I remember lying in bed next to someone I loved & feeling it. That quiet, persistent wrongness I couldn't explain or argue away. He hadn't done anything wrong. He was good to me. I loved him, genuinely. & still, somewhere underneath all of it, a feeling kept surfacing that I kept trying to push back down. This can't be my forever.
I didn't trust that feeling for a long time. Because if nothing was wrong, how could something be wrong? I told myself I was being dramatic. That every relationship feels like this eventually. That I'd feel differently tomorrow. I got very good at explaining the feeling away. Until I couldn't anymore.
What I didn't understand then was that I wasn't just ignoring a feeling about a relationship. I was ignoring myself. That quiet knowing, the one I kept shushing, was my body trying to tell me something true. & every time I dismissed it, I drifted a little further from the part of me that actually knew things.
I think this happens to so many women, & I think it happens so gradually that we don't notice until we're already far from shore. Relationships, especially early ones, are supposed to feel good. & they do. But somewhere along the way, without meaning to, we start reorganizing ourselves around another person. Will they like this? Does this bother them? What do they need right now? We become very fluent in another person's world & slowly, quietly, lose the language of our own.
We shrink. Not dramatically, not all at once. Just a little here, a little there. We stop wearing the thing we love because they made a face once. We laugh off the comment that actually stung. We say yes when we mean no & convince ourselves that's just what love looks like. We become the best version of a girlfriend we can possibly be, & somewhere in there, we forget how to be our own best friend.
The hardest version of this, the one I lived, is when the relationship isn't even bad. There's no villain. No obvious reason to leave. Just this low, persistent feeling, like a dark cloud that follows you everywhere. Day to day you can explain it away. You can point to something small & say that's why I feel off today. But if you're honest with yourself, the cloud was always there. It just moved with you.
When that relationship ended I thought the cloud would lift. & in some ways it did. But what I didn't expect was the silence on the other side of it. The transitional season where there was no one to look at & ask where do I go now? Just me, & my body, & all the feelings I'd been explaining away for years, finally asking to be felt.
Transitional periods are their own kind of hard. Because you can't think your way through them. You can't plan or organize or optimize your way to the other side. You just have to feel the emotions through your body & move, slowly, imperfectly, through them. For two years after that relationship ended, I was in that movement. Slowly finding my footing. Slowly remembering what it felt like to belong to myself.
Spring 2024 was when something shifted. I'd been doing pilates, breathwork, the quiet daily practice of coming back into my body. & one day I noticed something. I was drawn to the color pink again. Not in a small way. In a way that felt like reclaiming something. I started bringing it into my room, my life, my wardrobe. & I remember thinking, oh. she's coming back.
That sounds like such a small thing. A color. But it wasn't small at all. It was the first signal my body sent me that my love was returning. Not love for someone else, but love for myself. The softness I'd packed away to be someone's person was unpacking itself. I was becoming my own person again.
That relationship, the one where I lay in bed knowing something was off & couldn't trust myself enough to believe it, is the one that led me here. To this brand. To the workout routine I now can't imagine living without. To breathwork & somatic healing & the deep understanding that my body was never the problem. It was the messenger I kept ignoring.
If you're in the middle of that drift right now, shrinking, explaining, convincing yourself the cloud is just weather, I want to tell you something I needed to hear. The feeling is real. You don't have to be able to explain it or justify it or make it make sense to someone else. Your body knows things your mind hasn't caught up to yet. & the way back to yourself isn't through thinking harder. It's through listening more.
You've always known the way home. You just got a little separated from the part of you that remembers.
If you want a gentle place to start, Remembrance is a free guide & a quiet return to yourself. & if you want to go deeper, The Soft Landing is a 7-day return for the woman who is tired of pushing her way through the hard moments & ready to actually come home to her body.
Stay close,
Jess