character I wrote. I spent years in love with my own story about her.

What we had was real. The love was real. But you can love someone genuinely and still be genuinely awful together. Both things can live inside the same relationship at the same time. For a long time, I couldn’t hold that. I kept reaching for a cleaner story. Either it was beautiful and the ending ruined it, or it was broken from the start. Both easier than sitting with what was actually true.

What was actually true is that it was real love and it was also impossible, and both of those things were happening the whole time. The good moments were real. The damage was also real. It mattered. It also had to end.

She was a person. We loved each other. It wasn’t enough. That chapter is closed.

And the truth, even when it’s quieter than the story I’d been living inside, is a lot lighter to carry.

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“The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.” ~Oprah Winfrey

My father died at forty-nine.

I was young when it happened, still soft in the way grief makes you when you are not yet equipped to hold it. I was so consumed by the loss itself that I never stopped to do the mathematics of it. Forty-nine years. That is all he got. Forty-nine years to do everything he wanted to do, to become everything he wanted to become, and to say every word he still had left inside him.

I did not let that land. Not then. I was not ready for what it meant. But life has a way of making you ready, whether you choose it or not.

A few years later, someone I love was diagnosed with cancer. Late stage. The kind of diagnosis that does not just change the person receiving it. It changes everyone sitting in the waiting room, everyone driving home in silence afterwards, and everyone lying awake at 2 a.m. doing the same terrible arithmetic.

Suddenly, the smallness of ordinary life becomes unbearable. Suddenly, you see with horrible clarity how much time you have been spending on things that do not matter.

Then last year, my grandmother passed. She was elderly. She had lived. And still, in a moment, she was simply no longer here. No warning. No gradual fade I could prepare for. Just the sudden, permanent fact of her absence.

Three losses. Three reminders. And still, the loudest wake-up call came quietly from the inside.

I turned forty.

There is something about forty that nobody fully prepares you for. It does not arrive with fanfare or crisis. It arrives as a question, low and steady, that you cannot unhear once it starts: What am I waiting for?

Because forty is not old. But it is also no longer young in the way that lets you believe time is endless.

I look around at the people I have loved and lost, and I realize so many of them never made it to sixty. Forty-nine was it for my father. And I am sitting here, healthy, capable, full of ideas and dreams and things I keep filing away for later, thinking about later. As if it’s a place I have a guaranteed ticket to.

It is not.

We Learned to Survive, But Nobody Taught Us to Live

We have been taught to wait. To earn joy. To be responsible first and alive second. And so we do. We scroll, we plan, we delay, and we tell ourselves we will do the thing once things settle down, once we feel ready, and once the timing is right.

But life does not slow down for your readiness. And death does not check your calendar.

I know this because I almost waited too long to start sharing my writing publicly. I had the idea. I had the message. I had years of lived experience that I knew, somewhere deep down, might matter to someone else. But I was scared. Scared of what people would say. Scared of the criticism, the judgment, and the vulnerability of putting my private stories into the world and not knowing how they would land.

And then I thought about my father. Forty-nine years. And I asked myself, if not now, when? If not this, what?

So I started. Scared, imperfect, and unsure, but I started. And that leap, that one decision to stop waiting for the fear to pass, changed everything. The fear does not pass. You just decide a life led by fear is not a life lived.

The Life List and How It Actually Works

This is not about grand gestures or dramatic reinvention. It is about something much quieter and much more powerful: intentional living practiced consistently. Here is how I do it:

1. The Reflective Audit

Every month I sit down and ask myself honestly: How was this month of my life, really? Did I read the book I kept meaning to read? Did I take the walks I promised myself? Did I rest without guilt? Did I spend real, unhurried time with the people I love? This is not to judge myself but to see clearly where I have been showing up for my own life and where I have been quietly abandoning it.

2. The Who Check-in

I ask myself who I have not spoken to in a while. Who do I miss? Who deserves more than a liked post? Who deserves an actual phone call, a real conversation, and a moment of genuine connection? Relationships are part of the life list too. The people who matter are not on the someday list. They are on the now list.

