I Forgot How to Need

Most of us survived by shrinking the experience instead. Healing asks for the opposite. It asks you to stay inside the feeling long enough for it to tell the truth it carried.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for order now. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

I forgot how to need.
Every time I tried,
the room reminded me
how loud that sounded.

Affection arrived
like an unexpected knock.
I hid behind control
and called it maturity.

The body learns its accent
from whoever taught it to survive.
Mine still stumbles
when it tries to say stay.

“You became fluent in detachment because it was the only language that kept you from disappearing completely.”

Detachment begins as protection. It’s a reflex that kept the system stable when presence was unsafe. The body sealed its windows because it remembered what came through them. Warmth once carried warning. Softness once meant setup.

Over time, the reflex turns into identity. You stop noticing how often you translate feeling into analysis. Eye contact becomes a test. Comfort feels like a trap disguised as care. People mistake that distance for pride when it’s really vigilance.

Learning safety later in life rewires the whole map. You start catching the flash before the freeze. Someone’s tone shifts, and your muscles prepare for impact that never comes. Regulation feels awkward at first. Foreign. Almost undeserved.

Healing doesn’t ask you to open everything. It asks you to update the evidence. To let the body learn, through repetition, that calm can stay. Every moment of safety redraws the language. What once meant survive begins, slowly, to mean stay.

When someone reaches toward you, which part of you answers first?
The one that wants to connect or the one that prepares to leave?

If you’re peeling back wounds like this one,
my 365-Day Shadow Work Journals were made for moments like these.
They speak the same language you do. Truth before comfort.
Explore the journals →

Sprinkles of Healing Confetti:

🕊 New messages drop most weekdays. Quiet, but not gentle.
🔥 Paid subscribers keep the wounds lit long enough to be named.
📚 When the pain overflows, it becomes a book.
🧢 Healing wears well when stitched into something real.
☕ This newsletter runs on coffee and confession.
🖤 Shadow Thoughts carries the pieces too jagged for here.

If this hit a nerve, you’re not alone. Healing Thoughts is where I say the quiet parts loudly. If you’re not subscribed yet, now’s the time. It’s only getting rawer from here.

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” —Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913)