There was a time I thought healing meant
evicting all the parts of me
that didn’t fit the light.
The angry one.
The ashamed one.
The lonely, aching, too-much, not-enough,
over-sensitive, under-loved ones.
I kept trying to send them away.
Hide them.
Fix them.
Spiritualize them.
But they never left.
They waited — not to be corrected,
but to be welcomed.
And now…
I have opened a door.
And they came.
The ones I had cast out with judgment.
The ones I had ignored with busyness.
The ones I had mocked in my mind to feel safe in my strength.
They came back
not as monsters, but as children.
Not as burdens, but as beings with stories to tell.
I lit a fire.
I let them curl up in the corners of my heart,
in sweaters of tenderness I never knew I owned.
I didn’t ask them to be cheerful.
I didn’t make them speak on cue.
I just let them be here, finally —
in the home they were always aching for.
And something sacred happened.
They softened.
Not because I changed them —
but because I stopped demanding that they change.
This house I opened is not a hospital.
It’s not a prison.
It’s a sanctuary.
This house is a place where every part of me
gets to sit at the table —
quiet or loud, grieving or numb —
and know that they belong.
Not because they earned it.
But because they are mine”.
