August feels strange to write about because, on paper, it looks like a collection of unrelated thoughts: discipline, six little wishes, a man I finally buried, a hundred desires, a future life I wrote as though I were already living it, three unexpected receipts, and a declaration that I am becoming hard to stop.
But looking at it now, I think they were all saying the same thing.
I am no longer available for the life I used to accept.
And perhaps that is what makes this August different.
A year ago, around this same time, I was beginning a healing journey I didn’t fully understand yet. I knew I was hurting. I knew there were things inside me that I had carried for years and somehow learned to function around. I knew abandonment had shaped more of me than I wanted to admit. I knew I had become very good at surviving things I shouldn’t have had to survive.
But I don’t think I understood how much of my life had been organized around those wounds.
I thought healing would be about feeling better.
I didn’t know it would eventually become about living differently.
And maybe that is the strangest thing about looking back.
You don’t always notice yourself changing while it is happening.
You just wake up one day and realize you don’t react to something the way you used to.
The door that once had to remain open is finally closed.
The person whose silence used to consume you can text and you can delete it.
The thing you once begged life to give you becomes something you can imagine creating yourself.
The boundary that once made you shake becomes a sentence you can say without explaining yourself for forty minutes.
The dream that once felt embarrassing to admit becomes something you write down without shrinking it.
And suddenly you realize:
Oh.
Maybe I really have changed.
A Year Ago, I Was Just Beginning
A year ago, I didn’t have a neat little healing plan.
There was no beautiful timeline where I could say, August: abandonment trauma. September: boundaries. October: self-worth. November: healed.
Real life doesn’t work like that.
Healing is messy.
It is remembering something you thought you were over because someone says one sentence that hits the exact place you thought you’d buried.
It is realizing you are angry about something that happened years ago.
It is crying over a version of yourself you didn’t know you were still grieving.
It is understanding why certain things make you panic.
It is noticing the way you push people away before they get the opportunity to disappoint you.
It is recognizing that sometimes solitude is peaceful and sometimes it is simply the safest place to hide.
It is sitting with the uncomfortable possibility that some of the things you call independence were actually adaptations to disappointment.
And then, slowly, you start asking better questions.
Not just What happened to me?
But:
What am I going to do with what happened to me?
That question changed something.
Because there is a point where understanding your wounds can become another way of staying inside them.
You can spend years explaining yourself.
My abandonment.
My childhood.
My relationships.
My disappointments.
My fears.
My triggers.
My patterns.
And eventually you have to ask:
Okay. And now what?
That became one of the quieter themes of this year.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life becoming an expert on why I hurt.
I want to become an expert on how I live.
I Think I Finally Understand What Healing Was Asking From Me
For a long time, I thought healing would make me softer.
In some ways, it did.
But it also made me much less willing to tolerate things.
That’s the part nobody really tells you.
Sometimes healing looks like becoming harder to manipulate.
Sometimes it looks like losing your appetite for chaos.
Sometimes it looks like realizing that peace is more important than being understood.
Sometimes it looks like finally saying, No, actually, I don’t want this anymore.
Not because you’re angry.
Not because you want revenge.
Not because you’re trying to punish anybody.
Because you simply don’t want it.
That distinction feels enormous to me now.
I have spent so much of my life negotiating with things I already knew weren’t good for me.
Maybe they’ll change.
Maybe they’ll understand.
Maybe this time will be different.
Maybe if I explain myself properly.
Maybe if I’m patient.
Maybe if I give it another chance.
Maybe if I love harder.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Maybe.
August feels like the month I finally got tired of living inside maybe.
Six Little Marks Changed Something
One of the strangest moments of this month came from something so small.
A card.
A pen.
Six little wishes written by my son.
I had asked him to write down his birthday wishes, and what came back wasn’t some grand philosophical list. It was simply a child’s desires.
But I couldn’t look at those marks the same way after.
Because suddenly I wasn’t just thinking about getting through life anymore.
I was thinking about what kind of life I am building.
Not just surviving.
Not just paying the next bill.
Not just making sure there is food.
Not just figuring things out.
Building.
A safe home.
A good neighborhood.
A good school.
Travel.
Experiences.
