I was standing in the kitchen earlier today, holding a glass of water, just letting the quiet of the afternoon settle around me. It was a perfectly ordinary moment. The kind of completely unremarkable pocket of time that makes up the bulk of our lives. I took a sip, instinctively looked out the window, the way I always do when my mind is wandering, and I froze.
There it was.
A butterfly.
Delicate, erratic, brilliant white against the harsh, unforgiving gray of the city.
Then suddenly, there was another. And another.
Within seconds, the air just outside my window was filled with white butterflies. Some were moving entirely alone, riding the unseen currents of the wind. Others were in pairs, tumbling through the air, chasing each other in that frantic, beautiful choreography that belongs only to nature.
But all of them, every single one, was moving in the exact same direction, as though they were being pulled by an invisible string. As if they understood something I didn’t.
I just stood there, the glass of water turning warm in my hand, staring out at this sudden burst of magic in the middle of a concrete jungle.
Because the moment I saw them, a memory hit me so hard it almost knocked the wind out of me. It was a pact. A quiet, private, desperate little pact I had made with myself years ago, back when I was younger, softer, and still deeply entangled in the belief that the universe spoke to me in cinematic symbols.
Years ago, I had told myself: When you finally see a lot of butterflies, that is the sign. That is when you will know you are about to meet “the one.”
At the time, making that pact felt deeply romantic. It felt like a secret between me and God. I thought I was being poetic, believing that life would eventually reward all my aching and yearning with something beautiful, wrapped in a bow, arriving right on time.
Back then, love did not just feel like companionship to me. It felt like salvation.
I don’t think we talk enough about the psychology of yearning, especially when you are a single mother. We talk about the logistics, the exhaustion, the scheduling, the sheer physical labor of raising a human being on your own. But we rarely talk about the silent, creeping panic.
The quiet terror that lives in the back of your throat when the house is finally asleep and you are sitting on the edge of the bed, wondering if anyone will ever look at your beautifully complicated, fully-formed life and choose it. Choose you.
For a long time, my desire for love was entirely rooted in that panic.
If I am being brutally honest with myself, a lot of what I accepted in my past did not come from true love. It came from fear. It came from scarcity. It came from a deep, unhealed wound that wondered if someone could ever fully accept a mother and her child without a reservoir of resentment hiding somewhere underneath.
That specific fear makes you tolerate things you would normally walk away from. It makes you pliable. It makes you shrink.
When you are operating from the fear of not being chosen, you begin to confuse basic attention for profound care. You start looking at a man’s bare-minimum potential and convincing yourself it is the same thing as a commitment. You mistake your own deep longing for genuine compatibility. You start trying to build entire homes out of temporary, drafty shelters.
And because you want it to work so badly, because you are so tired of carrying the world on your own shoulders, you keep taking a pair of scissors to your own intuition. You cut away the parts of your knowing that scream at you to leave, just so you can fit yourself into a relationship that is fundamentally too small for you.
Looking back at those past versions of myself, I can finally admit that I was not always in love. Often, I was just terrified of ending up alone.
But over the last few months, maybe even the last few years, something inside of me has been fundamentally shifting. The ground beneath my feet has settled into a new kind of rhythm.
It didn’t happen overnight, and it hasn’t happened in a loud, bitter way.
I didn’t wake up one morning and declare that I hated love. I haven’t been performing that wounded, hyper-independent trope you see all over the internet, where people shout about how they don’t need anybody just to mask how badly they wish they did.
No, this shift has been so much quieter than that. It has been a slow, methodical return to myself.
Lately, I have been watching myself make decisions that all point firmly toward a life that is entirely my own. I have been leaning into the idea of living alone, doing my own thing, and thriving on my own terms.
I am building a life where my peace is not dependent on being chosen romantically. A life where my home feels soft, beautiful, abundant, and calm, regardless of who is sitting on the couch next to me. A life where my child grows up looking at a mother who is completely rooted in her own worth, a mother who absolutely refuses to abandon herself just to keep a relationship afloat.
And the strangest, most beautiful paradox has emerged from this: the more I move toward myself, the less desperate I feel to be rescued.
That is entirely new for me.
It’s not a perfect, linear healing, of course. The ghosts still return.
Just recently, they decided to resurface. Old people. Old situations. Old emotions and memories knocking at my door like they still have the keys to the house. Like they still have access to a version of me that died a long time ago.
There was a time in my life when a familiar text or an old ghost showing up would have completely derailed my week. I would have romanticized the return. I would have convinced myself it was “fate.” I would have reopened closed doors just because the sound of loneliness was ringing a little too loudly in my ears that day.
But this time?
This time, I looked at the ghosts, I looked at the familiar pull of old chaos, and I simply thought: No.
Not worth it.
I didn’t entertain them. I didn’t write dramatic speeches to send them. I didn’t go down an emotional spiral. I just decided that I am finally going to do what is best for me, and let the dead stay dead.
Unlike the old days, when I would have walked away feeling broken, bitter, and rejected, this round, I just felt a profound sense of apathy. A peaceful, protective indifference.
That quiet “not worth it” healed something incredibly deep inside of me.
It proved to me that my discernment is finally stronger than my desperation. It proved that I am no longer willing to betray my own clarity just for a momentary distraction.
