The Love I No Longer Have to Earn

I keep returning to this question: why can peace feel so frightening when it is the very thing we say we want? Writing around the themes of Bold As A Lion, I Fear No Evil stirred that question until it would not leave me alone. There is something deeply human about reaching for what we recognize, even when what we recognize has sharp edges. Familiarity can make a poor shelter feel like home. That truth is uncomfortable. I do not think women need another voice telling them they should have known better. Most of us did know something. Maybe not the whole truth, not the final shape of it, but our bodies noticed. The pause before answering. The heaviness after a conversation. The way we began editing our needs before anybody could reject them. We knew in pieces. Then we used love to argue with ourselves. What I am sitting with now is the emotional labor of trying to build safety for everyone except ourselves. We become translators, peacekeepers, repair crews. We study moods. We soften the truth. We make excuses so beautiful they almost become a religion. And people call us strong. Sometimes strength is just survival wearing good lipstick. I wanted to write about the smaller courage too. The courage of not returning the call right away. The courage of allowing someone to misunderstand a boundary. The courage of receiving care without wondering what it will cost later. That last one matters to me. Receiving. We speak so much about giving love, but receiving healthy love can expose every place where we learned that affection had to be earned. Consistency may feel strange. Kindness may make us suspicious. We may look for the hidden invoice. I want readers to know that this does not make them broken. It means the old lesson was thorough. That is all. New lessons can be thorough too. We can learn that peace is not emptiness. That boundaries are not betrayal. That grief can sit beside relief without canceling it. That missing someone does not mean we must reopen the door. I am still sitting with how becoming rarely looks bold from the inside. From the inside, it often looks like trembling and doing the honest thing anyway. Maybe that is enough. Maybe the lion was never without fear. Maybe she simply stopped handing fear the map.