an intimate letter, to myself and you.

xo

The fires have been put out.

The smoke has started to clear, though it still hangs in the air long enough to remind me where it came from. The residue settles into places I don’t expect, revealing itself only when I think it’s finally gone.

The sunlight feels different after months of smoke.

At first, the glimmers become your focus. You cling to them because they remind you life is finding its way back.

Then the light keeps moving. It reaches the places it couldn’t before. The places the smoke had hidden while your attention belonged somewhere else.

As the haze lifts, you begin to see what the fire actually touched.

It wasn’t one event. It rarely is. It was the accumulation.

Family crisis, and the financial demands that arrive alongside it.

Relationships that shifted beneath my feet.

Disappointments I didn’t know how to make sense of.

The kind of season where every time I thought I could exhale, life asked me to hold my breath a little longer.

It wasn’t until the smoke began to clear that I could finally see what the fire had left behind.

Looking back, I don’t think there was a single moment. No day where I woke up and realized something had changed. It happened so gradually that I kept finding new explanations.

I was tired. It had been a hard year. Things would settle soon. Once this was over, I’d feel like myself again.

The story kept changing, but the ending stayed the same. Tomorrow would be easier.

Maybe that’s what happens when you’re carrying too much for too long. You stop checking in with yourself because there’s always something asking for your attention first. The people you love. The responsibilities that don’t care whether you have the capacity to carry them.

There was one word that kept finding its way back. I’d catch it for a second, then immediately replace it with something else.

Burnout. Grief. Stress. Exhaustion. A hard season.

Anything but that.

Growing up, it was never just a word. It carried history. It carried fear. It carried people I loved.

Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself it belonged to someone else.

Someone who couldn’t get out of bed.

Someone who had stopped trying.

Someone who had given up.

Not the woman who kept showing up. The one people called resilient. The one who always figured it out. The one who could carry everyone else, but never seemed to need carrying herself.

If I’m honest, part of me believed it happened to people who had stopped fighting. I was still fighting. No one ever told me those two things could exist at the same time.

So I reached for words that felt easier to hold. Words that sounded temporary. Words that didn’t ask me to question who I believed myself to be.

Because if I could explain it away, I never had to ask the question I was most afraid of answering.

Mine felt layered.

Grief woven into exhaustion.

Disappointment tangled with hope.

Moments of genuine joy existing beside a heaviness I couldn’t quite explain.

Looking for the light wasn’t denial. It was survival.

When the air is thick with smoke, you don’t stand still trying to understand the fire. You keep moving. Toward the light. Toward the people. Toward whatever reminds you there is still something worth protecting.

Then the smoke begins to lift. The light stretches across the landscape, revealing what it had been holding back.

The trees that won’t bloom again. The ground forever changed by heat. The places that can be rebuilt. The places that cannot.

There is a different kind of grief in that. Not the grief of living through the fire. The grief of finally seeing what it left behind.

It wasn’t the fire that stayed with me. It was the residue. The heaviness that lingered long after the flames were gone.

It settled into ordinary moments. The space between waking up and getting out of bed. The pause before answering a text. The extra effort it took to reach for a hopeful thought.

It wasn’t the absence of hope. Hope was always there. It just felt further away.

Therapy has a way of handing you words you weren’t looking for. Not all at once. Sometimes months after you first hear them. Sometimes long after you’ve stopped resisting them.

One of those words was about being held.

Beneath all that independence was a longing I’d never learned how to ask for. To be held. To be supported. To let someone carry me for a little while.

For most of my life, I didn’t know what that felt like. Survival teaches you many things. How to adapt. How to endure. How to carry more than you should.

Then I met my husband. He introduced me to a kind of love I didn’t know existed. One where being held wasn’t something you had to earn. One where support wasn’t transactional. One where I could finally put something down without feeling like I had failed.

What I didn’t realize was that I had only learned to receive that love from him. Everywhere else, I was still the capable one. Still the resilient one. Still the woman who needed very little.

And I think that’s part of how the heaviness took root without me naming it. When you’ve taught everyone around you that you don’t need anything, there’s no one positioned to notice when you start to sink. The support that might have caught it earlier had nowhere to land.

I had spent years teaching the people around me that I didn’t need anything. It wasn’t their fault. When you spend enough years convincing people you’re okay, they eventually believe you.

The hardest part is realizing that after years of teaching people you don’t need anything, they don’t know what it looks like when you finally do.

Maybe that’s what this season revealed. Not that I needed people. That I always had.

I’ve walked this landscape more times than I can count. Each pass revealing something I couldn’t see the one before.

Maybe that’s what healing is. Not arriving at an answer. Having the courage to keep looking.

For months, I searched for every explanation except the one that frightened me most. Not because one word could ever carry everything this season has been. It can’t.

Not the family crisis. Not the financial weight that followed. Not the disappointments. Not the love that carried me. Not the friendships I found myself longing for. Not the version of myself I’m still getting to know.

One word could never hold an entire landscape. But sometimes one word is enough to stop running.

Depression.

Maybe it isn’t a dirty word after all. Maybe it was simply the hardest word for me to believe could ever belong to my story.

The fire eventually stopped burning. The smoke continues to clear. The landscape doesn’t look the way it did before. Neither do I.

Forests don’t spend their lives trying to become what they were before the fire. They learn how to grow from what remains.

To anyone who’s been searching for another word… I see you.

With love,

Jaz

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