From Steve De’lano Garcia:
“There is a hush that falls over the soul when it meets someone who has walked through a night so deep that the stars had to be remembered from within. I have learned that unless a person has endured the cracking of their own certainty, the undoing of their own masks, they will try to meet you with a surface heart. They will search for you with untested eyes, and they will call that search love. But love that has not been tempered by sorrow is still a stranger to the depths. It cannot hold silence without filling it with noise, and it cannot see the holy pattern running through an ordinary day. When you have wept for what could not be saved and still chosen to live, you become a language that only the trembling can read.
In the long corridors of pain, I found out that there is a sacred education no book can teach. There, in the classrooms of loss and longing, the soul learns how to kneel in wonder, how to breathe in a room that seems to have no air. There, the ego burns like a paper lantern, and you stand in the ash of your old name. This is not a pretty fire. It is raw, it is messy, and it refuses to let you pretend. You drop your cleverness. You drop your plans. And when the flames let you go, you realize you are not empty at all. You are wide. You are weathered. You are ready to hold real life when it arrives like a storm dressed as a blessing.
People who have not sat with their sorrow try to touch you with tidy hands. They want your light without admission to the furnace where it was made. They want your wisdom without hearing the bare, cracked notes of its first song. But the soul does not open for those who hurry it. The soul opens for those who know the taste of waiting, who have sipped from cups that did not quench, who have watched mornings arrive without magic and still rose from bed. The soul trusts the ones who can sit beside your ache without rushing to fix it, who can witness your trembling without translating it into fear.
You will recognize them. They will not be frightened by your depth. They will not punish you for your sensitivity. In their presence, your tenderness will not be a burden to carry but a room to live in. They will hear the small bird in your chest and know it has traveled through winters. They will not ask it to sing on command. Instead, they will bring seeds, water, and patient hands. In their gaze, your edges will soften, not because you have made yourself smaller, but because you are finally safe enough to be as large as you truly are.
There is a holy wonder that only the broken-hearted can bear. It does not arrive in flashes of spectacle. It comes as the quiet revelation that everything you survived has carved a sanctuary in you. In that sanctuary the simple becomes sacred. A cup of tea held with both hands becomes a vow. The rain on a wobbly window becomes a hymn. The way someone leans in to listen becomes communion. The way a friend says your name the second time to make sure you felt seen becomes a blessing dressed in familiar clothes.
If someone has never been initiated by the abyss, they may call this poetry and walk past it. They may be charmed by your glow and miss the gravity that keeps you from drifting away. They may label your discernment as difficulty, your boundaries as distance, your quiet as a wall. But those who have been undone and remade will bow, gently, before the mystery of you. They will understand that your light was not inherited; it was forged. They will understand that you do not love like a pastime; you love like a vow whispered through smoke and saltwater.
So do not apologize for the temples your pain has built. Do not dim the lantern you carry to soothe the eyes of those who refuse to learn the dark. Do not barter the wisdom in your bones for company that cannot tell your worth. Your soul is not a marketplace. It is a meadow ringed with ancient trees, and only those who can sit among them without tearing the roots should be allowed to walk your path. Let the unready bless you with their leaving. Let the right ones find you by the glow of your honesty.
Choose people who treat you as sacred, not special. Special can be replaced. Sacred is recognized, reverenced, and carefully held. Choose the ones who ask how your spirit is sleeping, not just how your day has been. Choose the ones who can look into your storms and still believe in your sunrise. Choose those who understand that apology is a form of prayer and repair is a form of love. With them, your heart will remember what ease feels like. With them, your laughter will sound like something you did not know you had been saving.
I say this as a woman who has walked to the edge and returned with new eyes. I have been the breaking and the mending, the wandering and the homecoming. I have learned to trust the river that runs beneath the river, and I have learned to bless the hands that held me when I thought I was not holdable. If you are reading this with tears near your skin, know that you are not too much. You are a cathedral of fierce tenderness, and your echo belongs to the mountains. Those who have met their own night will hear it and answer with lanterns.
May you be met by souls who have been baptized by their own shadows and risen with water still shining on their lashes. May you be loved by eyes that have learned to see in the dark. May your life be encircled by people who understand the cost of your light and honor the miracle of your staying. And when such people find you, may you feel the old ache loosen its grip, may you exhale the years of pretending, and may you finally rest in the simple, holy truth: you were never hard to love, you were only waiting to be recognized.”