3. The Tiny Brave Thing

This is the one that changes everything. I choose at least one thing per season that scares me just enough to mean it matters. Not a dramatic leap. Sometimes it is signing up for a class, sometimes it is reaching out to someone after years of silence, and sometimes it is simply saying yes when every cautious part of me wants to say not yet. The size of the thing is not the point. The act of choosing it over fear is what matters.

4. The Loving Accountability Check

I will be honest: it is not always easy. Some seasons you fall back into the trap of next week or next month when things calm down. When that happens, I bring myself back with a simple question asked with compassion, not criticism:

If this were my last opportunity to do this, would I still wait? That gentle urgency cuts through almost everything. It is not about frightening yourself into action. It is about loving yourself enough to stop postponing your own life.

When Your Time Comes, What Will You Look Back On?

I think about my father often. Forty-nine years, a life mid-sentence. And I ask myself the question I should have asked sooner: When my time comes, what will I look back on?

Will I be able to say I lived fully, loved without holding back, and took the risks that called to me? Or will I be sitting with a list of places I never went, words I never said, and dreams I kept small and safe because I was waiting for the perfect moment?

The perfect moment is not coming. But this moment is here.

You are not eternal. Not on this earth, not in this body, and not in this particular window of life that is open right now. And neither am I. That is not a morbid thought. It is the most clarifying one I know.

So I am asking you, genuinely, as someone who has sat with enough loss to mean it: What is on your life list? Not when things settle. Not when you feel less afraid. Not in some future you are borrowing against.

Now. This breath. This heartbeat. Stop waiting. Start living. Do it scared, do it imperfectly, and do it in the smallest possible way if that is all you have today, but do it. Because this moment is the only one you are guaranteed. And the people you have lost, the ones who left before they were ready and before you were ready, they would not tell you to wait.

So do not.

Because here is what I know to be true after every loss, after every birthday that reminded me time is not standing still, after every moment I chose to show up for my own life instead of postponing it: the regret of inaction is heavier than the discomfort of trying.

The things you did not do will sit with you far longer than the things that did not go to plan. And the life you chose to live fully, imperfectly, bravely and on your own terms—that is the one worth looking back on.

You do not need a dramatic turning point to begin. You do not need to have it all figured out. You just need to decide, quietly and firmly, that your life deserves to be lived now. Not in theory. Not someday. Now.

What is one thing on your life list that you can do this week?

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“When we avoid difficult conversations, we trade short-term discomfort for long-term dysfunction.” ~Peter Bromberg

Have you ever looked around at other people’s lives and wondered, “How do they do that?”

How do they seem so steady, so connected, so… together?

From where I stood, there appeared to be a certain kind of person—someone confident, kind, thoughtful, and at ease in her relationships. And because she enjoyed her relationships, she seemed to enjoy her life.

I was not her.

For a long time, I thought I was the “nice” one in my relationships because I avoided confrontational conversations. But because I wasn’t saying what I felt, I let it come out in other ways.

I remember telling my boyfriend one night that it was fine for him to go out with his friends. But then when he got home, I was so angry with him for going.

He asked if I was okay, and I said, “I’m fine,” while not looking at him or making eye contact. I kept shutting my drawers loudly and making comments under my breath like “Must be nice to go out without me.”

What I wanted to say was, “Could you go out with your friends another night because I wanted to stay in and watch a movie together,” but asking directly was too hard, so I complained instead.

I wanted to be the “cool girl”—easygoing, unbothered, low-maintenance. But the truth was, I was pretending. Many things bothered me. I just didn’t know how to say it. And that unspoken frustration leaked out in the way I showed up—with tension, distance, and defensiveness.

This was just who I thought I was.

And because I didn’t know any different, I didn’t question it.

Then everything changed.

My first love passed away, and the world as I knew it disappeared.

Even though I was walking down the same streets, everything looked different. What once felt important—maintaining relationships with friends and family, eating, what to eat, what to wear, work—no longer mattered.

I remember lying on my floor, surrounded by tissues, realizing something I had never understood before: no one could take away my pain and make this better for me.

If I was going to keep living—if I was going to find a way through this—I would have to do it myself.

So I started searching.

