1,000 Days.

1,000 days looks like this.

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Not a summit. Not a fanfare. Not the woman I imagined I’d become when I white-knuckled my way through day one with shaking hands and a mouth full of prayers I wasn’t sure anyone was listening to.

It looks like … Curiosity. The kind that doesn’t flinch anymore. Questions I finally let sit without rushing toward answers that taste like apology.

It looks like shame, still. Let’s not pretend. Wearing yesterday’s face, standing at the edge of every room I almost didn’t walk into.

Isolation. The old familiar. The one who told me I was safer alone, that the world was too loud and I was too much and also never, never enough.

But also…

togetherness. Jules. The animals. The Sangha. The strangers who became witnesses.

The way someone says me too and the whole room exhales.

Smiling. Not performing. The difference took me nine hundred days to learn and I am still learning it every morning. Every morning that I choose my own face over the one I used to wear for you.

Unsure. God, yes. Unsure. But knowing… the way you know a song before the words come, the way your body remembers the

bridge before your mind catches up:

There is something worth fighting for.

And so you push. And you smile. And you fight. And you… run.

Not away. Not anymore. Toward. Into. Through.

Put on that necklace. The one that protects. The one that means I chose this.

Write a few affirming words on a scrap of paper, on a bathroom mirror, on the inside of your own wrist with a pen that doesn’t wash off easy.

Hug. Speak. Share. Talk. Cry. Dance. Cry while dancing. Dance while crying. Let the mess of it be the thanking.

… And let it be enough.

Not because you’ve arrived.

But because you’re still HERE.

Awake, tender, terrified, alive.

And you didn’t leave.

1,000 days looks like this: a woman who stayed.

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