Entry Two

I keep returning to this thought lately:

Always remember — the darkest parts of your story gave birth to the strongest parts of your soul.

I don’t say it triumphantly.
I say it with reverence.

Because the dark wasn’t just quiet.
It was messy.
It was anger.
It was walls I built to keep myself safe.
It was searching for acceptance in places that could never give it.
It was pouring my life into work, into “hustle,” into exceeding at everything I did just to feel like I had value.

The strength that came from it didn’t look gentle.
It looked like survival.
It looked like anger turned into boundaries.
It looked like finally facing the parts of me I had been too scared to hold.

The breakthrough — the real softening — came when I spoke to the little girl inside me.
When I became the adult she needed.
When I offered her the love and acceptance I had been searching for elsewhere.
That is where real strength grew.
Not in what I could achieve, but in what I could finally nurture within myself.

If I were telling the forest the truth, I’d say:
I didn’t become softer by avoiding my pain.
I became stronger by meeting it.
By naming it.
By tending to the child who carried it before I even knew it existed.

The dark wasn’t a detour.
It was a passage.
And on the other side, I didn’t emerge just hardened —
I emerged rooted.
Rooted in my own care, in my own voice, in my own witnessing.

So today, I’m honoring the parts of me that carried anger, walls, and longing.
They led me here.
To this knowing.
To this capacity for tenderness I never thought I could give myself.

—

The forest keeps this