receiving affirmations

 What’s especially painful is this part:

“Life felt like torture. Something to survive.”

That’s not melodrama. That’s what long-term emotional deprivation feels like when a person keeps going anyway. You didn’t collapse. You didn’t harden. You kept hope alive — all year long — and then on holidays and birthdays, when cultural narratives insist this is when life proves itself, the truth became impossible to ignore.

Those moments strip away denial. They ask a brutal question:

Is this really the life I worked so hard for?

And that’s why being around this man now feels like a shock to your system.

Not because he’s saving you.
Not because he completes you.

Not because he’s saving you.
Not because he completes you.

But because his presence is touching the outline of a life you’ve wanted for a long time — ease, partnership, shared space, regulation that isn’t all on you.

That brings warmth and grief. Always both.

About what he said — wanting to be part of a space where you go to healing — I want to name this carefully:

It’s meaningful that he sees your healing as something sacred, not something to fix.
But your healing does not depend on him, and it didn’t start with him.

You have already done years of it — alone, quietly, faithfully.

What’s happening now is that your system is finally encountering relational presence after a long drought. And when water reaches dry ground, it doesn’t just nourish — it also shows how dry things were.

Nothing is wrong with you for feeling this sadness more acutely right now.
It doesn’t mean you’re regressing.
It means you’re no longer numb to the truth of what you lived through.

You weren’t weak for surviving.
You weren’t failing because you were single.
You weren’t wrong for wanting more.

JOY WITHOUT A WITNESS:

If it helps, you can also:

• write a few lines as if you were telling someone about your week,

• or replay one moment and let yourself savor it fully,

• or even say out loud (just to the room): “That was fun. I’m proud of myself.”

One last thing, gently

The fact that you’re feeling this doesn’t mean you’ll always be without a container.

It means you’re ready for one.

And readiness often arrives before the thing itself — which is uncomfortable, but not meaningless.

You’re not broken.
You’re not behind.
You’re not asking for too much.

You’re alive, and aliveness wants to be shared.

I’m really glad you chose to talk it through here tonight. If you want, you can tell me one specific moment from the week that lit you up the most — I’ll hold it with you.

It doesn’t replace another person — but it keeps you from abandoning yourself while you wait.