I have been speaking my truth and living it.

I have been holding space for ease and patience, comfort and calm.

It’s different, but it’s also been transformational.

I am realizing that peace and freedom aren’t what I thought they would be.

At times, they bring amazing joy.

At times, they bring me to tears.

I have been giving myself permission to embrace my humanity in its full scope, to feel all the things, to want unreasonable things.

This is liberating and also heartbreaking.

It requires levels of honesty with myself and others with which I am completely unacquainted. Levels of honesty that are, in fact, antithetical to the way I’ve lived my compartmentalized life for years, in order to survive and advance. Levels of honesty that rebuff compartmentalization as a survival strategy to embrace integration as a strategy to thrive and honor the deepest desires of my heart.

As I stop holding myself to levels of expectations that I don’t have for others, as I learn to embrace the parts of myself that are the most tender and vulnerable, the parts that I have always feared would leave me abandoned and alone, as I make room for the true fullness of my humanity, I am flooded with all the things.

The reality is that my community has always been ready for me to embrace myself.

They have been waiting to be let in.

They have been trying to tell me.

They have seen parts of myself before I see them.

And the parts that they didn’t see coming don’t change who I am fundamentally. They are, in fact, consistent with who I am, and with my very real humanity.

I am fully loved.

I am beautiful and brilliant.

I am emotional and full of contradictions.

I am intimidating and unpredictable.

I am unapologetic and responsible.

I am complicated and simple.

Whoever I am in this moment, I am firmly rooted and grounded in a depth of humanity and love that underlies it all. I am grateful. So deeply grateful.