A childhood with memories that aren’t defined by adults constantly worrying about money.
And something in me shifted.
Because my son doesn’t need me to give him a perfect life.
He needs a mother who keeps building.
A mother who doesn’t give up because things are difficult.
A mother who is willing to imagine more.
And maybe that is what those six little wishes gave me.
A reminder that my dreams aren’t only about me.
There are things I want to experience with him.
Places I want to take him.
Things I want to teach him.
A home I want him to remember.
A life I want us to look back on one day and say:
We really lived.
Then I Buried Someone
And then came the part of healing I didn’t know I was still waiting for.
His father.
The person attached to one of the oldest and deepest wounds in my life.
For years, there was still some version of hope.
Not necessarily hope that we’d be together.
Not even romantic hope.
It was the hope that one day he would simply become the person I had needed him to be.
That he would communicate.
That he would show up.
That he would take responsibility.
That he would be consistent.
That he would understand what his absence had done.
That he would be a father.
That somehow, eventually, the story would make sense.
And I kept getting disappointed.
Promises.
Silence.
Hope.
Disappointment.
A little anger.
A little forgiveness.
Another promise.
Another disappearance.
It became exhausting.
And perhaps the hardest thing to admit was that I wasn’t only angry at him.
I was angry at myself for continuing to hope.
Then my son wrote that he wanted to meet his father.
And that changed the shape of everything.
Because suddenly this wasn’t only about the woman who had been hurt by a man.
There was a child standing in the middle of the story.
A child who deserved to know that his father’s absence was not evidence that he was unwanted.
And I think something in me finally broke open.
Not in the destructive way.
In the way a door breaks when you’ve been pushing against it for too long.
I wrote the letter.
The ugly one.
The angry one.
The one where I stopped trying to sound mature and reasonable and forgiving.
I said everything.
The resentment.
The disappointment.
The rage.
The promises.
The abandonment.
The exhaustion.
The years of hoping.
The humiliation of hoping again.
And then I buried him.
Not literally.
But emotionally.
I buried the expectation.
I buried the fantasy.
I buried the version of the future where I was still waiting for him to become someone else.
And perhaps that was the greatest healing I’ve done all year.
Because I don’t think I needed to forgive him in some beautiful cinematic way.
I needed to stop waiting.
That was the closure.
Not I hope you become better.
Not maybe one day.
Not let’s see.
Just:
This is no longer something I am building my life around.
And that felt like freedom.
I Think I Finally Stopped Looking for Rescue
This month also made me confront something uncomfortable.
How badly I want ease.
Not fake luxury.
Not the Instagram version of soft life.
Real ease.
And for a while, I think I was looking at other people and wondering what it would be like if someone else had simply made life easier for me.
If I had been born into wealth.
If I had parents with generational money.
If I had a partner who could carry some of the financial weight.
If I had someone who could simply say, Don’t worry, I’ve got it.
And there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting support.
But somewhere along the way, I realized something.
I don’t actually want to spend my life waiting for somebody to rescue me.
I want to become the woman who can rescue herself.
Not because she doesn’t deserve support.
But because she has options.
That distinction matters.
So I Wrote Down One Hundred Desires
And I didn’t make the list small.
That was intentional.
I wanted to see what would happen if I stopped filtering my desires through what seemed immediately realistic.
I wanted money.
Travel.
A beautiful home.
A thriving business.
A healthier body.
Skills.
Baking.
Sewing.
Swimming.
Better clothes.
Good perfume.
A fridge.
Machines that make my business easier.
Corporate clients.
More web traffic.
More revenue.
Savings.
Land.
A future home.
A garden.
A peaceful neighborhood.
A beautiful childhood for my son.
More experiences.
More freedom.
More life.
And I loved the exercise because it reminded me that abundance isn’t only about money.
It is about capacity.
Capacity to experience.
Capacity to choose.
Capacity to rest.
Capacity to explore.
Capacity to give.
Capacity to create.
Capacity to say yes because you genuinely want to, not because you are desperate.
I don’t want a life where every good thing has to be justified by productivity.
I want to travel somewhere just because the place is beautiful.
I want to bake because I enjoy learning.
I want to sit in a spa and not think about whether I should have spent that money on something “more important.”
