When you emerge from a period of transformation, what remains is a gentle sense of gratitude and acceptance. You begin not only to see the beauty in your becoming - you start to feel it. That is how you know. It's like pausing briefly to look back, eyes misted, at all that once was - before lowering your gaze again, only for it to be caught by a quiet, knowing smile - because you feel a little wiser, adorned with a little more meaning.
When you've done the work - sat with discomfort, and integrated the facets of yourself you once abandoned, deliberately suppressed, or feared - you become who you were always meant to be. What once terrified you becomes a hollow echo, because there is little to fear when you are no longer hiding from yourself. You're just learning to listen, to feel, and to love yourself again - as you were always meant to - a brilliant, singular creation.
For self-love is not loud - it carries the quiet dignity of remembering that you are inherently good, regardless of the choices that live in your past. It is forgiving yourself for what you didn't yet comprehend, and for the versions of you that you weren't quite ready to embody - the ones who lived just beneath the surface, but never found their way. It is choosing not just to love yourself, but to like yourself anyway. To love wholeheartedly - not with reckless self-erasure, because martyrdom incurs a spiritual debt which must be balanced - but with deep reverence for what is true within you, no matter the form it takes.
And when you do, something subtle and extraordinary happens. You feel the shift - and with it, the doors of alignment begin to open.
Beautiful. Subtle. Profound.
"Not with reckless self-erasure" - I have this square rock in my mind....it could tumble [and potentially] break apart.
OR it could let the water wash over it, time and time again, until there are no sharp edges left