The Clearing

For when you're still learning to believe it.

I spent most of my life being told I'm wrong. Not wrong about facts or decisions, just wrong about myself. The way my voice sounds. The way I look at someone. The words I choose. Little things, said often enough, by enough people, that they stopped feeling like opinions and started feeling like truth.

Some of that still happens now. This isn't a story with a tidy ending where I found a meadow and everything got better. I'm still here, still hearing it sometimes, still having to decide what to do with it.

What I needed wasn't a list of positive affirmations I didn't believe. I've seen those. They're everywhere. And they always come with the same promise: say these things and it'll get better. Sometimes it doesn't get better.

I needed a place to practice wanting to believe them, because that's where I had to actually start. Just the act of reading something kind about yourself and letting yourself want it to be true. Not on a flowery website telling you why it matters. Just words, in my pocket, on my phone, whenever I wanted them.

The Clearing is that place. Some days I read them and nothing shifts. Some days I read one or two and something finally clicks. Yeah, I should feel this way. I deserve to feel this way about myself. It can be subtle, and it takes time. But over time, it becomes believable.

I put these here because I struggle with believing them too. That's the truth.