I want to buy perfume because I like how it smells.
I want to wear beautiful clothes.
I want to plant things.
I want to have a home that feels like mine.
I want to live.
And perhaps that is one of the biggest things healing has taught me:
I am allowed to want a life that isn’t organized entirely around surviving it.
Then I Wrote From the Other Side
There was something almost ridiculous about writing The Life I Once Prayed For.
Because I sat down and imagined myself already living the life I keep asking for.
Flying to the coast with my son.
Mombasa.
Diani.
Watamu.
Zanzibar.
A beautiful home.
A thriving business.
Money that doesn’t disappear the moment it arrives.
Freedom.
And while writing it, something strange happened.
For a few hours, I wasn’t the woman desperately trying to get there.
I was the woman who had already arrived.
And I could feel how different she was.
She wasn’t frantic.
She wasn’t checking her phone every five minutes.
She wasn’t wondering whether someone would come through.
She wasn’t trying to convince anyone to choose her.
She wasn’t measuring her worth against sales.
She wasn’t afraid of every slow month.
She wasn’t constantly waiting for the next disaster.
She was just living.
And perhaps that is what I mean when I talk about abundance now.
I don’t want abundance because I want to prove that I made it.
I want it because I want to experience the relief of having enough.
Enough money.
Enough time.
Enough choices.
Enough space.
Enough life.
Then I Dared the Universe
And this one makes me laugh a little.
Because there was a day when I was frustrated.
My business had already gone through enough.
I had lost almost two hundred Google reviews after an unfound location issue, and I was rebuilding my website and my business presence from scratch.
It was annoying.
It was discouraging.
And instead of sitting there feeling sorry for myself, I basically said:
Fine.
You say you have everything.
Show me.
I dared the universe to show me how good it could get.
And then three fully paid online orders came through almost at once.
Were they life-changing?
No.
Were they millions?
No.
But they were perfectly timed.
And sometimes that’s what makes something meaningful.
Not the size.
The timing.
It felt like a tiny wink.
You asked.
Here.
And I took it.
Not as proof that I could sit back and wait for miracles.
As proof that perhaps I can keep moving even when I don’t know exactly how everything will unfold.
And Then I Decided I Was Going to Become Hard to Stop
This might be my favorite realization of August.
Because I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be a “good” person.
We are taught that good people are agreeable.
Nice.
Patient.
Understanding.
Self-sacrificing.
And I don’t want that definition anymore.
I want to be kind.
But I also want to be formidable.
I want to be generous without being gullible.
Soft without being easy to manipulate.
Ambitious without being cruel.
I want to ask for what I’m owed.
I want customers to pay before I start working.
I want to charge properly.
I want to pitch bigger clients.
I want to create more.
I want to be visible.
I want to take up space.
I want to say no.
I want to walk away.
I want to stop explaining myself.
And I don’t think that makes me a bad person.
Maybe it just means I finally understand that kindness doesn’t require self-abandonment.
There is a difference between being good and being available for exploitation.
I don’t need to hurt anyone to get ahead.
But I am also no longer interested in holding myself back so everyone else can remain comfortable.
I want their audacity.
Not their cruelty.
Looking Back, I Think August Was About Choice
That’s what I see now.
Choice.
A year ago, healing was something happening to me.
This August, healing started looking like something I was actively participating in.
I chose boundaries.
I chose myself.
I chose to stop waiting for my son’s father.
I chose to imagine more.
I chose to write down desires without shrinking them.
I chose to build.
I chose to ask.
I chose to sell.
I chose to become more disciplined.
I chose to believe that my business could grow.
I chose to let customers walk away rather than abandon my standards.
I chose to think bigger.
I chose to become harder to stop.
And perhaps that is what growth actually looks like.
Not becoming a completely different person.
Just becoming increasingly willing to choose differently.
A Year Later
A year ago, I was beginning to dig through things I had spent years burying.
Today, I am standing on top of some of those graves.
Not because none of it hurts anymore.
But because it no longer owns me.
I can remember.
I can grieve.
I can get angry.
I can have a difficult day.
I can miss someone.
I can be afraid.
I can still have abandonment wounds flare up.
I can still overthink.
I can still get overwhelmed.
