During breathwork today, I was told to imagine myself fighting the darkness.
Not hunting it.
Not destroying it.
But forcing it into the light.
I resisted at first.
For years, I have believed the darkness was my refuge.
In meditation, in dreams, since childhood — I have seen a cave.
The soil inside it is black-brown and soft, almost sandy. Clean. Cool.
When I face outward, there is an ocean. Cold. Comforting. Endless.
The cave sits along a beach.
I always believed it was a place to heal.
A place to regenerate.
A place to gather myself before returning to the world.
Because the world is heavy.
Because carrying ancestral memory is heavy.
Because being the child of parents who were never truly there is heavy.
Because loving people who do not know how to love back is heavy.
So I would go into the cave. Into the dark. To prepare myself to go back out.
But today was different.
Today, I was told to bring light into the cave.
When I stepped deeper inside, I saw her.
A child.
At first, I thought she was a little girl I once worked with — the same messy haircut, the same anxious energy. But when I knelt down, I realized she was me.
She was pulling at my heart.
Clawing it.
Squeezing it so tightly I could barely breathe.
She was not trying to hurt me. She was desperate.
She needed me to understand.
She is terrified of being too much.
Terrified of losing people.
Terrified that her need for affection makes her unlovable.
She thinks she ruins things.
She thinks if she wants too much, everyone will leave.
She has spent her whole life begging to be seen — first by narcissistic parents who were never fully present, and then by lovers and friends who mirror that absence in different forms.
Not always cruel.
Sometimes avoidant.
Sometimes “kind,” but distant.
Sometimes people who take and take, and then call her the user for wanting reciprocity.
And the child believes it.
She thinks she is the problem.
She pulls at my heart because she wants someone to finally say:
“I see you. You are not too much.”
So I sat down in the cave.
I took her hand off my heart.
I placed her on my lap and turned her toward the ocean.
I pressed the heart back into her chest.
“Your heart is my heart,” I told her.
“You are safe. You are loved. You do not have to prove anything anymore.”
“You do not have to scream to be heard.”
“You do not have to bleed to be chosen.”
“You do not have to give endlessly to deserve warmth.”
And something shifted.
She stopped crying.
For the first time in what feels like lifetimes — she calmed. Her tears stopped.
I cradled and hummed with the little one in my arms.
Here is what I understood in that cave:
I have been returning to the darkness not just to heal —
but to recharge so I could go back out and give again.
To people who do not show up the way I show up.
To people who accept devotion but resist intimacy.
To people who project their shame onto me and call it my flaw.
To people who say I am “using” them because I ask for care in return.
That cycle ends here.
Kindness is not a debt.
Generosity is not an invitation for extraction.
Reciprocity is not selfish.
If you continuously show me that you do not value me, I will believe you.
Not because I am worthless.
But because I am finally listening.
I deserve respect.
I deserve tenderness.
I deserve to receive the same presence I offer.
And the little girl in the cave deserves to stop begging.
This is not vengeance.
This is not hardness.
This is light entering the cave.
If this calls you out — good.
If this holds you — good.
If this makes you uncomfortable — sit with it.
But I will not go back into the darkness to prepare myself for more depletion.
I will go into the cave to rest.
And when I step back into the ocean air, I will step out whole.
Not hungry.
