'Flowers' Teared Me Up...

I was sitting on my bathroom floor at 11PM, dabbing Neosporin on a bloody shin.

My head was spinning. My stomach was turning. And the cut on my leg (the one I got stumbling off someone's driveway after a party I barely remember...) was starting to bruise in a way that made me wonder if I'd carry a scar.

A permanent, visible reminder of what I couldn't control.

I didn't even know what I'd said to people that night. I was told later I'd been "a little extra." That phrase lived in my chest for weeks.

The thing is...I didn't want to be there. Not on the bathroom floor. Not drunk at a party. Not in that version of my life. I wanted something else. I had no idea what...but I knew, looking at my banged-up leg while the room tilted sideways, that it wasn't this.

My body was literally showing me, externally, everything I'd been ignoring internally. The disconnection. The anxiety. The panic I kept numbing instead of facing.

And sitting there, head pounding, I thought: I am terrified of what happens if I don't face this.

That night didn't fix anything. But it cracked something open (pun intended).

I started by saying something I'd never said out loud. Not to anyone else, but to myself: I think there's something really going on underneath this. And if I want a different life, I need to figure out what it is.

After years of "I'm fine, everything's fine", that one admission was the first real step. Not a dramatic one. Not a visible one. Just...honesty.

I'd been going to therapy for a while. But I'd been treating my sessions like a test I was trying to pass. My therapist would ask questions...I'd give thorough, detailed, well-organized answers...I never cried...I explained my feelings instead of feeling them.

It was people-pleasing in a therapy chair. I was performing "good patient" the way I performed everything else.

So I started really digging into what was actually underneath. And slowly, the patterns started to make sense. The codependency. The avoidance. The way I'd made an entire life out of managing other people's comfort instead of understanding my own.

I understood why I felt the way I felt...but I still didn't know what to do about it.

The rebuilding required work, both inside and out.

From the outside, it was years of baby steps that kept getting slightly bigger. Sitting with discomfort instead of reaching for a bottle. Putting myself in situations that made me a little more uncomfortable each time, and just leaning into the sensations instead of fighting them. Learning that most of my fears were just...fears.

And from the inside, I started asking myself the same questions I used to ask the teams I led at work: What do we actually want here? What's getting in the way? What would it look like if we were honest about it? 

Except now the "we" was just...me.

Things started to become clearer. I could name what I valued. I could see that most of the decisions I'd made weren't really mine...they were built to meet expectations I'd been carrying ever since I could remember. 

Then one afternoon, I was driving to the grocery store after a yoga class. Windows down. "Flowers" by Miley Cyrus on the shuffle playlist. Just...running errands on a sunny day.

And I started tearing up.

Not from sadness. Not from anxiety. From the quiet realization that I couldn't remember the last time I'd just gone out and done something purely for myself...no obligation, no pressure, no performing for anyone. This was all mine. And I wasn't panicking.

That's what surprised me most. It wasn't a big, dramatic moment. It wasn't conquering some major fear. It was driving to yoga, crying to a pop song on a Tuesday...because for the first time in a long time, I actually felt like myself.

I didn't need a breakthrough. I needed practice.

Practice hearing my own voice underneath all the noise. Practice trusting what I found there. What I'd been missing wasn't courage or willpower...it was fluency. In myself.

Self-fluency didn't arrive in one moment. It faded in...so gradually that I almost missed it happening. But that afternoon in the car? That's when I caught it.

✨ What's the smallest moment where you surprised yourself recently...not because you did something big, but because you finally did something that was yours? ✨

Hit reply and tell me. I'd love to hear it.

🪷 Nora