It’s a strange feeling, being single again after decades of marriage and partnership. As a woman who spent years being a wife, caretaking and nurturing and tending to someone else’s needs isn’t something I do, it’s who I am. It’s a default setting so deep I stopped noticing it was even there.

Now that I’ve been divorced for a while, I understand why so many women slide quickly into a new relationship. It’s rarely loneliness, and it’s rarely an inability to be alone. It’s that women, especially after years of being a wife and mother, are wired for partnership at a cellular level. There’s no shame in that. It should be celebrated, not whispered about.

The moment the divorce papers were filed, I turned my whole attention toward myself. I’d spent years in and out of therapy, using it as scaffolding to hold the marriage, and myself, together. So once I finally made the decision to leave, I quietly stopped. I know plenty of women begin therapy right here, at the end or even in the thick of the divorce, and I think that instinct is often the right one. For me, the need had already been met. I was ready to stand on my own two feet, having already done the work of grieving what I couldn’t control.

Then came the chorus of everyone else’s opinions. Get on a dating app. Live your unhinged cougar era. Just get out there and have fun. None of it was wrong exactly, women absolutely deserve some lightness and release after divorce, which experts still rank among the hardest chapters a woman can live through. But advice like that is a costume, not a fit. It doesn’t drape the same way on every body.

I lasted twenty-four hours on a dating app before I knew, in my bones, it wasn’t my place. Messages poured in from strangers, and it felt like my entire energy field had been thrown open to a wave of eyes and static I never invited in. My stomach turned. I deleted the app before the day was out. I have nothing against apps if they’re an easy on-ramp for someone. But don’t let anyone hand you that as the solution to a broken relationship. Sifting through strangers’ messages left me needing to clear my energy field again. None of it felt aligned.

I did go on a few dates, mostly pleasant, nothing heavy or serious. Just light conversation with people whose interests brushed up against mine, people I came across naturally. And that’s where I hit my first real wall: most people out here are still building toward marriage, toward forever especially at this age. I am not looking to be anyone’s partner again unless it’s a soul level fit. And I’m not in a rush, I already completed the marriage and children chapter of my life.

I’m not looking to fulfill a timeline, I’m only going to align with my soul from here on.

Here's the harder truth about dating after divorce: you finally know exactly what you want, and what you don't. I'm not searching for a man who looks good on paper to settle down with or raise children beside — I already lived that whole life, and my kids have their father. I'm not auditioning to be anyone's housewife. I can't be. I still have to work, still have to hold up my end for my kids, financially and every other way that matters. So I can tell pretty quickly whether this is going to work, and I don't want to lead anyone on or waste anyone's time.

The dating world seems to run on a current of daily texts and constant check-ins, and I don’t have the current to spare. I’m not waking up at 7 a.m composing a good morning text to a man I met two weeks ago when my kids need me first.

At this point in my life, I’m not chasing fleeting feelings or empty nights. I’m not chasing a ring or a man’s bank account to lean on. And I am done shrinking my life, my standards, my shape, to fit inside someone else’s idea of what a partner should be, especially when plenty of those men come with a list of standards just as long as mine.

Forty-something, single, raising kids, I look at dating now through a completely different lens. I’m no longer the young woman describing the carat weight of her dream ring. I’m no longer someone who reshapes her whole life around a man’s needs before she’s even asked what her own are.

It’s a strange place to land, I know. But I’m finally understanding why so many people choose to stay single, and stay there a while. There’s something intoxicating about being wherever you want, with whoever you want, answering to no one. Walking out the door each morning without knowing what the day holds is a freedom I never once tasted inside my marriage.

So today, I am single but hopeful. And every morning I wake up genuinely curious what kind of adventure is waiting for me. I feel ready for more, and am excited for what the universe has in store for me next.

I spent years overperforming. Doing more, earning more, showing up more, as if my worth depended on the doing. I loved much of it. But somewhere in all that motion, I stopped leaving enough silence to hear my own voice.

There are seasons to a life. A season to sow, a season to reap. Neither is wrong. The only requirement is gentleness with ourselves when the outside world goes quiet and the inner voice gets loud.

The past two weeks: soccer camp, two hours of driving a day as a solo parent. Lunch, laundry, a working kitchen. Kids washed every night, playdates on the calendar. More TV and FaceTime for the kids than I’d like to admit. Me, holding it all together with a smile.

When I had a chance to rest, I curled under my sheets and just lay there. Sometimes self-pity came, or sadness, or overwhelm. I let it. No more spiritual bypassing, no more running — just feeling what arrived and letting it pass through, so I could stand on solid ground again.

Some days were easier than others. But day by day, I found myself doing the work I’m meant to do. Showing up for my kids. Working through the old patterns. Learning to hold my own emotions without breaking apart or seeking solace elsewhere.

Then one afternoon, I found myself dancing alone in my bedroom.

It felt good. Free. Alive. Nothing was happening on the outside — no epic vacation, no celebration to post. But I knew I was exactly where I was meant to be.

For years I did all the things on the outside with no clarity on the inside. Now the polarity has tipped. My human self still resists it some days. My soul knows better. I’m finally beginning to better understand where I’m headed.

Whatever your season looks like, remember this: no amount of doing outweighs inner clarity. And clarity asks only one thing of us — that we quiet the busy mind and follow our inner voice.

The rest, I trust, will follow. When the inside aligns, the outside world begins to reflect it. It always does.

This morning my nine-year-old son was yelling from the hallway — mom, hurry up, we’re going to be late! — while I was gathering the water bottle, the snacks, the homework, moving through the kitchen in that particular kind of quiet urgency that mothers learn. Two daughters behind him. The logistics of love, stacked on my solo parenting days.

He is a sensitive boy with a loud piercing voice. Big feelings that come fast — tears, anxiety, the full-body response to anything that feels wrong. He absorbs the room like a sponge. I know this about him the way I know my own handwriting.

The only time he goes quiet is when his father and I slip into disagreements, an inevitable facet of co-parenting. Then he just — stills. Sits in freeze, unable to speak, unable to move, just waiting for the air to change.

I know that stillness. I grew up inside it.

And this is why I chose differently.

I was a girl with enormous feelings who learned, very early, to hold all that bigness somewhere in my chest and leave it there. I still don’t cry easily. The tears are in me — I can feel them — but they stay lodged, deep and heavy, like a stone I can’t quite turn over. I’ve used sad music. Romance films with sad endings. Sometimes they come out unexpectedly after one too many drinks when I’m alone. I know these aren’t the answers, but the release — when it finally comes — is the only thing that gives me some relief.

