Choosing What’s Actually Mine

Choosing What's Actually Mine

There is something I have been learning this year that I did not expect to be learning at this stage of my life.

How to choose things that I actually want.

It sounds simple. It is not simple. It has taken me the better part of five decades to understand that I did not know how to do this — and longer still to understand why.

I grew up walking on eggshells.

But I want to be careful here, because that phrase can flatten something that was actually more complicated and more disorienting than a simple description of difficulty. It was not a battlefield every day. There were beautiful moments in my childhood. Mundane ones. Good ones. Real ones. There were moments of laughter and the specific sweetness that can exist even inside a hard life.

What made it hard was not constant darkness. It was inconsistency.

Not knowing which version of things you were going to get. Learning to read the room before you entered it. Staying alert, staying careful, making yourself small — not because every moment required it, but because you never quite knew which moments would. That particular kind of vigilance has its own cost. It settles into the nervous system and stays there long after the circumstances that created it are gone.

I was a highly sensitive child in an environment that did not have much room for sensitivity. So I learned to hide. I hid most of myself, actually, for a very long time.

I want to say something here about the adults who shaped those years, because I think it matters and because I have spent a lot of time sitting with it.

They were navigating their own storms.

They were carrying habits and patterns and wounds from their own childhoods — perpetuating a cycle they did not know they were in. The legacy lived in their systems first, and then it moved into mine. That is not an excuse for the harm that was done. The harm was real and it had real consequences that have followed me through decades of choices, relationships, and the inside of my own body. But it is a truth I hold alongside the grief — with compassion, because I know now that broken people break things, and that most of them do not know they are doing it.

The work I am doing now — the healing, the transmuting, the trying to meet myself with something gentler than I was ever shown — is the work of breaking that cycle. Of not passing it forward in the same form. Of turning something that was inherited into something that can actually heal.

That feels like one of the most important things I have ever done. Some days it feels like the whole point.

What I did not realize for a very long time is that growing up the way I did left me without something essential.

The ability to trust my own instincts about what was right for me.

When safety is conditional and unpredictable in childhood, you learn to accept what is given rather than ask whether it is right for you. You do not develop the internal voice that says this one is mine or this one is not. Or you develop it, and then you learn very quickly not to listen to it, because listening to it was never safe. You take what is presented. You try to make it work. You hope that this time it will.

I have said yes to things in my life — jobs, relationships, situations — where in the very first moment, something in me already knew.

Not this one.

A quiet signal, clear as anything, that this was not the right fit. And I would override it. Every time. I would give it a chance, try it on, hope I was wrong about the feeling. Sometimes things lasted a year. Sometimes eighteen months. But they would end, and when they ended I would feel the particular hollow feeling of someone who had always known, somewhere underneath, that they were never quite in the right place to begin with.

For a long time I thought this meant something was wrong with me. That I was the common denominator. And in a way I was — but not in the way I thought.

The problem was not that I was broken. The problem was that I had never been taught to trust myself. When the message of your childhood is that you do not have much say over what happens to you, you internalize that. It becomes the water you swim in. I carried that mindset for decades without fully knowing I had it.

I also want to name the losses. Because they were real.

The loss of a childhood where I felt fully safe. The loss of learning early to trust my own instincts. The loss of knowing how to identify and express what I was feeling — because when you grow up powerless, you never develop that language. You absorb. You endure. You move on. At thirty years old, in the middle of a car ride with coworkers who were trying to help me, I realized I did not know how to feel anger. Had never let myself feel it. It had been held inside me my entire life.

That was the moment I understood how much had been quietly accumulating — in my body, in my choices, in the life I had been building on a foundation I couldn't fully see.

But here is what I also want to tell you.

I never stopped hoping.

There have been moments of real despair in my life. Moments of wanting to give up. Moments of wishing, with everything I had, that I had been given a different foundation to build from. Those moments were real and I do not minimize them.

But underneath all of it, even in the hardest years, there was always a thread I held onto. The belief — sometimes thin, sometimes barely there — that healing was possible. That a different life was reachable. That I was not permanently defined by what happened to me.

One of my favorite teachers at SWIHA — the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts — introduced a concept that has stayed with me ever since. She said that healing is like peeling an onion. Layer by layer. You do not heal all at once. You return to the same core material again and again with more capacity each time, releasing a little more with each pass.

Some days that image gives me tremendous hope. There is always another layer that can be reached, healed, released. Progress is real even when it is slow.

Other days, I will be honest, it exhausts me. I wonder if it will ever end. Whether I will ever reach the core and have some reprieve.

Both of those things are true at the same time. I have learned to hold them both.

And slowly — not in a straight line, not without setbacks — life has gotten better.

Little by little I have healed aspects of myself, achieved goals I set, built a life that looks more and more like the one I wrote down on a piece of paper when I was sixteen years old and crying alone in my room with Pink Floyd on repeat. Everything on that paper, I became. I know now that I have always been able to find my way toward what I truly want when I let myself want it clearly enough.

The challenge has been learning to want the right things in the first place. To feel the difference between a choice that is actually mine and a choice I am making out of fear, or longing, or the old conditioning that says take what is offered and be grateful.

Here is what is different about this chapter.

When Kelly and I decided to sell everything and move to Europe, it was not a whim. It was not a hope. It was not me trying something on and seeing if it fit.

It fit before we fully decided. I knew it the way I have rarely known anything — not with anxiety underneath the excitement, but with a deep and quiet certainty that this was the direction my life had always been pointing. That this was mine.

Kelly is mine. Fifteen years of choosing each other every single day — that is not a mistake, not a placeholder, not something I talked myself into. From the very beginning, underneath everything, I knew.

This move is an extension of that knowing. The blog is an extension of it. Field & Frequency — the work I am building around nervous system healing, around helping other women find their way back to themselves — is the most direct expression of it I have ever attempted.

Because what I understand now, that I did not understand at sixteen or twenty-five or thirty-five, is this:

The inner knowing was never wrong.

Every time I overrode it, I paid a price. Every time I honored it — really honored it, let it lead — I ended up somewhere true.

I also know that my story is not only mine.

The cycle of childhood wounding passed unconsciously from generation to generation is one of the most universal human experiences on this earth. Parents wound children not because they are monsters but because they were wounded children themselves. The healing work — the peeling of the onion, the learning to trust the quiet inner signal, the choosing of what is actually yours — is work that so many of us are quietly doing, each in our own way, trying to transmute something inherited into something that can finally heal.

That is what this move is about, at its deepest level. Not just a change of geography. A change of the whole architecture. A life built, finally, on what is actually mine. Could I do this work while staying in the US? Of course I can. Perhaps I will. If I know anything by now is that things can change, they can suddenly change, we course correct and carry on. But the architecture, the framework of how I move through this world is changing.

Every action we are taking now is pointing us in the direction of a new life, in a country and continent new to us. I do not know exactly how we are going to land. The uncertainty is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise. We are building the plane while flying it, and everyday the ground is further down than it used to feel.

But I know this is right. Through moments when I second guess out of fear. I knew it before I could fully explain it. And this time — for the first time in a very long time — I am not overriding that.

74 days.