February Love Letter

It’s funny how gently sometimes your wishes come true, your mind doesn’t even notice if you’re not paying enough attention.

For a long time, I used to pray for one very specific thing.

That it would be harder for me not to write than to actually be writing. Back when the words felt like something I had to extract from myself, when writing was discipline and identity in ambition, but not yet just me. Something that I naturally do. Lately I catch myself moving through the day with sentences forming before I even sit down. They follow me into the shower, through the day, into the quiet minutes between sessions at the clinic. I taste them the way I used to taste new cities, turning them slowly in my mouth, “slightly”, “tenacious”, “sublime”, amazed at how a single word can hold the exact temperature of a feeling and give structure to an otherwise chaotic world. Now it is easier to write rather than not to be writing. Sharing no longer feels like exposure but as circulation.

A year and a half ago I was back in my childhood room, the same uneven piles of books, the same window, the same streetlight that never fully turns off at night. I had just returned from Berlin, the city where I allowed myself to rebel against the straight line of ten years of psychology, where I built a home out of people who spoke in poems and unfinished manuscripts and accents from everywhere. I created a community for writers and poets there, designing programs at my kitchen table with no training other than my own obsession. Over a hundred creatives passed through those rooms. It was the best of times and the worst of times. Sorry, I had to. But seriously, it was the most alive I had ever felt and the most unstable I had ever been.

As the daughter of immigrants, and an immigrant child myself, survival has always felt like the only responsible state of being. Even while doing something beautiful, meaningful, or dare I say - fun, there was a voice in the background counting, calculating, wondering how long this could last. Chaos felt familiar in the way home sometimes does. So when that life could no longer hold me, I returned to my oldest lover, psychology. Where I sit across from people with questions that never have quick answers.

Coming back to live with my parents after years of independence while reentering the therapy space, felt like being asked to stand on two moving floors at once. I had no apartment of my own, no partner, an exhausted bank account after two and a half years of almost no income, and friends who were now continents away. There were days I cried so hard I scared myself, the kind of crying that makes you speak out loud to no one, pleading - How did I get here? What is wrong with me? Will this keep happening again and again? There is a very specific exhaustion that comes from being good at rebuilding, from watching a life you built dissolve more than once.

And yet, in between the breakdowns, there were these visions. My own place filled with plants and books and that very specific afternoon light, a private practice with my name on the door, friendships that feel like chosen family, a relationship with my mother in which I can safely be myself, loving myself in a way that is not dependent on achievement, productivity, or someone choosing me romantically. They felt real but fragile, like glass objects I was not yet allowed to touch.

So I disappeared into what I called hermit mode. Morning pages every day, meditation even when my mind screamed, EFT tapping before coffee, working out not to change my body but to return to it, long stretches of silence. I even stopped listening to music with words because I didn’t want a single sentence in my head that I hadn’t grown there myself. At the time I thought I was fixing myself. Only now do I understand that I was becoming someone capable of recognizing her own answered prayers.

Because the question that finally broke something open was disarmingly simple.

What if I didn’t do everything wrong?

In the spring of last year I suddenly felt like I had to go to Thailand. It made no sense. I was deep in my hermit mode, healing, getting my financial suicide from a few years back in order, focusing on my career. It wasn’t the right time to go on vacation. But there was this voice inside that told me I have to go. Figure it out, Alex. I was sitting in front of my computer, bawling my eyes out while getting the tickets. I wasn’t used to treating myself before reaching a great milestone or suffering enough to justify it. I didn’t deserve it. But the I I was becoming did. And both of these versions, in that transition, were holding the tension of polarities. People tend to speak a lot about the before and after, but no one speaks enough about how yucky the in between feels in that cocoon. How wrong it feels to listen to your gut feeling. How irresponsible it feels to spend money on yourself without negotiating it with anyone. So I didn’t tell anyone and I did it. I went. And it changed my life. Not because of something specific that happened there, but because, for the first time, I was acting as the person I was becoming instead of waiting for her to arrive.

When I came back, things started falling into place in little ways that were hard to notice at first. I stopped biting my nails. I found my little piece of heaven, my place with a sunny garden. Soon after I met my neighbor who became one of my closest friends, who is always there for support, to cook for me and give me random presents. Just because.

For years I prayed to feel loved in a way that didn’t need to be negotiated. I wanted to stop translating myself so I could be received. I wanted to ask without the familiar contraction in my stomach while waiting for the answer. Now the people in my life say I love you out loud, easily, at the end of phone calls and in the middle of messages, as if love has become a language we all remember how to speak. When I need help, the answer is immediate, almost joyful, always a resounding - yes. There is a softness in the way the world meets me. The right rooms tend to become available, the right conversation happens on the right day between two sessions, and when I deal with electricity bills and broken shelves I suddenly realize I am doing it in my own home, my own life.

None of these things is dramatic. That’s the point. They are gentle, consistent, almost easy. They all carry the same feeling: I am no longer trying to extract love from life. I am meeting it from a place that is already overflowing with it.

The answered prayer was never the apartment, or the writing, that Thailand retreat, or the love that now comes easily. It was becoming someone who allows themselves to experience it.

Someone who can recognize her own life as it is happening.

Acting as the person you are becoming is not a strategy. It is the way you treat yourself when there is nothing to prove and no one to impress. Learning to spoil yourself, to become your own sugar mama, is not indulgence. It is the moment your life stops being a project and starts being a home.

It’s funny how gently sometimes your wishes come true, your mind doesn’t even notice if you’re not paying enough attention.

Be Magnificent,

Alex

❤️