What actually helps: walking. Moving my body. Growing roses. Lighting a candle. Taking deep breaths. Going for a drive down PCH. Hugging trees, which I say without embarrassment. Allowing myself to love and be loved. But I am a single woman with children and a life that requires my full presence before 8 am, and these things require a softness of schedule I don’t always have.

So this morning I just told him calmly: please don’t scream like that. My nervous system can’t hold that kind of energy first thing in the morning. It makes me feel uneasy. I said it plainly, one highly sensitive person to another.

He heard me immediately. That’s the thing about sensitive children — they don’t need much. Just the truth, spoken gently.

We put on Yung Kai’s Blue, his favorite song at the moment, and drove to school in the quiet that follows understanding.

I spent decades with a man who called himself sensitive but could never quite locate mine. In that marriage I learned how to survive — how to defend myself, how to fight back, how to hold my ground. The armor I built kept me standing. It also buried my feelings deeper.

I’ve thought about that a lot — how sensitivity isn’t just feeling things deeply, it’s the capacity to feel someone else deeply. My son has it. I have it. I believe many boys have it, it just gets lost somewhere in translation.

This feeling in my chest — the thing that will not move — keeps appearing in the memoir I’m writing. I keep circling it, returning to it, pressing my hands against it like a door I’ve been afraid to open.

It is not mine alone. My mother carried it. Her mother carried it before her. It moved through the women in my line like water finding the same channel, generation after generation, looking for a place to finally be released.

I am now trying to release it. For all of us.

Rome · Assisi · Tuscany · Florence · Venice

Ten days, five cities, one private guide who knew exactly where to take us, and a mother-daughter trip that became something I didn’t plan for. This is the full itinerary — where we stayed, what we ate, how long it takes between each city, and why the order matters more than you’d think.

Save this. You’ll want to come back to it for your next trip.

ROME — Days 1–3

Arrive: Check in. Rest. Rome doesn't ease you in gently — let yourself land before you try to take it on.

Day 1-2:

Rome hits you immediately. Ancient, overwhelming, relentless in its scale. Two thousand years of empire compressed into one city.

We spent our first full day moving through the Colosseum, Roman Forum, Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps.

Day 3: the Vatican — the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basilica. A place where something shifts even in the most secular heart.

Where to eat:

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Good people choose wrong too.

Some people are lucky enough to get it right the first time. My mother did. She found her person in her twenties and built a life that lasted. But there’s a caveat — she also lost her father young, without a strong safety net beneath her. She couldn’t afford a mistake. Her first choice had to be the right one.

In this way I believe God and the universe are fair. They know what we can and what we cannot handle.

My childhood wasn’t perfect — whose is, with immigrant parents — but it was good for the most part. My parents loved me, apologized when they needed to, sat through uncomfortable conversations with grace. They gave me more than many get.

Maybe that’s exactly why my marriage had to break.

Good people don’t just choose wrong — they stay too long too. Idealism does that. So does empathy. When you’re wired to see the best in people, to believe in potential over reality, walking away feels like giving up on someone rather than choosing yourself. We extend grace long past the point where others would have walked away. We believe in people not as they are but as they could be. And that beautiful quality — the very thing that makes us good — is the same thing that keeps us in the wrong place for too long.

It takes years sometimes to understand the difference between loyalty and self-abandonment.

If my marriage had been good enough to last, I may have never understood loss at its deepest level. Never sat with the specific grief of dismantling something you built with your own hands. Never learned what it means to start over not as a young woman with everything ahead of her but as a woman in the middle of her life, children watching, the world watching, her own heart watching.

The breakdown didn’t just cost me a marriage. It cost me an identity. The woman I had carefully constructed over decades — wife, half of something — had to be completely taken apart before something truer could emerge. That process is not graceful. It is not pretty. It is the most humbling and terrifying thing I have ever done.

The cracks taught me something too. Wounded souls are not bad souls. They are just souls that have lived a higher calling.

And it was exactly what I needed.

This isn’t deflection. It’s not denial. It’s what years of sitting with pain honestly eventually produces — the quiet recognition of a greater design.

Whether your loss came through a broken childhood, a missing parent, or a marriage that didn’t last — you are exactly where you’re supposed to be. Every loss is rebuilding you into who you were always meant to become.

Good people choose wrong too. And sometimes the wrong choice leads you exactly where you were always meant to go.

I’m not quite there yet. But I have no doubt I’ll get there one day — and you will too.

I’ve lived through the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s. I’ve dated, gotten my heart broken, fallen in and out of love. I’ve raised a Gen Z child into adulthood and am now raising a Gen Alpha in an overly connected, digitized world that would be unrecognizable to the girl I used to be. When I tell people I’ve been married since my twenties, they assume I’m inexperienced. Sheltered. Naive about men.

I may love like a fool. But I am not naive about men.

What I didn’t know — what none of us know the first time — is what attachment disguised as love actually costs. Not the romantic cost. The personal one. The slow erosion of self that can happen inside even a chosen life. The particular ache of being next to someone and feeling completely alone. You don’t learn that from dating. You learn it from staying.

A friend recently told me that divorce is like going through second puberty. It hit home immediately. Because it’s one thing to be dating and meeting new people in your thirties, forties, fifties. It’s another thing entirely to do it after you tuck away the wedding ring. After a life built together. After learning that what you believed was happily ever after was not, in fact, forever.

There is a quiet reckoning in that realization. A humbling. You learn that love is completely outside your control — and that if you can control it, it probably isn’t love in its truest sense.

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1. That I had unknowingly given my power away.

I became a young mother in my twenties — the perfect recipe for losing yourself without realizing it’s happening. Somewhere between back-to-back pregnancies, mountains of laundry and the relentlessness of early motherhood, I lost my voice and confidence without even noticing they were gone. And I don’t think this is just my story.

2. That marriage and motherhood bind a woman to someone else’s life more than she realizes — until the binding loosens.

The way patriarchy quietly seeps into marriage and motherhood cannot be fully described. It has to be felt. It’s subtle, sometimes even gentle — and yet the results can be quietly violent, especially for the woman living inside it.

3. That I was always strong enough to be alone — I just never had the chance to prove it to myself.

I grew up watching my parents function as a team. Their marriage wasn’t perfect but it was honest and mutually respectful, and I assumed that was simply how marriage worked. I carried that assumption into my own and somewhere along the way stopped doing things alone — not out of weakness, but because life was overwhelming and leaning felt easier. One day I looked up and realized I had been depending on someone else to hold things I was always capable of holding myself.

4. That trauma lives in the body long after the mind has moved on — and healing it requires going back in, not pushing through.

Healing is not linear and it never will be. My mind has moved on. My heart still needs gentleness. I am reminded of this constantly as I move toward my next chapter — that moving forward doesn’t mean leaving the body behind. It means bringing it with you, slowly, with care.

