In bloom

Blooming

There is a kind of pain that doesn’t feel personal at first.

It sits deeper than memory.

A pattern, a reflex, a way of turning away from myself

before I even know I’m doing it.

It’s an old imprint.

A seed carried forward,

pressed into this lifetime

long before I had words for shame.

For a long time, I believed the seed itself was the problem.

That if I could uproot it, remove it, heal it enough,

I would finally be free.

But seeds don’t choose how they grow.

They respond to the ground that holds them.

Shame isn’t what blooms.

Shame is the soil.

And soil can change.

What if healing isn’t about erasing what was planted,

but about letting myself grow anyway?

To bloom is not passive.

It asks me to move,

to risk expression,

to stop identifying with what buried me

and begin living as what is emerging.

I am not the seed anymore.

I am what the seed became.

And yes, there is fear here—

that opening will only repeat the past,

that growth will somehow recreate the same wound

in a different shape.

But a flower does not return to being a seed.

It becomes the place where new life is formed.

So the cycle does not repeat.

It continues differently.

From here, creation feels less like effort

and more like participation.

Something moves through me,

not to correct what was,

but to reclaim what is.

This is how I begin again—