What Happens After You Finally Choose Yourself

We were just standing there. Bryan had pressed play on Banks by NEEDTOBREATHE and pulled me in, and we were slow dancing in the kitchen. We weren’t celebrating an anniversary or birthday, no reason for any of it except that he felt like it. 

And I started to cry.

He pulled back and asked me what was wrong. And I told him nothing was wrong, that I was just so happy, that I couldn’t believe this was our life. He pulled me back in close and said he felt the same way. 

And standing there in my kitchen I realized something: 
I had done it. I had found my way back to myself. 

Here’s what led to that night.

A few years before that kitchen night, I made one of the hardest decisions of my life. I ended my marriage. It was my choice, fully and consciously mine, and I don’t say that to be harsh. I say it because the fact that it was my choice is the most important part of this story. 

Choosing yourself for maybe the first time feels enormous. It feels like breathing after holding your breath for longer than you realized. 

And then the dust settles. And you look at what the choice cost someone else. And the worthiness you just reclaimed starts to slip. 

That in-between season is the hardest one to talk about. You did the brave thing. You followed your own life. And then you spent months wondering if someone like you, someone who caused that kind of pain, deserved good things on the other side of it. 

THe answer, I know now, is yes. But I didn’t know it then. 

What I learned in the in-between

Worthiness isn’t something you arrive at once and keep forever. It isn’t a reward for making the right choices or a punishment for making the wrong ones. It isn’t something another person can hand you or take away. It’s something that you have to return to. And, yes, that’s easier said than done.

We grow up in a world that teaches us the opposite. From the time we’re old enough to walk into a room we are being evaluated. Sorted into labels and measured against timelines and milestones and the curated highlight reels of everyone else’s life. We absorb the message early that worthiness is conditional. That it has to be earned. That there is always one more thing standing between us and the moment we finally feel like enough. 

When I started crying in the kitchen it wasn’t because of sadness or fear.

By the time that night happened I had already done the quiet, unglamorous work of deciding I was worthy of my own life. I had made the hard choice. I had sat inside the in-between without letting it define me. I had slowly and imperfectly found my way back to myself. 

Bryan didn’t create that. But he created the space for me to finally feel it. 

He leaves me sticky notes, slow dances in the kitchen, and is steady in a way that doesn’t ask me to be anything other than myself.

He didn’t give me worthiness. He just gave me the space to live it out.

If you’re still in the in-between

You’re not waiting on the right person, the right moment, or the next version of yourself that finally has it together. You’re not earning your way back to deserving good things. There isn’t a moment where you cross some invisible line and the worthiness is restored.

You were always worthy of your own life. Sometimes it just takes awhile for us to believe that.

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