5. That chasing and running are two sides of the same avoidance. The lesson waits patiently either way.

Forget the clinical labels — anxiously attached, avoidant, triggered. We are all just carrying wounded children inside us, stuck in loops we didn’t choose and don’t always know how to exit. What I want now is to be the patience and the love that another wounded child needs. And to call in someone who can do the same for me.

6. That forgiveness is possible. Forgetting is not. Both are okay.

No matter how much time passes, there are things I still cannot forget. The memory arrives without warning — when I see a young mother struggling alone at the park, or hear of another woman who has been betrayed. It still moves me. Not in a personal way anymore, but in a universal one. The wound became a window. That’s okay too.

7. That I’m grateful I tried, even for the years it didn’t work.

I’m thankful for my children — fully, without reservation. They are the gift that came from a chapter that wasn’t forever. I’m even grateful to my ex-husband for living that chapter with me, because without him they wouldn’t exist. It wasn’t easy to arrive at this kind of grace. But I’m here. And I mean it.

8. That having my own bedroom is a luxury, not a loss.

I’m not sure I can go back to sharing a bedroom with another person. I love being a mother. I love a house full of children and noise and life. But at the end of the day, having a space that is entirely mine — my silence, my closet, my sheets — is something I didn’t know I needed until I had it. It is not loneliness. It is luxury.

9. That love that finds you later hits different — because you finally know what you’re saying yes to.

You think the feelings you had in your twenties and thirties were big? Wait. Wait until you have lived through real storms, expanded your capacity for pain and for joy, and learned — the hard way — what you actually need and what you will no longer accept. The love that finds you in your forties and on is something the younger version of you could not have imagined. I promise you. Trust the wait.

10. That freedom tastes sweetest when you remember what it felt like to not have it.

Some women choose from the beginning — no marriage, no children, full sovereignty over their own lives. I chose differently. I chose to experience it all — the love, the entrapment, the beauty, the restriction, the pain — and then to free myself from what no longer served me.

What I didn't expect was that the leaving would be the making of me. The courage it took to walk away from the life I had built, the strength it required to choose myself over comfort and familiarity — that became the foundation of everything I am now. My life has never felt so sweet. And I am grateful, genuinely grateful, for every year of sacrifice that made me finally choose myself.

If you enjoyed this, you can find more essays on love and divorce.

I tried to write a novel many times throughout my life. Every time, I failed after a few chapters in. The characters stopped developing. The dialogue felt hollow. Eventually I had to admit something uncomfortable about myself — I’m not an imaginer. I’m an embodied storyteller. The difference matters more than I expected.

I wanted to write fiction because I wanted to keep my story private. I’ve always kept things tucked away. I wrote in my diary constantly, and even built a lifestyle platform called mommy diary — a space that lived somewhere between my real life and something more curated, more managed. Controlled distance was something I’d practiced for a long time.

So I invented a character named Mia.

In English, MIA means missing in action. In Korean, it means lost child — a child cut off from origin. I told myself it was just a name. I know now it was a confession.

Mia was in a relationship she wasn’t sure about. She was walking to the doctor for a second pregnancy test, passing a local bar along the way, thinking about how her life was about to change. I needed to describe her face, the street, what she was feeling. Nothing came. She wouldn’t move forward. Because the sidewalk was real. The uncertainty was real. The test was real.

I wasn’t writing Mia. I was standing outside myself, trying to describe what I couldn’t yet look at directly.

She refused to become fully human on the page. She stayed flat, wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t move forward. It took me a while to understand why.

I was Mia. I was hiding behind her. And the story she was carrying was too real to be imagined — it had to be excavated.

That’s when I stopped writing fiction and started writing the memoir I was always meant to write.

I’m now eight chapters in. My literary agent, my only reader so far, told me the story is deeply internal and embodied — meaning it lives in my body, and I’m excavating it, not constructing it. That distinction has reorganized how I understand myself as a writer. Maybe as a person too.

This was the book I was meant to write. I understand that now. Everything I’ve lived since my twenties was building toward it — the unexpected pregnancy, the postpartum depression, the special needs parenting, the businesses built from nothing, the joy that came in unexpected forms, the heartbreak that reshaped me, and the divorce that finally cracked everything open.

We’re often told to keep new work private until it’s finished. Protect it. Don’t share too soon. And I understand the wisdom in that. But I want to document this process here, because the meaning isn’t only in the final product — the finished book, the copies sold, the reviews. The real value lives in the process itself. The one that breaks you open and rebuilds you into a better artist. A more honest one.

Mia never made it to that pregnancy test. But I did. And I’m finally writing about it.

The one that comes after you’ve survived something. After the years of floating, of surviving, of telling yourself one day, one day like a prayer you weren’t sure God was still listening to.

My Korean American immigrant mother has been a traveler for as long as I can remember. As a little girl, I didn’t understand it — why she always needed to go somewhere, why she kept placing herself in new cities, new countries, new versions of herself. She is the reason we ended up in the US from Korea. I mistook it for selfishness. I now know it was the bravest thing she ever did.

She was finding herself — within motherhood, within her forty-something years of marriage — over and over again.

What a blessing, to have been raised by a woman who paved her own path. What a blessing I couldn’t see until I began paving my own.

She had always wanted to take me to Italy. And for years I kept telling her the same thing: one day, umma. One day, I hope. But during my marriage, one day felt impossible — outrageous, even selfish. How do you explain to your husband that you want to disappear to Italy for ten days with your mother, just for the pleasure of it, while he watches the kids? I couldn’t justify it. So I kept that dream small and tucked away.

But guess what? Divorce has a way of returning things to you.

Co-parenting made space I didn't know I was missing. And one day — the real one, not the deferred one — I found myself on a plane to Rome with my mother. Finally ready to receive what she had been trying to gift me my whole life.

Holy

When I arrived in Vatican City, I felt a pressure in my chest I couldn’t explain. Not anxiety exactly — something older than that. The energy of the city, heavy and ancient and alive, pressing against something in me.

Inside St. Peter’s Basilica, nothing prepares you for the scale of it — the ceilings soaring into another atmosphere entirely, marble and gold in every direction, light pouring through the dome in long columns that make you feel both impossibly small and somehow exactly where you’re supposed to be.

I sat on a pew for a long time next to my mother, in front of the Eucharist. She was quietly praying the rosary. I was writing down my Dream 2.0 manifestations in my Mary Magdalene journal. Same prayer, two different languages.

My mother began to weep during mass — quietly, the way she does — and something in her quiet broke me completely open. I let the tears flow silently, no longer tears of sadness but ones of renewal.

