I have always wondered what true love would look like--what it would feel like. Real love, one that survives reality and is not based on fairytales and honeymoon phases.

I have been stumped in a dead-end every time. I could never find the answers or picture it.

It wasn’t until a recent epiphany, that I had realized I had been living in it all my life. Not in an ungrateful sense, and not in a boasting sense, but more-so, realizing that my familial love had been teaching me and exemplifying true love all along.

In the movies, the one after the “bad guy” is supposed to be the happily-ever-after. That’s where the movie ends, and so we assume, that’s how life is too.

How do you know when it’s time to break up?

We spend countless hours and days drowning in these thoughts.

Running the same pros and cons over and over.

Just to conclude that even in your misery, fear of the unknown makes it worth staying.

I spent 7 months in therapy and took a break with the unforeseen pandemic. But truthfully, it feels as if I’ve been in therapy for 8 months now. For how hard I’ve been working internally, to finally walk towards being the person I want to be--perhaps the person I always was underneath all the hurt.

If you’re considering therapy...I just wanted to share my journey. Because often times, we think we only need therapy if we have diagnosed mental illnesses, or if we’ve had huge life-changing traumatic experiences. We don’t realize, that we carry all sorts of trauma throughout our lives, living without never having dealt with them—but suffering regardless.

We live in a time where we are constantly working on how to better ourselves and the world. And as someone who has a habit of wanting to fix things, wanting to share ideas to lessen the world’s hurt, there is one thing I cannot change, I could never change, now matter how hard I would want to try.

I truly wish I could change the way we died.

We say it all the time but what does it even look like, what does it feel like, and how do we even do it?

As I am getting older, my understanding and experience with self-love and doing inner work deepens, it broadens, and it teaches me everyday. It’s always evolving and for that, self-love and inner work will never be overrated.

And the more I understand about therapy and mental health, the more I realize that even though we have different pain points, narratives, and situations, ultimately many of us seek help because we are struggling to learn how to love and accept ourselves. We no longer know how to cope on auto pilot like we’ve done up until now. We don’t know how to make sense of our lives or the way we are. We’re tired. And the only way out is to dig from within.