You leveled up. The relationship didn’t. That’s not failure — that’s growth colliding with stagnation.

Chi represents life energy — the quiet force that moves through us, strengthens us, awakens us.
For much of my life, my chi was dimmed. I had lost connection to myself, my strength, and my inner voice.

What awaited me after the Camino was not peace.
It was the reckoning I had postponed for years.

Loving myself, though — that was harder. My sense of self had been deeply damaged. So there I was: away from home, sad, confused, and alone. All the ingredients for a mental health crisis.

At the crossroads. Learning to trust myself again. Reclaiming intuition, healing after emotional abuse, and finding peace in self-compassion.

The silent trauma of long marriages. This is the double wound of long marriages that end in betrayal: the loss of the partner, and the loss of faith in your own discernment. The trauma lingers and lingers. Immediately after my separation I was a mental mess — my brain was soup, I couldn’t hold a coherent thought, and I couldn’t stop crying.