The statue of St. Peter was dressed in his papal vestments, as he is only once a year. We had no idea this was his Feast day. Even our guide, who frequents the Vatican regularly, stopped in his tracks.

I am collecting real life miracles these days. They keep arriving — in simple joys, in dreams, in quiet moments I no longer miss.

Afterward we climbed six hundred steps to the top, my mom’s bad back and all. We needed breaks in between but she made it. I knew she would.

Rome spread out beneath us like something out of a dream.

Assisi

The cobblestone streets of Assisi look like they belong inside a fairy tale. Pale stone and narrow alleyways, the whole town perched on a hill like it’s been keeping a sacred secret for centuries.

We drank local Umbrian wine — the best I’ve ever tasted — alongside truffle pasta I am still dreaming about. We visited the remnants of St. Francis, open to the public for the first time in eight hundred years. For one month only.

We were there that exact month, without prior knowledge or plans.

I learned about St. Francis and St. Chiara while I was there — two souls so spiritually bound to one another that their connection transcended the boundaries of ordinary love. Not romantic in the conventional sense, but something deeper. A recognition. Two people who saw God in each other and chose, over and over again, to walk the same path. The kind of love that doesn’t possess but liberates.

I saw the rose of St. Francis — the thornless rose. The story goes that one night, tormented by desire and seeking respite, Francis threw himself into a thorn bush. When he rose, the thorns were gone. The bush bloomed roses. Nearly eight hundred years later, those roses still grow without thorns — but only on this site. Move the plants elsewhere and the thorns return. Only here, they don’t.

I stood there looking at the thornless stems with my own eyes.

That night, St. Francis appeared in my dream.

I am slowly — finally — learning to let miracles be what they are.

Florence

Santa Maria del Fiore stops you before you even walk inside — the facade alone, white and green and pink marble, the dome rising above the city like it was placed there by something other than human hands.

That night, our hotel lounge had transformed into a Cuban jazz night — jewel-toned walls and furniture, performers so magnetic you couldn’t look away. A woman next to us pulled us in and we danced. One of those nights you never planned for and can only enjoy in Florence.

We talked until four in the morning — my mother, her younger half-sister who had flown in from Korea, and me, two bottles of red wine between us. We went deep, argued like the old days, laughed at our own silliness.

We didn’t know where the words were coming from. We just knew they were necessary. That the talking was healing something deep and distinct in our maternal lineage — and that the healing had been waiting, arranged somehow by my late grandmother, who was present in that room with us.

Venice

Venice was beautiful, foggy and undeniably haunted, the way a city built on water should be. What most don't know is that Venice was ravaged by plague for centuries — the word quarantine itself was born here, from the forty days ships were forced to wait before docking. Tens of thousands died on these very streets, buried beneath the city, their spirits absorbed into the stone and water. You feel them everywhere.

I wore a lace skirt that looked beautiful in photographs but was a catastrophic decision in real life. I prayed I wouldn’t catch a cold and ruin the trip for everyone. Luckily I came out unscathed — grateful for this forty-something body of mine that somehow feels better than it did in my twenties.

We had our best meal of the trip there, put on our collagen masks, and fell asleep side by side in a room that was hundreds of years old and accompanied by spirits. You feel them in the walls, in the narrow canals, in the way the fog moves through the streets like it has somewhere to be.

Yet I wasn’t afraid.

I felt held — because the most beautiful stories are haunting, achingly so.

Las Vegas

I had just returned from Italy when my friends texted. Art of the Wild — a grown up festival I’ve loved for years. This time I was sure I couldn’t make it. The timing made no sense.

And then the universe aligned again. I had the weekend to myself — no kids, no obligations. Just an open window and a group chat that said come, everything is ready.

A few hours later, the flight was booked.

I’ve been a fan of house since the late 90s — progressive, melodic, the kind that moves through your entire body. House music is a conversation of your soul that bypasses mind and logic. It’s the thing underneath the thing. It finds you on the dance floor and reminds you that you are still in there. Still alive, still feeling, still free.

I let myself go that night. My body remembered exactly what to do — how to move, how to feel the music, how to fall back into something that had always been mine. Before I was a mother, before I was a wife, before I was anything to anyone.

Here it was, waiting for me. Unchanged, patient, attentive — my old lover.

We left XS at 6 am, hearts full, the city still glittering outside. We made a promise on the way out that we would live a full life well into our later years. That joy is not something you earn after all the responsibilities are handled. That it belongs to us too.

That we belong to ourselves first and foremost.

Italy handed me back my sense of the sacred. Vegas handed me back my body, my joy, my permission to be fully alive.

Two trips that had no business belonging together. And yet.

Dream 2.0 isn’t about arriving somewhere perfect. It’s about finally understanding that you were allowed to want this all along — the candlelit churches, the ancient wine, the dance floor at dawn, the mother who always knew you needed this before you did.

That one day came.

And it was everything.

And it came to me in a split second.

The old me would sift through multiple words over and over, sometimes for days, losing sleep and sanity, hoping to “get it right.”

I no longer do that—a natural outcome of spending time becoming my own best friend and learning to trust my inner voice over all else.

When was the last time you dreamed? I mean, really—dreamed?

I used to call myself a dreamer in my twenties, and as I got older, being a dreamer felt frivolous. Immature. Unrealistic. Just naive.

But in 2026, I’m giving myself permission to dream again—not as a naive girl but as a fully grown, fully formed, sovereign forty-something woman.

When I was a child, I dreamed of becoming an author, although I wasn’t entirely sure what that would look like or who would read my book. So I began a blog called Mommy Diary.

When I was an adolescent and love became the forefront of my life, I dreamed of finding my happily-ever-after fairytale. My marriage was far from a fairytale, and I ended up divorced.

When I was in college, I dreamed of becoming a young mother. I’m not sure why the word “young” preceded “mother,” but that’s what I wanted. So I began my motherhood journey at twenty-three, still moving through it in my forties. That dream, I fulfilled.

As I sit here trying to map out my outlook for 2026—a fresh ONE year in numerology—I want to dream again.

I’m not sure why women are expected to stop dreaming once we’ve achieved marriage and children, as if these are finish lines rather than starting gates. But for me, this is only the beginning and I’m excited that my children get to meet this new version of me too.

This time, the dream no longer involves a husband, children, or shiny material things—just a dream of my ancient soul, finally awake and asking: what’s next?

2026 is not just a new chapter—it's a new book.

So tell me: what does your dream 2.0 look like?

It’s raining outside, a soft gray afternoon. I’m still in my pajamas, coffee gone cold, while my kids watch TV and tinker with their 3D printers in the next room. This is just stream-of-consciousness writing on New Year’s Eve—unpolished, but straight from my heart.

