0
Share on bsky
For a long time, I thought intimacy was something you found—through a person, a relationship, or a shared history that made something feel special and rare.
I believed connection lived somewhere outside me, waiting to be discovered, earned, or secured.
What I’ve come to understand is quieter than that. More grounding.
When you live from your heart, you protect its sacredness—not by closing it, but by refusing to let it be rushed, misused, or diminished. Connection shifts from pursuit to recognition. It’s no longer about intensity, chemistry, or guarantees. It’s about presence—two people meeting without armor, even briefly. This kind of intimacy doesn’t need to last to be real. It can happen in friendship, in shared ease, in small moments of mutual seeing.
Earlier today, I learned that a family member loves “Rhiannon” as much as I do. In that instant, I felt a quiet kindredness. No effort, no urgency—just a shared sense of being seen. Nothing needed to happen next for that moment to matter. The connection was already complete.
For a long time, though, I wasn’t living from my heart at all.
When my best friend died when I was 11, something fundamental shifted. What I lost wasn’t just her—it was access to a part of myself. She represented my inner child: playfulness, joy, openness, a feeling of being alive. When she died, that access collapsed, leaving a void I didn’t have words for. I only knew that something essential felt unreachable.
For years after, I lived with a dull loneliness I learned how to distract from. Certain relationships gave me brief glimpses of something more—excitement, hope, aliveness. Not because they created it, but because they temporarily opened a doorway back into me. When that doorway closed, the ache returned.
What I’m learning now is how to stay with the full range of what lives inside me—joy, grief, longing, curiosity—without needing someone else to hold the door open.
Through body-based therapy, what had been inaccessible for years began to soften. Warmth returned. Playfulness. A sense of being at home in myself. My heart wasn’t reopening because of another person—my nervous system was becoming capable of staying present with more of what I felt.
At first, I misunderstood that shift. I thought it was about the person in my life at the time. It wasn’t. They didn’t create my heart or unlock something missing. They arrived during a moment when I was finally able to stay with what had always been there, even when it felt vulnerable.
When that relationship ended, the familiar fear arose—but this time, I could feel that my heart was still here. What had changed wasn’t my capacity for connection. It was my understanding of where it lived.
Not long after, I had a dream where I heard myself say: I just want to feel good in my own skin. Nothing dramatic—just a quiet truth surfacing. As I sat with it, I realized I wasn’t grieving a current loss. I was grieving a younger version of myself—the part that had learned to live without ease for a long time. I was grieving living in my own skin, fully embodied in my own heart.
My heart feels different now. Not lighter, exactly—but fuller. It holds more than one feeling at a time. Joy doesn’t erase grief. Curiosity exists alongside longing. Living from the heart doesn’t mean letting everyone in. It means staying present with what’s here.
I notice sensations in my chest the way I once scanned my thoughts. Openness feels warm and expansive. Yearning has a subtle itchiness to it—alive, reaching. Tightness signals anxiety or fear. When I bring my awareness there, images sometimes arise: memories, or just an image of me as a child. I don’t try to interpret them. I stay present. When I do, the sensations soften and organize on their own, as if my body is settling into itself.
I’m not looking for my heart in another person anymore. When something feels tender or uncertain, I go inside and ask what my heart needs from me. What I find there is my little girl—the part of me that loves to sing, play, create, be silly, use her imagination. She’s drawn to novelty and simplicity. She holds wonder and innocence. My responsibility now is to listen to her and protect what she needs to stay alive.
And I’m starting to understand something even deeper: the value was never in whether the connection stayed or was returned. The value was in the fact that I could feel it at all. There is something alive in being the one who loves, regardless of outcome. Not because it leads somewhere, but because it means you’re here—open, present, capable of connection.
That, in itself, is not something to diminish or regret.
Living from the heart doesn’t guarantee connection. What it guarantees is integrity. And more than that, it reminds me that even when love isn’t returned, it was never wasted.
It was lived.
I’m not trying to return to a place I lost. I’m learning how to stay with a place that was always mine.
~
Read 2 comments and reply