Becoming | Learning To Live Here 🦋

There is nothing particularly dramatic happening in my life right now. And that has taken some getting used to.

Things are quieter. I am quieter. I’m not constantly trying to make sense of something, recover from something, hold something together, or find stability in places that never really offered it. There isn’t some emotional fire burning in the background demanding my attention.

For all the years I wanted peace, I don’t think I realized I would eventually have to learn how to live in it. Because peace, when chaos has been familiar, can be boring as hell.

Not bad. Not empty. And definitely not something I want to trade back in for the life I had before. Just unfamiliar in a way I didn’t expect.

There was always so much movement in survival. Something to understand, work through or heal. Even self-discovery had an urgency to it because every new realization seemed connected to another place where I needed to grow.

Now I can have a regular day. I can wake up, handle what needs handling, laugh at something ridiculous, get annoyed by something equally ridiculous, love on the people I love and go to bed without uncovering some profound new truth about myself.

Apparently, this is allowed. Who knew!?!?

Somewhere in all that quiet, though, I noticed something else…

My life had moved forward, but my storytelling hadn’t quite caught up.

I would sit down to write and instinctively reach backward.

• Heartbreak.

• Healing.

• Adversity.

• Boundaries.

The things I survived and everything they taught me.

Those stories are mine, and I will never pretend they didn’t shape me. But eventually I had to admit something to myself:

Pain became familiar enough that even my storytelling learned to live there.

When the Story Changes

Balanced Well Woman grew alongside a very real healing journey. I wasn’t manufacturing healing content. I was healing. I wasn’t searching for lessons to share. I was living through experiences that were forcing me to find them.

So I wrote from where I was.

When I recognized another place where I had been shrinking, settling, overgiving or abandoning myself, there was something to say because there was something I was actively trying to understand.

Then I started feeling better.

Not the temporary kind of better where a few good weeks convince you everything has changed. I mean the kind where you can look at something that once devastated you and realize it simply doesn’t have access to you anymore.

I can look back now and shake my damn head at some of my choices. I can acknowledge what people did or said to me, what I allowed, where I stayed too long or knew better before I was ready to do better, and still smile.

Not because any of it was funny.

It is simply because my heart healed from something I once thought might take me out.

There is victory in that.

I just didn’t expect the victory to make me feel so incomplete.

I think part of that is because chaos is loud.

Chaos is frantic. Chaos is unhinged! It bursts through the door knocking things over in every room you enter. It demands your attention, keeps your mind moving and your body responding. There is always something to anticipate, fix, understand or survive. Bless the nervous system in times like these!

Peace doesn’t enter the room that way.

Peace tiptoes. It whispers. It feels more like the wind moving through the trees while you’re sitting outside drinking a cup of tea. Nothing is demanding anything from you. Nothing needs an immediate answer. Nothing is asking you to brace yourself for what might happen next.

When discourse has been familiar for much of your life, that difference is enormous.

So much of my life, beginning in childhood, brought disruption to my core being. I learned how to exist around things that unsettled me long before I had language for what any of it was doing to me. I carried pain for a long time, and there were parts of myself that never had enough quiet to fully emerge.

Then healing came, and even that had movement.

Healing asks things of you. You dismantle ways of thinking. You grieve. You confront yourself. You make different choices. You spend so much time doing the work of healing that you never consider that the work itself is creating movement.

Until one day you look around and realize you’ve moved.

There isn’t as much to fix anymore.

Things just feel peaceful.

And you have to adjust to the temperature of that.

Redefining Normal

I think I used to believe healing would bring me back to some version of normal, but I understand it differently now.

Normal has to be redefined.

If pain remains the reference point, we can build a completely different life and mistakenly understand everything through the lens of what happened before. Ease becomes meaningful because we remember struggle. Healthy love gets measured against unhealthy love. Peace becomes important because we know chaos.

There is nothing inherently wrong with remembering the contrast. It reminds us how far we’ve come.

But eventually, the life we have now deserves to exist without constantly standing next to the life we survived.

Peace never needed pain to stand beside it to prove that it’s peace.

Ease can simply feel good. Be good. Softness can feel safe. Abundance, love, laughter and joy can settle into a life without being treated like temporary visitors we’re afraid to get comfortable with….as if they’re fleeting.

And the funny thing is, the more peace becomes my normal, the more I understand why people talk about protecting it at all costs.

Because this feels good.

Boring as hell sometimes. I’m not gonna lie!

But good.

Comfortable.

Beautiful.

I have worked too hard to arrive here to casually hand this version of my life over to anything that wants to disrupt it.

That doesn’t mean I believe nothing difficult will ever happen again. Life will continue to challenge me, disappoint me, surprise me and eventually ask another version of me to emerge.

But the next painful thing doesn’t automatically get to redefine my entire existence.

That, to me, is what having a new reference point changes.

It isn’t about becoming unshakeable. I don’t want to become so guarded that life can’t touch me. I want to feel my life. I just don’t want every disruption to convince me that chaos is home.

Pain can visit without getting its old room back.

More Than What I Healed From

This realization has changed the way I think about my voice too.

There were moments when I was reaching backward for content because healing had become part of the brand. I would try to talk about something I had already worked through and feel myself forcing the words.

The message might still have been true.

It just wasn’t where I lived anymore.

And maybe that’s what I needed to understand.

The woman had evolved faster than the storytelling.

For years, pain gave me something to write toward. Healing gave me language. Self-discovery gave me questions. I worried that feeling better somehow meant I would have less to say.

Now I think that fear came from confusing my experiences with my identity.

I don’t have to allow pain to define me.

But I don’t have to allow peace to define me either.

I am not one season of my life.

I can find absolution in every journey I have been on and every destination I have reached because I am everything I am because I lived all of it. The painful parts belong to me. The healing belongs to me. This peace belongs to me. So does whatever comes next.

I am the through-line, not my trauma.

That gives me an entirely different relationship with my voice.

I can speak to someone who is hurting without returning to hurt. I can talk about healing without pretending I am still standing inside the wound. And I can talk about parenting, womanhood, friendship, faith, culture, aging, joy, curiosity or whatever else life puts in front of me because my perspective was always the thing connecting the stories.

There is an entire life happening outside of recovery.

I think I’m finally ready to let myself write from it.

The Woman in the Mirror

As more of the pain slips away, I won’t pretend that hasn’t scared me at times.

There is something strange about releasing something you’ve carried for so long. Even when you don’t want it anymore, you notice the space it leaves behind. You realize how much space it was taking up.

I don’t reach for it.

I don’t want it back.

I don’t need to keep digging through old wounds to prove that I’ve healed. I don’t need to keep telling the story of the woman who survived as though she is the only version of me worth hearing from.

She got me here.

Now I want to let her rest.

I want ordinary days. I want laughter that doesn’t need a lesson attached to it. I want curiosity. I want softness. I want to continue discovering who I am when my energy isn’t being spent recovering from who I had to be.

I spent enough of my life adjusting myself around disruption. I don’t want to organize this chapter around it too.

Maybe that’s where I am in Becoming now.

Not searching for another version of myself.

Not trying to turn every scar into a story.

Not even trying to become the most healed version of me.

Just allowing all the versions I’ve already been to belong to one whole woman.

There is peace in that.

And when I look at her now, I don’t need to ask what she survived or what she’s healing from next.

I just want to allow the me that stands in the mirror to be the me that lives.