Here are some things I learned in 2025, as I prepare for a fresh start by carrying only love, gratitude, and hope into 2026.

1. The importance of being your own best friend

I have never spent so much time alone as I have this year. I traveled solo to Paris—wandering the Marais in the rain, eating dinner at a corner table with only a book for company (highly recommend this for any woman). I opted out of family gatherings that had been part of my life for decades, ate meals alone without feeling the need to call a friend, spent the holidays in solitude while my kids visited family and friends elsewhere.

Contrary to what you see online about the holidays being such a lonely time for single mothers, I felt a renewed sense of hope and much-needed quiet—the kind that settles in when no one needs anything from you. Perhaps it’s because I spend enough time with my kids throughout the week that I never felt guilt for not being with them every step of the way. Instead, I reveled in the time I’m finally getting to become my own best friend—a joy I’m recovering for the first time since becoming an adult.

2. The beauty of starting over

Until this year, I measured my worth and success by longevity and quantity. I’ve been with this person for x years, built a family of x children, made an income of x dollars.

This year I focused on quality and value instead.

I’m no longer married. My relationship of nearly two decades is done, years of memory and history fading into the distance. Yet I’ve lived every day in my authenticity, placing myself at the center and everything else—my relationship status, children, income—as supporting characters, no longer the essence.

Historically, women like this would be deemed selfish.

But I’m not selfish. I’m simply coming home to myself.

3. The hope of rebirth

Once we get married and become mothers, or find ourselves in any long-term arrangement, it’s easy to think we’re locked in—especially when finances, history or children are involved.

This year I broke free from that limiting belief by focusing on the life I want to build for the present and future. This required adjustments, trimming away excess, leaving connections and situations that no longer fed my soul. It wasn’t always easy, but today, after a year of aligning with this vision, I know I’ve been making the right steps.

The journey here wasn’t simple—lots of tears, pain, and doubt, as evident in my previous posts. But as someone now walking this new path, I know wholeheartedly I’m where I’m meant to be.

This post may not be the most polished, but there’s always room for truth-telling in this noise-filled world.

Happy 2026, friends. Thank you for reading, many of you silently. I’m glad you’re here. I’ll keep showing up next year too, as a better version of myself.

The kind I witnessed while planning my mother’s 70th birthday alongside my father.

Despite his demanding work schedule, he never once forgot to follow up with me about the venue, the details, the gifts—calling me between clients, calling during his commute, making sure his wife would have the most memorable 70th birthday party with her friends.

This is what real love looks like—not simply his acts of service, but his deep desire to see her smile.

I hear about men who fail to properly care for their wives in later years as they get sick. But I’ve witnessed my father’s wholehearted devotion, loyalty, and love for my mom as she endured one of the toughest years of her life through various illnesses, conditions, and countless doctor’s visits.

My father’s love and devotion for my mother are so genuine and pure. Perhaps it’s this understanding—this firsthand knowledge of what real love looks like—that gave me the courage to leave my marriage.

I’m fortunate enough to understand how messy, imperfect, but beautiful real love is by being a living witness to my parents’ love story that spans over 50 years.

As I watched my father deliver his heartfelt speech for my mom, telling her how sad he is to one day have to part with her, I was reminded once again that there is nothing more powerful and worthwhile than love.

No amount of wealth, success, or fame has the power to elevate and fulfill one’s life like love. There is truly no greater joy, meaning, or purpose than love itself.

When I began my marriage in my early 20s, I naively assumed that love like my parents’ would be easily found. So I kept trying and trying despite the odds, hoping that if I just persisted, if I just tried a little bit harder, I could attain the same kind of love.

But my love story has been different. Instead of finding true love within my marriage, I had to step outside of it.

The past few years have been difficult at times, but I’m so grateful that I get this new opportunity to try again. Despite all the ways my heart has been broken, I still believe in love.

The temptations and distractions of the world want us to forget, make us jaded, and get us to give up on the most beautiful and powerful force in existence.

But I refuse to give up, because I can’t turn away from the very essence of my being—one of divine love.

Like a lighthouse standing firm against the storm, I choose to keep my light burning. The waves may crash, the winds may howl, but the beacon remains.

Because love isn’t something we find only in calm waters—it’s what guides us home through the darkness.

11:11.

Today is a powerful day of manifestation. Say your prayers, write down your affirmations, don’t give up on love.

We may all have different timelines, but love is available for all of us—as long as we match its frequency.

The heart that stays open, even after breaking, is the one that becomes strong enough to hold the kind of love it was always meant to carry.

You can read more about the love I’m calling in.

What frequency are you choosing to hold today?

After months—no, years—of purging, processing, and forcing myself to feel normal again (the forcing didn’t work, by the way), I’m starting to feel myself slowly coming back.

Going from a long-term marriage to single life in your 40s is disorienting, to say the least. It’s like stepping off a fast moving train you’d been riding for decades—suddenly the ground feels strange beneath your feet, but you know you have to take the steps nonetheless.

Some days you can’t believe you’re so free, that you can do whatever and go wherever as long as you show up for your kids or make prior co-parenting arrangements.

I didn’t know what to do with all that freedom at first. So I started small, focusing on the things that made me feel like myself again.

These are three things that helped me—non-negotiables if you’re a woman trying to rediscover herself at any point in her life.

1. talk therapy + gym

I was in therapy during my marriage while sorting out my emotions—on and off for over ten years, to be exact—so by the time the decision was made, I didn’t really need talk therapy anymore.

But for many, this is a crucial time to check in with mental and psychological well-being, a time to hire a licensed therapist to process emotions and heal wounds.

During this period, I also hired a personal trainer and began working out with him three times a week. It was a huge commitment as a mom, but I knew I needed to get stronger in mind and body after months of not taking care of myself, losing weight, and feeling so empty inside.

Today I feel stronger, more confident, and happy.

Working out became my anchor when everything else was adrift. It functioned as a reliable constant in my life that kept me grounded even when I felt like things were falling apart around me during the divorce process.

Having a strong, fit body made me feel whole, despite outside circumstances. When paired with a strong mind and soul, you become limitless.

2. a solo trip

I’m a firm believer that the universe grants us what we need when we least expect it. I recently took a solo trip to Paris, and the invitation just came my way somehow. I believe this is the universe knowing what I needed before I did.

Walking through the cobblestone streets of Paris alone was not only freeing but empowering. I’d spent many months before that healing and spending time alone, and this felt like the final chapter of that journey.

As a woman who has been with a husband and children since age 23, this was the ultimate path to a new chapter, one that I needed to rebuild me from the ground up.

You can read more about my trip here: lessons from paris.

3. the courage to prioritize myself

This is huge. I spent most of my 20s and 30s as a mom and wife, which meant my needs always took the back seat.

