Reunion With the Woman Who Was Always There.

Reunion With the Woman Who Was Always There.

Has all my writing really been about loss?

Or am I now beginning to see with open eyes and wonder whether it has actually been about reunion? Reunion with the woman who was writing underneath all the uniforms all along. The scribe. The storyteller. The one who can see beyond and through the glitter and noise.

No one guided me through the thicket.

I want to say that plainly, without performance and without self-pity, because it is simply true and it has taken me longer than I care to admit to say it without softening it into something more palatable. There was no one standing at the entrance with a lantern. No elder who had walked this particular darkness before me and turned back to say, here, take my hand, I know this part, I know where the ground holds. I went in alone. I found my way through alone. And the only light I had was the one I made myself, word by word, page by page, in the long hours before anyone else was awake.

The writing was never the destination. I understand that now. It was the torch.

I was dismantled early. Not metaphorically. In the particular, embodied way that leaves its imprint on the nervous system long after the circumstances have changed — the way a house remembers water damage in its walls even after the roof has been repaired. A childhood that was not safe. A body that was not protected. Violations that arrived before I had the language to name them or the power to refuse them. A mother whose love had conditions so elaborate and shifting they could never quite be met—a stepfather whose idea of correction was physical. The message, delivered consistently and in multiple languages, was that I was not quite worth keeping. Not quite worth the full measure of care.

I believed it for longer than I should have. Most people would have.

But something else was also happening beneath the damage. Quietly, stubbornly, without instruction or encouragement, I was teaching myself. Everything I needed and was not given, I eventually found a way to find. Everything I could not afford to learn freely, I paid for, and the prices were not always monetary — they were paid in years, in wrong turns, in the particular tax of having to become your own authority in a world that prefers you to remain dependent. I taught myself how to think. How to read a room, a person, a situation beneath its surface. How to heal, not once but repeatedly, across losses that would have finished people with less practice at surviving. I became a therapist because I had needed one and learned to be my own. I became a yoga teacher because the body had been a site of harm, and I needed to learn it as a site of intelligence. I became a mother and poured into that child everything I had wished for and been denied.

Learn, then teach it. Heal, then help another heal.

That was the rhythm I lived inside for decades. And I do not regret it. The pay-forward was not performance — it came from somewhere genuine, from the part of me that decided early, without words, that if I could not have been spared, then at least I could spare others. Every person I sat with, every space I held, every time I turned my hard-won lantern around so someone else could see the next step — that was real. That mattered. That was the truest thing about me.

But here is what I did not see for a very long time.

I was always the guide. I was never guided. I moved through the thicket, stood at the edge, waved others through, then turned around and walked back in to find the next person. Over and over. The wound became the curriculum. The scar became the qualification. And somewhere inside that endless rhythm of giving away what I had barely finished receiving, I forgot — or perhaps never fully learned — how to stop and let the lantern illuminate my own face.

The one person I never fully healed for, never fully taught, never fully sat beside with the patience and the long unhurried attention I gave to everyone else, was myself.

The losses, the legal battles, the medical reckoning, the horses whose breath was the closest thing I knew to sanctuary and who had to leave — those chapters are real, and they are mine. But they are not the oldest story. They are the latest expressions of something that began long before any of that, in a house where love had to be earned, and safety was conditional, and the small girl inside it learned, with extraordinary efficiency, to need very little for herself while becoming indispensable to everyone around her.

She was magnificent, that girl. I can see that now, in a way I could not when I was still inside the performance of survival. She was ingenious. She was fierce. She kept her heart open through things that close most hearts permanently, and she did it not because she was naive but because she made a decision, deep and wordless, that what had been done to her would not become what she passed on. She refused to become the wound. She became the antidote to it instead.

But she was exhausted. She has always been exhausted. And no one ever thought to ask.

The scribe was always there underneath the uniforms. The therapist uniform, the teacher uniform, the healer, the mother, the rebuilder, the seeker moving through spiritual communities that promised transformation and mostly delivered more sophisticated language for the same hunger. She was writing underneath all of it, in the margins, in the early hours, processing in prose what she could not yet speak aloud, making sense of a life that kept demanding more than it gave and somehow finding, in the making of sentences, the only form of receipt she ever got.

The writing was the guide I never had.

And perhaps that is the reunion I have been writing toward all along. Not a return to some earlier, unspoiled version of myself. There is no such version. The self I am returning to has been forged in everything that happened, shaped by every fire she walked through alone, made precise by the particular kind of seeing that only develops in someone who has had to learn everything herself, who paid extraordinary prices for ordinary dignities, who gave and gave and gave and is only now, in the long exhale of having finally stopped performing, learning to receive.

She is not impressive in the way the world measures impressiveness. She has no interest in being impressive anymore. She wants boots without pointy heels, dust beneath them, and no apology for it. She wants mountains at sunrise, tea before anyone else stirs, and the silence that does not need filling. She wants to write what is true and let that be enough.

She was always the one. She just kept handing the lantern to everyone else before she remembered to keep a little of the light for herself.

She is keeping it now.

And this is what keeping it looks like.

Throughout my life, people, including those I once thought I could trust, told me, in one way or another, that I could not be controlled—much to their disdain.

Because I don’t beg to be liked, I don’t beg to be loved. Never have. Never will.

I will cut ties even when it hurts me. I will cry. I will grieve. I will purge. But charades are not for me. I am either in or I am out. Not rude. Not cruel. I simply close access.

I stand with eyes that see the twisting of words to suit narratives, the subtle manipulations used to overpower, the constructed stories, the poison pens, the systems that try to rewrite what actually happened. They can construct all they like. They will not touch what I see or what I know.

I have always been willing to pay the price to retain my soul, my freedom, my heart. Because those things are valuable to me. Shallow shells have never captured me. I wasn’t afraid to confront. I wasn’t afraid to face things head-on. I wasn’t afraid to call out the shadows, the lies, the facades. The games. The manipulation. The using. I addressed what others preferred to pretend away.

I never belonged, and now I am glad I didn’t because I saved myself from so many emotional lobotomies.

Yes, my heart was broken. But sometimes that is the price you pay to get your soul back.

Yes, I carried grief. Loss. Longing. Trauma. Fear. Yes, I was shattered and shaken. Yes, I was rejected for it. Outcast for it. Had doors closed in my face. I was ignored and had shame projected onto me because I dared to challenge their words, their behaviour, their carefully maintained fakeness.

Yes, I have been called crazy.

But sometimes it takes crazy to stand against what consensus thinking has normalised. I am glad I wasn’t afraid to walk alone. Glad I couldn’t be bought. Glad I didn’t sell out.

Thank you, Pluto. You showed me. My Capricorn Sun and Aries Moon, you saved me.

And now I am closing doors. Now I am walking free.

Money has never been able to buy my silence. I would rather leave than stay trapped in cages built for belonging among empty souls living beneath masks and crowns. Groups. Likes. Approval. I couldn’t care less. Freedom was always the highest crown I could wear.

Being alone teaches you there is a light and a power within you that does not go out.

I’m nobody’s puppet.

My heart stayed open, but it also learned discernment. Not everyone who asked for my loyalty deserved it. Not everyone who received my support honoured it.

I am not afraid to die. But I will not sell my soul to live.

I’m not selling nice.

And let them gossip. Because they could never be me, never walk the ground I have walked, and still hold integrity.

She is keeping the light now.

And she is not giving it away again.

Delahrose Roobie Myer 🤍🦉