I took classes. I went to seminars. I read everything I could get my hands on. And one theme kept appearing over and over again: the way we communicate shapes the way we experience our lives.

Eventually, I found myself at a writing and meditation workshop at a Shambhala center in New York. It was there that I learned how to meditate, which was the first time I ever sat with myself without judgment and evaluation, and was introduced to the Buddhist principles of right speech—speaking in ways that are truthful, kind, and helpful.

Something clicked.

I began to see that my suffering wasn’t just coming from what had happened to me—it was also coming from the way I related to my thoughts, my emotions, and other people. The overthinking, the emotional reactivity, the constant inner tension—they weren’t fixed parts of who I was. They were patterns.

And patterns can change.

If I wanted to change my life, I needed to change how I showed up in it—how I spoke, how I listened, how I related to myself and others.

So I treated it like an experiment.

What would happen if I practiced speaking honestly, kindly, and clearly?

I remember how nervous I was when my friend asked me how I felt about the guy she had been seeing. Normally, I would have said that I thought he was nice and that I was happy if she was, while quietly on the inside I felt the opposite.

Instead, I looked at her. I paused. And I knew my intention was to be honest, kind, and helpful, so I said, “I think you deserve someone who really treats you kindly and is supportive of you, and I don’t see that from him. “The conversation didn’t explode; she didn’t become defensive. She simply thought for a moment about what I said.

Each morning, I would wake up and set an intention for how I wanted to show up that day for myself and others. It was a gentle intention, knowing that I would likely stray from it, and my job was then to notice when I strayed, acknowledge it, and bring my attention back to my intention.

At first, it wasn’t easy. It meant noticing when I wanted to shut down or lash out and instead express myself and what was truly going on for me.

It meant learning how to pause so I could stop myself from reacting in a way that wasn’t helpful for me or the other person.

It meant noticing the desire to lie and instead telling the truth—even when it felt uncomfortable or scary.

It meant noticing how unkind I was talking to myself and instead seeing if I could become gentler and more friendly.

And slowly, things began to shift.

I became less passive-aggressive and less judgmental. My anxiety softened. I started expressing myself more clearly and directly. Conversations that once felt overwhelming became manageable. Even confrontation—something I used to avoid at all costs—became an opportunity for connection rather than conflict.

I remember having a moment where I was starting to get passive-aggressive and shut down with a friend of mine, and they looked at me and said, “You’re acting like a child.” Before, I would have really dug my heels in, defended myself, and said something hurtful. But instead, I looked at them and said, “You’re right.”

It was the most liberating moment for me, and because of it, the tension dissipated and we were able to enjoy our time together.

This practice didn’t just change how I communicated—it changed my relationships.

I found myself able to enter a new relationship with openness and honesty. I experienced what healthy communication actually feels like.

Because of this work, I respond more thoughtfully, with greater patience and awareness, to my children. I’m not perfect—far from it—but I’m present in a way I never was before.

And perhaps most importantly, it changed how I relate to myself. I don’t judge and evaluate myself as often as before. I can see myself through a friendly lens, which means I want to look out for myself and make choices that are helpful instead of hurtful.

I get to be human and emotional and make mistakes without beating myself up and thinking I need to be better, different, or fixed. There’s now an allowing and an acceptance of who I am at my best and my worst that I didn’t have before.

I’ve come to understand that the people who seem like they “have it all together” aren’t magically different. They’re practicing. They’re choosing—again and again—how they want to show up.

Communicating intentionally in our relationships gives us the opportunity to enjoy our lives, and it is a learned practice. It isn’t something that just happens. It’s something we cultivate.

It’s a daily practice of being present. Of noticing what we’re engaging with—internally and externally—and choosing what we want to feed.

It’s choosing to be kind when it would be easier to be reactive.

To be honest when it would be more comfortable to stay silent.

To be helpful when we feel defensive or afraid.

Mindfulness gave me the tools to pause in difficult moments—to ground myself, to come back to my body, and to respond instead of react.

And in that space, I found something I didn’t know I was looking for:

A way to live—and speak—that feels true.

“Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.” ~Hermann Hesse