Finding My Rhythm: Healing, Leading, Becoming

Looking back now, it all seems so obvious.

The constant unannounced visits.
The erasure from the family portrait.
The gifts that were really obligations.
The isolation that looked like “tradition.”
The moment my newborn daughter was locked away from me, and no one thought it strange enough to fight for me.

At the time, though, it was harder to see.

Because emotional abuse doesn’t always come with shouting.
It doesn’t always come with bruises or broken furniture.
Sometimes, it comes dressed as family dinners, photo shoots, and baby bassinets.
It comes wrapped in traditions and expectations and “good intentions.”
It hides inside the word “should” —
You should come over.
You should be grateful.
You should not make a scene.

It whispers that you are selfish for wanting space.
It insists you are ungrateful for setting boundaries.
It paints your exhaustion as weakness, your discomfort as drama.

It teaches you to doubt your own instincts.
It trains you to silence yourself.

And it does all of this so slowly, so insidiously, that by the time you realize you’re trapped, you’re already exhausted — too tired, too isolated, too unsure of yourself to fight your way out.

But here’s what I want you — what I want me — to remember:

Love does not erase you.
Love does not isolate you.
Love does not lock you out of your own life.

The patterns were there all along.
I just hadn’t learned to trust myself enough to see them yet.

But I’m learning now.
And that is the beginning of everything.