It took birthing and raising four kids and a divorce to finally reprogram my brain to think about myself too.

I don’t know where this pattern of thought and behavior originated from, but it’s probably a combination of ancestral patterns, lack of clear communication and guidance from my immigrant parents (not their fault—they lacked resources too), and my codependent and people-pleasing issues that stemmed from being an over-functioning eldest daughter of immigrant parents.

Whatever the reason, I take full accountability for my decisions, behaviors, and patterns—but I also consciously choose not to subject myself to more denial and deflection.

By deciding on divorce and walking away from a life that was no longer serving my highest good, even if it meant temporarily dismantling a structure with my kids so I could rebuild it more consciously, I broke the cycle that was keeping me in a loop of unhappiness, guilt and shame.

I’m not here to champion divorce—I know there are many happy and fulfilling marriages out there. But I am championing choosing yourself, even if it means choosing differently than when you first began your journey as a wife and mother.

You can always change your mind. You are never stuck. You are constantly evolving—meant to flow and change course when the landscape shifts beneath us.

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:

• Codependent no more by Melody Beattle

• The Pivot Year by Brianna Wiest

• A radical awakening by Dr. Shefali

• It’s not you by Dr. Ramani

• The origins of you by Vienna Pharaon

READ 5 BOOKS TO READ IN 2025 FOR GROUNDING YOURSELF

A question I never heard in my marriage, a question I never asked—a question I now savor for my lover.

How can I love you better?

How can I make you feel seen, understood, held, desired? How can I show up in ways that make you believe in the quiet strength of love—the kind that isn’t loud or boisterous, but endures like old trees with roots that run deep, across lifetimes?

How can I love you so you begin to believe in love again? So you see that your past heartbreaks weren’t true heartbreaks at all, because the depth you shared with him, with her—that wasn’t destined love.

What if those experiences were simply practice rounds, karmic tests of some sort, preparing to expand your heart for what’s to come—through you, through me?

Why let those past heartbreaks cast shadows over your present and future? How do you expect the greatest gift of your life to arrive easily, without effort, without tears?

The things worth having never do.

How can I love you better?

Do you dream of love that is soft and endearing, or the kind that is loud and determined?

Or should it be an effortless balance of both, as your life and mine circle in and out of phases like the moon and waves that require various levels of volume—like the ocean, sometimes calm, sometimes crashing against the shore?

Sometimes love is loud. Sometimes words are best carried through silence. Sometimes it’s celebratory, sometimes it lives in the quiet ache buried deep in our hearts.

Sometimes it seeps into our dreams when our ego is least resistant— divine love doesn’t loosen it’s grip that easily, so I’ve learned.

Love is that way. It comes with a multitude of faces and emotions and memories and dreams and expectations and triggers, and we have to be ready to embrace it—the light and the weight of it all.

Love is that way. It’s rarely simple, nor is it linear. It moves like the river, sometimes rushing forward into the ocean, sometimes pooling in still places so we can finally catch our breath until the next inevitable wave.

How can I love you better?

Do you want love that lives in your dreams, in memory, in the tender ache between your sheets when you’re tired of being alone yet scared to be bound to someone who now has the power to hurt you?

Do you want love that shows up in your everyday life, sharing your ups and downs after a long day of work, the kind that knows whether to silently listen or fill you in with details so you can finally take a break from performing?

The kind that shows up as 2 am late night talks in bed, the one that continues into a slow Sunday morning as you lazily get out of bed while your lover fixes your hair before heading out to brunch at a cafe around the corner?

Do you want love that is cinematic—the kind that makes you feel like you’re living inside an archived film with floral walls and distant smell of cigarettes—or do you wish it to be carefree and full of laughter, like the version your inner child can finally leap through?

How can I love you better?

I wish I could ask you these questions so you would ask me too.

I wish we could begin to speak the same language, finally—two people no longer translating their needs through fear, but saying them plainly, tenderly, like prayers we’ve secretly recited our whole lives.

Because underneath the fears, the conditioning, the patterns and the what if’s, we already speak the same language - we just have to rediscover what’s already there, what has already existed since the beginning of time.

We simply have to remember who we are—

What you are to me, who I am to you.

So tell me, how can I love you better?

Paris is a city that doesn’t merely exist—it breathes, whispers, seduces. After a week wandering its rain-slicked streets and grand boulevards, I returned home transformed, carrying within me the echo of a city that reminded me to love again.

Everywhere I looked, I saw lovers. Couples pressed together on bistro terraces, sharing wine and cigarettes beneath striped awnings. A man who couldn’t stop kissing his girlfriend, pausing between each kiss to look at her as though she was the most beautiful piece of art he has ever laid his eyes on.

Love in Paris isn’t hidden—it’s performed, celebrated, woven into the very fabric of the city.

I walked through Paris with all my senses open. The sound of rain tapping against cobblestones in the Marais, the sophisticated cadence of French conversations I couldn’t understand but felt in my chest, the faint drift of cigarette smoke curling through narrow passages lined with Haussmannian buildings—those elegant six-story structures with their wrought-iron balconies, mansard roofs, and cream-colored stone facades that have stood since the 19th century.

I watched Parisians move through their days in oversized wool coats and effortless outfits that always looked perfectly considered, never trying too hard.

More than once, I had to stop walking. The beauty became too much—the way afternoon light filtered through the glass ceiling of the Louvre, the intricate stone lacework of Notre-Dame’s flying buttresses, the view from Sacré-Cœur looking down over the rooftops that rolled across the city like waves. I found myself moved in the middle of the street, overwhelmed by beauty I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in years.

There must be a French word for this—that particular ache when beauty moves you to tears.

The art, the architecture, the history, the unabashed romance of it all—Paris made me realize how much my life back home had been missing. How little space I’d left for beauty, for inspiration, for feeling.

I’m ready now.

Ready to love again, to live again, to breathe without restraint. I want to love, to give, to receive, to create.

My marriage, over the years, had become a cage built from explanations and justifications. It happened so slowly I didn’t notice—the way certain connections require you to constantly defend your feelings, your needs, your very existence. A ridiculous transaction that somehow became the price of partnership.

But stepping outside those confines, traveling alone through Paris, I could finally see what I’d been missing. Freedom. Art. The possibility of a life lived fully rather than carefully.

I’m grateful for my blog, for social media, for the small acts of creation that have sustained me. But I’m ready now to build something lasting—not content that vanishes after twenty-four hours, but a legacy.

It’s true what they say: sometimes we have to lose ourselves before we can be found. I was lost in the winding streets of Montmartre, wandering past the Place du Tertre where artists set up their easels, and down the hill through passages lined with ivy and street lamps.

