The Life That Includes You

For most of my life, life did not include me.

Even as a child, I often felt as though I were living outside of my own body, as if I were looking at myself rather than living from within myself.

Growing up in an unstable home created so much external chaos that I learned to make myself small. Stay invisible. Play quietly. Breathe calmly. Don’t be loud. Don’t talk back. Be normal.

Normal was not something I felt. It was something I performed.

As a teenager, I rebelled. I became the opposite of everything I had been told to be. I was loud. I was over the top. I refused to disappear quietly.

But being visible is not the same as being seen.

In my quiet moments, beneath all that noise, I still felt unloved, unwanted and unknown. The parts of me that had learned to hide in childhood had never actually been met. They had not been heard. They had only changed costumes.

I carried those parts of myself into motherhood.

I studied books about pregnancy. I wanted to have the healthiest baby. I wanted to be the best mother. Somewhere inside me, I thought: Maybe this is why I am here. Maybe, finally, I have a purpose.

Motherhood revealed parts of me I was not ready for and could never have imagined. It held both heaven and hell—not because my daughter was anything less than love, but because loving her exposed everything in me that had never been tended to.

I lost whatever I thought I knew of myself. I poured everything I could muster into her. I wanted her to feel safe, loved and wanted in all the ways I had not.

But in trying to give her everything, I disappeared from my own life again.

Motherhood was not the first place I abandoned myself. It was simply the place where I could no longer ignore how practiced I had become at doing it.

There were burned relationships, old scars and cycles I repeated because I had never learned how to interrupt them. I confused being needed with being loved. I mistook endurance for strength. I kept the peace at the expense of my own.

Eventually, I reached the bottom.

The bottom is not always dramatic from the outside. Sometimes it is the quiet realization that you can no longer keep living as a stranger to yourself.

I began asking the questions no one prepares you for, the ones that break something open, the ones that leave you crying so hard you cannot catch your breath.

Who am I beneath everything I have survived?

What have I been pretending to be okay with?

How much of my life has been built around making sure everyone else is comfortable?

Where am I in all of this?

Slowly, I began to sew the pieces together: the darkness and the shadow, the losses and the gains, the woman I had been and the woman I was still becoming.

I stopped wanting to please others at the expense of my peace.

I began to hear myself again, not only my thoughts, but my body, my feelings and the quiet knowing in my gut. For so long, I had treated those signals as inconveniences. Now, I understood that they were trying to lead me home.

They were asking for peace.

For love.

For self-acceptance and compassion.

Not the performance of healing. Not a perfectly curated life. Simply the right to exist inside my own life—to have needs, preferences, boundaries, dreams and a voice.

A life that includes you does not require you to stop loving or caring for other people. It asks you to stop leaving yourself behind while you do.

It may begin with something very small: noticing what drains you, saying what you actually mean, resting before you have earned it or admitting that something you have tolerated no longer feels acceptable.

The life that includes you will not be built in a single brave moment. It will be built through every quiet decision to remain present with yourself.

For years, I watched myself live.

It was only when I began listening that I could finally see me.

And it was only then that I could begin to live from within my own life.