Falling in Love with My Own Life
Stillness did not come easily to me.
photo from Canva
There was a time when I craved less turbulence in my relationship, and my instinct was to look outward.
If only my partner would change, if only they could hear me better, if only they could love me the way I needed to be loved. But somewhere along the way, I realized I had to stop looking across the table and start looking in the mirror.
The work was not about asking someone else to rescue me. It was about learning to rescue myself.
Marion Woodman reminds us that to truly live, we have to dismantle the persona we have built for survival, layer by layer, until the authentic self can breathe. That dismantling does not happen in someone else’s arms. It happens in stillness, in solitude, in the messy quiet where there is no performance, no pleasing, no defense.
Stillness did not come easily to me.
My overstimulated mind resisted, my tired heart longed for distraction.
At first, it felt like rehab, like breaking an addiction to approval, to external affirmation. But it was in this very stillness that I began to build what Anaïs Nin would call a sacred marriage with my own life. Nin believed we write and live to taste life twice, once in the moment, and again in reflection.
In that sense, stillness became my way of tasting myself, meeting the woman beneath the layers, circling ever deeper into her truth.
I filled my own deposits. I tended to my own breaking. I learned to trust my Self with my healing, more than I trusted someone else with my pain. And slowly, I began to fall in love with the woman I was uncovering.
When I gave myself permission to be present, when I offered myself the kindness I had always begged from others, something shifted. I stopped demanding and expecting love from the outside, and started practicing the radical act of giving it, first to me.
This is not selfishness.
It is foundation.
It is the key and the door, as Jung might say, to the deeper life that has been waiting all along.
Because when I am anchored in love for myself, I do not need to control how others love me. I can meet them with more grace, less turbulence, and a steadier heart.
And now I find myself holding two questions close: What is my purpose in life?
How does my soul want to take action to live this purpose? They are questions worth asking not just of myself, but of you, too.
Perhaps your own stillness is waiting to reveal them. Perhaps the love you are seeking is already within, calling you to listen, to honor, and to begin again.
As Anaïs Nin once wrote, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
written by Bren Littleton
photo from Canva
Tin Flea Press c. 2025