I was lost along the Seine behind Notre-Dame, watching the river carry away the reflection of Gothic spires.

And in the aimlessness, I discovered myself again.

Most importantly, I learned that I’m not jaded. Despite everything, I still believe in love—because it’s everywhere, woven into everything, living inside us, into the very fabric of our essence.

It would be easy to become discouraged after pouring your heart into a connection built on unstable ground. With or without children, what doesn’t work cannot be forced into working.

What’s broken remains broken, and no amount of history or prayers can change that fundamental truth.

But within that brokenness, I discovered my boundaries—not just the ones I should set, but the ones I must demand as a woman who is whole.

And we don’t become whole by birth. We become whole by gathering our broken pieces, learning from each crack and flaw, and assembling them into something distinctly, authentically ours.

Walking the steep hills of Montmartre past the white dome of Sacré-Cœur, strolling along the quai behind Notre-Dame where bouquinistes sell vintage books from green boxes, standing on bridges while the Eiffel Tower sparkled in the distance—I felt love everywhere.

Not just romantic love, but the love of being alive, of beauty, of possibility.

I haven’t given up on love. Without it, life loses its meaning—at least for a hopeless romantic like me.

I refuse to let heartbreak and betrayal turn me cynical. Instead, I’ll use everything I’ve learned to build the kind of love that lasts, that leaves something powerful behind for generations to come.

Paris taught me many things during this past week, but the most important lesson is this: despite all the ways my heart has been broken in recent years, I still believe in love.

I will fiercely guard this soft heart—not as weakness, but as strength, a quiet reminder that it is love that created humanity in the first place.

Perhaps Paris didn’t change me so much as remind me of who I’ve always been — a woman who sees beauty in everything, even in heartbreak.

shop what i wore in paris here. bag by unnishop.us

It hasn’t been that long since I realized I carry a major fear of vulnerability in love. I’ve been open about other parts of my life—unexpected pregnancy, postpartum depression, even divorce—but when it comes to love, I have yet to learn how to let my guard down completely.

I had a few significant relationships in my life. An older college boy picked me up in his fixed-up Acura when I was still in high school, and every time he waited outside the school gates I felt chosen. Desired. Cool. I soaked up the envious eyes of other girls who hated me, and whom I secretly hated back.

In college I dated a guy who became so jealous and possessive he made me burn my ex-boyfriends’ letters and photos. He picked fights with random guys who looked my way while drinking out in K-town.

When I broke up with him, he came to my house for one final talk. After I told him I was serious, he rolled down the hill by my house—a desperate, theatrical gesture that should have taught me the difference between love and possession.

There were other relationships, yes—but always the same pattern. I waited to be chosen. And if they stopped choosing me, I stopped too—no matter how much I felt inside.

Always chosen, never choosing.

Not because I was too good. Because I was too scared.

The little girl at the school gates learned early: being chosen feels safer than choosing for herself.

Even my marriage of almost twenty years was a response to pregnancy—a responsible decision, not one born of pure love. I said yes to security, to timing, to doing the right thing, to what looked acceptable on the outside to friends and family.

To be fair to my 20-something self, she was too young to fully understand what love is. At the time, that’s what love felt like.

What I thought was surrender was really resignation to circumstance, not love.

It took me forty-something years to realize I have always been afraid of love and what it can bring. Maybe I knew if I fell too hard, I’d risk being consumed and unraveled with no turning back. Maybe I knew just how much my soul desired true love, and the magnitude of that desire scared the hell out of me.

Perhaps I was just too scared to choose, because I was fearful of not being chosen.

I felt safer in attachment, because attachment can be managed. Love cannot.

Now I see how easily attachment masquerades as love. We need attachment for survival and companionship, for daily routines and weekend outings. We become enmeshed and intertwined because it makes life easier—until it stops being easy.

Until I find myself in a place where I contort my body and soul into places that I don’t belong, in a desperate attempt to be chosen, again and again.

It’s shocking to realize, after two decades, that what I practiced wasn’t love. It was attachment disguised as love.

Even as a mother, a functioning adult, I never learned how to be fully vulnerable, how to let myself go in the name of love.

The little girl who was always waiting to be chosen is finally learning how to choose—and risk not being chosen. This feels like the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. And quite frankly, I still don’t know how to step forward even when love finds me.

Perhaps learning to step forward, even while trembling, is my next life lesson. And maybe, it took decades of motherhood and marriage to finally learn the difference between love and attachment.

Are you choosing or waiting to be chosen?

God is asking me to crystallize my experiences onto screen once more, and I'm fighting every instinct to keep my story private, to keep it hidden, to simply "get over" it and move on.

But as someone who is in the thick of finding her footing after a divorce, I can tell you—this process is not something you just get over. It's a continuous unraveling of past choices, mistakes, blessings, and awakenings, like pulling threads from a tapestry to see what patterns remain.

And I believe God put me here, processing externally through my writing, because someone out there is seeking answers like me.

Ever since I was a young girl, words have been how I process my thoughts, my emotions, my inner and external world. As an incessant reader and writer, I see the world through colors, symbols, songs, and metaphors that flow out naturally through language like water finding its way to the sea.

Social media has been a valuable tool, but writing—writing has always been my north star.

It took the ending of my marriage to bring me back to this truth.

We often feel the pressure to show up perfectly polished in front of others. We put on makeup to freshen our flaws, wear armor to avoid vulnerability. I’m a recovering perfectionist and hate asking for help—not sure if it's an eldest daughter thing or an immigrant daughter thing, but it's something I never gave second thought to.

It just was.

Many years ago, I let down my guard by sharing stories of special needs parenting and postpartum depression publicly, which evolved into Mommy Diary. It was a wonderful chapter filled with beautiful memories for myself and my family.

And here I am, entering a new chapter.

Sure, I'm equipped with even more experience, wisdom, and resilience, but I'm also starting over. The woman who believed she had it all figured out is gone.

In her place stands someone rawer, more uncertain, but somehow more real than I've ever been.

My writing here won't come perfectly packaged. I don't pretend to have all the answers. But I will continue to process and share what I can, with hope that my lyrical processing can help someone out there who's also learning to navigate the space between who they were and who they're becoming.

This is me, putting one foot in front of the other, taking baby steps like a toddler into this next chapter—messy, imperfect, and authentically mine.

The rest I’m leaving it up to God.

Blessings on blessings, even on gloomy mornings like today when simply showing up feels like courage enough.

what's on your blank page today?

You believed in fairytales, a happily-ever-after—not because of some Disney film fantasy, but because you knew in your heart that true love exists like oxygen in the air, invisible but essential.

In pursuit of this divine mission, you gave your twenties, thirties, and forties, choosing creation over indulgence, sacrifice over receiving, forgiveness over retribution. You planted seeds in winter soil, believing spring would come.

