Rise

Not fixed. Quiet.

You still get pulled back sometimes. The difference is that the return trip is shorter now, and it ends in you.

The truest thing in the book

This was never a staircase.

The four movements, realizing, regulating, reclaiming, rising, are not four steps you climb once and then stand at the top, finished and fixed forever. They are four territories, and you will move through them again, and again, in no particular order, for the rest of your life.

Some morning months from now you will wake flattened by a grief you were sure you had finished. He will reach out, or a song will play, or a date on the calendar will arrive, and you will feel yourself pulled backward into a fog you swore you had left behind.

When that happens, I do not want you to believe the lie that you have failed.

Looping back is not the same as starting over. The path is not a staircase, it is a spiral, and every time you come back around to a place you have stood before, you arrive there higher up than the last time, with more tools, more clarity, more of yourself intact. The fog clears faster now. The pull loses its hold sooner. The cruel voice gets answered quicker.

And I am not standing above you

I refuse to stand on a mountaintop I have not reached and call advice down from it. I am still walking this too. I still have old conditioning I am breathing my way through. I still have to push myself to take the risks and step out of the comfortable, safe smallness that years of survival turned into a habit.

On those days I do the only thing that has ever worked. I get up, I dust myself off, and I press on, gently, on my own side.

I am a work in progress, and so are you, and I have come to believe that being a work in progress is not the consolation prize. It is the whole privilege of being alive.

What helps right now

One daily ritual that is only yours. Not productive. Not healing. Not for anyone. A thing you do because you like it. This is how the self you reclaimed learns she is allowed to stay.

Let the spiral be a spiral. You will circle back to Realize. You will need Regulate again. That is not regression. It is the shape of the thing.

Speak the story, on your terms. Safely. To one person, or in writing, or not at all yet. A story you can say out loud has stopped running you.

What does not help

Measuring yourself against who you were before. She is not coming back and you would not want her. She is the one who could be managed.

Rushing to be of service. The instinct to help other women here is real and it is good, and it is also, sometimes, a very sophisticated way of not sitting still. Be sure you are not fawning at a larger scale.

Where to go next

Arriving was never about being finished. It was about finally knowing the way.

Chapters 11 through 14 of It Was Never You are this movement. Purpose, real connection, being loved for who you are, and why the path is a spiral. Read the book.

You do not have to walk it alone. That was the loneliest lie of all, the one that nearly drowned you in the dark, and it was never true.

When you are ready, and only when you are ready, there is a place to go deeper, alongside other women who know exactly what this road is made of. That is the work I do now, and the reason I built Wild Liberation. The door is open whenever you want it. There is no rush, and there is no pressure. There is only an invitation, from someone who has stood where you are standing, to keep going. Wild Liberation.

You were never the broken one. You were the strong one, the one who survived what was built to destroy you, the wild thing that was caged and never once tamed.

Go be wildly, completely free.