There was a time when I honestly had no idea what peace even was, or how it was ever supposed to feel inside my own body. I had spent so many years bracing myself and managing everyone else's moods that a calm, settled feeling was almost foreign to me. So when it finally arrived, it caught me off guard, because it came so quietly and from somewhere I had never once thought to look. It did not come from another person. It settled into me from the inside, on an ordinary morning, without any announcement at all.
Come sit with me for a few minutes.
The greatest gift healing has given me was never a perfect life. It was this quiet, and not the kind that shows up because everything suddenly got easy, but the kind that comes from finally knowing I no longer have to abandon myself to keep anyone else comfortable. For the first time I wake up feeling completely safe to be exactly who I am, and it took me years to trust it, because I had always believed that being safe was something another person had to give me, when it was really something that could only ever grow from within me.
That does not mean the past never visits. Every now and then a certain song finds its way back to me, one that carries a lot of emotional weight and gently brings the past up to the surface. Instead of turning it off the way I once would have, I let it in, almost as if it arrived carrying a message I am meant to sit with. I will play it over and over, sometimes for a few days and sometimes for weeks, until I have finally felt whatever I needed to feel from it, and after that I usually don't need to hear it again for a long while. The difference now is that these songs, and the memories that ride in on them, no longer unpack their bags and stay the way they used to. They visit, they remind me of how far I have come, and then they leave me a little lighter than they found me.
What peace gave me next was the courage to start saying yes again. Yes to traveling somewhere I have never been, to real conversations with complete strangers, to giving away free hugs, to opportunities that once would have frightened me, to learning new technology even when I feel completely out of my depth, and to building a business that carries my heart into the world instead of just earning me a paycheck. The life I am creating now is full of color and kindness and curiosity and people who smile back, and every bit of it keeps reminding me how much beauty had surrounded me for years without my ever being well enough to see it.
I have also learned something that genuinely surprised me, which is that I can still care deeply about the people who were once part of my story without needing to believe they belong in my future. That is not bitterness. It is simply wisdom. Some people are only ever meant to help shape who we become, even when they were never meant to walk beside us for the rest of the way.
So if you are somewhere in the middle of your own healing right now, wondering whether life will ever truly feel different, I hope you will keep saying yes to whatever makes your heart come alive, and keep trusting that peace is possible for you too, even if you have never once felt it before. For the longest time I believed peace was a reward, something I would finally be handed at the very end of all that waiting, on the day someone else decided I had earned it. That day never needed to come. Peace did not arrive from the outside, and it did not arrive at the end. It simply began the moment I stopped waiting and started living, and it has been growing quietly in me ever since.
With love,
Zenfull Heart
Soul Messages by Sherry