Healing did not turn me into some permanently regulated, endlessly peaceful woman who floats through life drinking green juice and making perfect decisions.
I’m still me.
I still spiral sometimes.
I still get frustrated.
I still want too much.
I still have moments where I want to run away from everything.
But something is different.
I come back to myself faster.
And that might be the real progress.
I Don’t Think I Am the Same Woman Who Started This
I think she would be surprised by me.
Not because I’ve achieved everything.
I haven’t.
There is still so much I want.
The business still needs work.
Money still matters.
There are still things I haven’t built.
There are still debts I want gone.
There are still dreams sitting on paper waiting for their turn.
But she would see the way I handle things now.
The boundaries.
The decisions.
The refusal to keep reopening certain doors.
The audacity to ask for more.
The willingness to imagine a much bigger life.
And maybe she would finally understand that healing wasn’t supposed to make everything easy.
It was supposed to make me free enough to choose.
Free enough to say:
No, I don’t want that.
Yes, I want this.
This is what I need.
This is what I’m building.
This is where I’m going.
And then actually move.
There is something almost beautiful about realizing that the woman I wanted to become wasn’t waiting somewhere in the future.
She was being built in all these tiny moments.
In the text I finally didn’t answer.
In the money I finally followed up on.
In the boundary I finally held.
In the desire I finally admitted.
In the dream I finally wrote down.
In the order that came through when I was frustrated.
In the decision to keep rebuilding.
In the six little marks on a white card.
In the angry letter I wrote and never needed to send.
In the nights I cried.
In the mornings I still got up.
In every moment I chose not to abandon myself.
That’s the thing about a year of healing.
Nobody hands you a certificate.
There is no ceremony.
You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly feel completely healed.
Sometimes you simply look back and realize:
The things that once controlled me don’t control me anymore.
And that’s enough.
August, Thank You
Thank you for showing me that I can want more without being ashamed of it.
Thank you for reminding me that my son’s future doesn’t have to be determined by the limitations of his past.
Thank you for the anger that finally had somewhere to go.
Thank you for the boundaries.
Thank you for the uncomfortable realizations.
Thank you for the audacity.
Thank you for the receipts.
Literally.
Thank you for the six little wishes.
Thank you for reminding me that there is still so much life ahead of me.
And thank you for making me look back at the woman who started this journey a year ago and realize something I couldn’t see then:
She wasn’t broken.
She was exhausted.
She was carrying too much.
She was trying to make sense of things that didn’t make sense.
She was trying to protect herself.
She was trying to love.
She was trying to mother.
She was trying to build.
She was trying to survive.
And somehow, despite everything, she kept going.
I’m glad she did.
Because I get to be here now.
Writing down one hundred desires instead of one hundred reasons why they might not happen.
Imagining flights instead of just imagining escape.
Thinking about expansion instead of just relief.
Building a business instead of waiting for somebody to save me.
Choosing boundaries instead of begging for understanding.
Choosing peace instead of familiarity.
Choosing myself without needing to hate anyone else.
And perhaps that is the real story of this month.
I didn’t become healed.
I became more available for my own life.
More available for money.
For love, if it ever comes in a form that actually deserves me.
For motherhood.
For travel.
For creativity.
For a beautiful home.
For business.
For friendships that don’t drain me.
For opportunities.
For rest.
For pleasure.
For abundance.
For all the things I once thought I needed permission to want.
A year ago, I started healing because I was tired of hurting.
This year, I think I’m healing because I am finally beginning to understand that there is a life beyond the hurting.
And I want it.
All of it.
I want all of it.
And I am no longer standing at the edge of my life asking whether I’m allowed to have it.
I’m building toward it.
Maybe slowly.
Maybe imperfectly.
Maybe with a few spectacular detours.
But I’m building.
And if I have learned anything this past year, it is this:
Healing isn’t always about becoming someone new.
Sometimes it’s about finally becoming available to the woman you were before life taught you to make yourself smaller.
And this August, I think I finally met her.
She’s still becoming.
So am I.
But this time, I’m not looking backward.
I’m looking at everything that could still be mine.
And for the first time in a very long time, I don’t feel like I am waiting for my life to begin.
I think I’m already in it.
