For years, I moved through life holding it all together on the outside, disconnected from self-love underneath. I was the woman who held space for everyone but had no refuge for herself. Who learned that love meant giving herself away, and found her worth in how much others needed her.

The universe kept offering me lessons. Until the biggest one arrived. After fifteen years of marriage, it ended in betrayal. Everything I had built my identity around, the devoted wife, the woman who loved hard enough, shattered. This was the unravelling. My heart and soul broken open.

There is a particular kind of hope that arrives after devastation, quieter than the hope you had before, and far more expensive.

He said it was over. He said he had chosen me. I wanted, more than I have ever wanted anything, to believe him completely, the way I had before any of this happened, without the small, watchful part of me that now checked his phone, noticed which direction he was facing when he answered a call, catalogued the hours unaccounted for.