You believed in the goodness of mankind, the power of prayers over darkness, God's promise in restoration and rejuvenation. You believed that as long as you remained faithful to your heart and youthful dreams not yet realized, goodness would bloom like wildflowers after rain.

What you didn't know is that in this process, you ended up losing your light. Your once-open heart hardened like stone worn smooth by relentless waves, your inner poetry became vengeful words scratched into bark, your peace replaced by the chaos of a storm that never passed.

Slowly, overtime, without warning, your reflection became a stranger's face. You no longer recognized the woman in the mirror, and shame washed over you like tide claiming sand.

The cycle twists into a labyrinth with no exit. You start to believe the scars are your skin, the broken song your only voice. You begin to believe the lies that you are unworthy of true love because you are no longer smiling, no longer singing, no longer the girl who believed in happily-ever-after.

The cycle of guilt, shame, and blame continues as diapers and dishes pile like laundry that never ends, pregnancy tests return positive, and tiny moments of hope and joy become larger than life—flickering candles in an endless winter.

Be grateful for what you have, they say.

This is the reality of marriage, they say.

It's cheaper to stay, they say.

You have to stay for the kids, they say.

Like a pinball you bounce from here to there—diapers pile, dishes stack, soccer sign-ups loom. The urgent drowns out the eternal. The cycle repeats like a broken record, until you realize you have handed over the pinball machine to someone outside of yourself.

Then comes the awakening—not like dawn breaking gently, but like lightning splitting the sky.

You grieve. You process. You relinquish. And slowly, deliberately, you begin gathering pieces of yourself from him, from the institution, from the contract, from the expectations that were never yours to carry.

You remember that the girl who believed in fairytales wasn't naive—she was brave. She knew something true about love that the world tried to convince her was foolish. And perhaps the real happily-ever-after was never about finding someone else to complete your story.

Perhaps it was always about becoming whole enough to write your own ending.

The pinball machine is yours again. Your hands are steady on the controls. And for the first time in years, you're not playing someone else's game—you're the author of your own fairytale.

What would you tell the girl who still believes in fairytales? Tell her: she was right all along.

I've said this before: a woman doesn't just wake up one day and decide to be divorced. It's a process that unfolds in waves over a long period of time—even longer when children are involved.

Finding a divorce attorney (so stressful I just went with my gut), filing papers, paying that first crushing retainer, filling out endless paperwork, gathering and sending financial documents—all of this was just the beginning of a journey I'm still on. All while holding it together for my kids and finding whatever bandwidth I had left for work.

During this chaos, I made two significant changes.

I replaced my talk therapist with a personal trainer and began working out regularly for the first time in my life—three times a week, no excuses. I'd been in and out of therapy since my twenties, so I already knew that drill.

I'd read countless self-help books over the years, some for me, others to understand my ex-husband better. I even bought books that had nothing to do with me, desperate to find answers to questions that were never mine to solve in the first place.

All those hours, all that money—I thought it was wasted. Now I realize it was the cost of coming home to myself.

So I poured back into my physical self, nourishing a body I'd long forgotten through weeks of crying, eating badly, not eating at all, being unable to get out of bed. I lost so much weight during this time I hardly recognized myself in mirrors.

All while showing up for my kids daily, posting to social media, working when I could find the strength.

I didn't expect this cycle to last so long. But it's true what they say—adjusting to life after divorce takes time.

The papers are signed now. Assets divided. Co-parenting schedules established. We're adjusting to a new rhythm, and my children are used to not having both parents at family functions and friend gatherings.

I thought this would be the end of it all, but I'm realizing this is only the beginning of my new life. I survived the emotional and financial turmoil of divorce. Now I'm stepping into something entirely different.

It's taking longer than I expected, especially because I carry no emotional residue from the marriage. When a woman has poured her entire life into marriage and motherhood, it takes time to find her footing—new life, new routine, new labels or the complete lack of them.

And that's okay.

This journey isn't easy, but I have never once regretted my decision. Even through the hardest days of solo parenting, co-parenting miscommunications, and disagreements over finances and schedules—never once have I regretted choosing myself.

With this firm truth, I continue to move forward, not knowing exactly what comes next, but finally learning the gift of stillness.

I see now that the lack of stillness kept me running in circles for so long by overcompensating with productivity, goals and output. When one’s self-worth is tied to another person’s approval, this toxic pattern becomes second nature.

My body is asking to rest, to be still, to just be. And for the first time in my life, I'm learning to love myself through the stillness.

This is what transformation really looks like—not a dramatic revelation, but a quiet coming home.

Finally, I love myself enough to create space for new love.

If you're in your own season of transformation, what does coming home to yourself look like for you?

Contrary to what others may think, divorce doesn't arrive like lightning striking—you don't simply wake up one morning, struck by a single isolated event, and declare "today is the day." Instead, a monumental decision like divorce comes first as small intuitive nudges—a quiet voice deep within your soul whispering, "this isn't where you belong forever."

Often we busy ourselves with outside circumstances to silence that voice: work, children, making more babies. None of this is conscious, of course. It's simply our human way of surviving, of coping, of calling a different outcome into being. Because at the end of the day, who doesn't want to be the princess of a happily-ever-after love story?

But my dear—this journey isn't about being a pretty princess draped in her beautiful white wedding dress. This journey is about embracing the queen that you are. And a queen doesn't arrive wearing virginal white.

Instead, she comes wrapped in flowing golden silk that catches the light with every breath, the fabric moving like molten gold around her form. Her gown trails behind her in waves of luminous gold, adorned with precious jewels of every color that tell the story of every lesson learned, every tear transformed into wisdom.

She wears a crown that cannot be removed by any man or woman, carrying a staff forged from strength, courage, and the fierce desire to love and choose herself first and foremost. She radiates with the inner fire of a goddess who has walked through darkness and emerged illuminated.

I'm not here to advocate for divorce—not at all. I still believe in the sacred vow of marriage and family. I never wanted divorce. I, too, wanted a fairytale ending.

Unfortunately, in today's society with so many distractions and challenges, divorce is the reality of half of all marriages—millions of women around the world.

What I'm here for, is truth.

And sometimes the journey of walking in truth requires the holy act of burning away all that no longer serves your highest good.

If you are reading this because of those small intuitive nudges you have been silencing for days, months, or even years—welcome.

I'm here to remind you that this is only the beginning of the most transformational journey of your life. Painful at times, yes—but beautiful and holy in its calling to become the queen you were always meant to be.

Step forward and take your throne baby girl.

What would it mean for you to stop silencing that small voice within, and instead, lean in close enough to hear what sacred truth it's been trying to whisper?