I once felt a lot of shame for my obsession with boys. I was the girl who always had a boyfriend, a serial monogamist beginning in the wee years of middle school. Every couple of months it was someone new—and I was someone new, shapeshifting into whoever my partner needed me to be. That proclivity to mold into someone else entirely was rooted in a deep sense of shame that convinced me that, to be loved, I had to change who I was. Shame was the source of my pain, and my response to that pain also felt shameful.
Over the past few years, I’ve done a lot of reckoning with myself regarding that period of my life. I no longer feel shame about it whatsoever. Since then, I’ve realized something pertinent in my healing: my actions were completely normal given my life and circumstances. We’re often so quick to berate ourselves for actions that feel icky or impulsive without considering our pasts. These behaviors don’t spring up from nowhere. They’re not isolated actions. In fact, they’re not actions at all—they’re reactions. They’re coping mechanisms we learned early on to fit into this world, or to distinguish ourselves from it.
I felt largely invisible at home. I was emotionally lonely and craving intimacy. That inherent human need for connection wasn’t being met, so of course, I looked for that elsewhere. There’s nothing shameful in that. I needed love and I was going to do whatever it took to find that love, even if it was fickle and fleeting. At the time, of course, I didn’t view it so formulaically. I didn’t realize the connection. Something deeper within me knew what I needed, and so I fulfilled that need.
This isn’t to say the behavior was healthy or conducive to loving relationships (it definitely wasn’t), but I simply can’t blame myself for it. Over the past few years, I’ve done the exact opposite. I’ve reflected on it with pure compassion, showing acceptance and love for the younger version of me who couldn’t accept herself. That’s exactly when my healing began to percolate—when I was willing to offer myself a different solution, rather than the same cycle of shame I’d been stuck in for years.
In 2022, I published a book about this process of coming home to myself. I was immensely proud of the growth I’d undergone and the complete transformation of my relationship with myself, and thus, with others. I wanted to share that wisdom with the world, hoping it could be a north star. Since then, I’ve received beautiful messages from readers explaining how instrumental the book was in their healing journey. They shared that the words resonated so deeply with their own experiences, it almost felt as if I was living their life. These comments amaze me because in my opinion, they are a testament to the truth that on a spiritual level, we are all so connected, soaking in life in largely similar ways, yet uniquely filtered through our individual experiences.
If I had to summarize the entirety of the book, distilling it down to its core message, I would say this: coming home to yourself is a journey of love, not of shame. Yes, sometimes that love is deeply painful. It’s met with challenge and resistance. But still, the undertone of all transformation is love, compassion, and radical acceptance. If you’re courageous enough to embrace these central tenets, you will find liberation from the patterns you’ve been stuck in.
Remember:
You will never achieve growth through negative self-talk.
Only through love can we begin to truly see ourselves.
Only through love can we begin to see change.
Reflections: A Guided Journal is available worldwide! If you’re in a season of healing, becoming, or reconnecting with yourself, I invite you into this 8-week journey.