Does the yearning still exist? Of course it does. I am human.
I still feel the pull sometimes. I still wonder. I still romanticize. I still drift into the land of “what if” on rainy Tuesday nights or quiet Sunday mornings. I know better, yet the desire for connection still hums in the background.
But what has fundamentally changed is my response to it. I no longer act on every emotion simply because I feel it. I sit with the yearning, I acknowledge it, and then I let it pass, unless it gives me a genuinely undeniable, healthy reason to act on it. Which, honestly? It hasn’t.
That is what true growth looks like. It is not the sudden, magical absence of desire. It is the presence of unshakeable discernment.
Which brings me back to the window. To the water in my hand. To the concrete jungle outside, and the sudden, breathtaking arrival of the white butterflies.
When I remembered the butterfly pact, my first instinct was to laugh.
The universe is so deeply ironic. It waited until the exact moment I completely abandoned the idea of “the one” to send me the exact symbol I used to beg for.
I stood there watching them flutter past the harsh lines of the buildings, and it felt like the universe had briefly peeled back the fabric of reality just to wink at me. It brought me right back to the girl I used to be. The one who wanted so badly to be seen, to be chosen, to be loved so loudly that it would finally quiet all the terrifying uncertainty inside her.
And as I watched them, I realized I don’t pity that younger version of me anymore. I don’t think she was foolish or naive. She was just tender. She was just tired.
We are so quick to mock our younger selves for wanting love so desperately, but honestly, there is something deeply beautiful about believing that life can still surprise you with softness.
Even now, I don’t know if “the one” exists. Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t.
Maybe love was never about finding one mythical, perfectly tailored person who was destined for you since the dawn of time. Maybe it is just about finding people who are capable of meeting you honestly, where you are, without requiring you to shrink.
Or maybe some of us are simply meant to become so entirely whole, so completely saturated in our own lives, that love transitions from being a rescue mission into being a simple, beautiful addition.
I don’t have the answers anymore. And for the first time in my life, I am comfortable with not knowing.
Because what I do know, with absolute, unwavering certainty, is this: I no longer want a love that is born out of survival.
I refuse to participate in relationships that are built on a fear of loneliness. Or financial scarcity. Or emotional hunger. Or panic.
If love ever decides to find me again, I want it to arrive in absolute peace. Not confusion. Not hot-and-cold inconsistency. Not the exhausting, emotional chaos that we are all brainwashed into believing is “passion.”
I want peace. The kind of peace that feels like a long, deep exhale at the end of a very long day.
But as I stood there by the window, watching the last of the white butterflies disappear into the distance, a deeper, much more profound realization washed over me.
The butterflies didn’t make me long for a man. They didn’t make me hope a soulmate was waiting around the corner.
Instead, they triggered a completely different kind of craving.
The truth is, the life I crave most these days is not intensely romantic.
It is spacious.
I don’t just want a partner; I want massive, undeniable, generational financial freedom.
I want overflow.
I want ease.
I realized, staring out at those buildings, that what I have been manifesting has entirely evolved. I am no longer looking at the sky asking for a savior. I am looking at the sky and demanding total abundance.
I want to get a huge chunk of money. Not just once, but consistently. I want wealth flowing into my life so reliably and abundantly that it completely rewires my nervous system.
For so long, I thought a romantic partner would be the thing that finally made me feel safe. I thought a man was the ultimate buffer between me and the harshness of the world. But I have realized that the safety I have been yearning for all these years isn’t romantic. It’s structural. It’s financial.
I want a carefree life.
I want mornings that are not heavy with the anxiety of calculation. I want to wake up, pour my tea, and know with absolute certainty that there is more than enough.
I want my businesses to flourish beyond mere survival. I don’t want to just get by; I want to thrive so loudly that it echoes. I want to hire people, build systems, and watch my ideas turn into tangible, abundant reality.
I want the kind of wealth that allows you to buy groceries without looking at the price tags. The kind of wealth that lets you book a flight just because the weather is nice somewhere else. The kind of money that buys you the ultimate luxury: time.
I want beautiful homes. Soft, high-quality clothes that feel like a second skin. Nutritious, vibrant food. Passports filled with stamps. I want gardens with towering trees, long dinners filled with laughter, and stretches of absolute, uninterrupted silence. I want creativity that isn’t stifled by the pressure to monetize immediately. I want deep, restorative rest.
I want to live slowly enough to actually hear myself think again.
I want abundance to become so natural to me that I no longer have to obsess over it.
I want the kind of wealth that softens you. The kind that unclenches your jaw, drops your shoulders, and allows you to breathe all the way down into your stomach.
Because for women like me, women who have had to be the foundation, the roof, and the walls of our families for so long, money is not just paper. It is not just status.
Money is a nervous system regulator.
Money is the ability to say “no” to things that drain you, without fearing the consequences. Money is the power to walk away from tables where you are no longer being served. Money is the moat you build around your peace so that the chaos of the world cannot just walk through your front door whenever it pleases.
Years ago, I truly believed that love would save me.
Now, I think stability might.
I think deep, unbothered peace might.
I think absolute alignment might.
I think a life fully built in my own image, funded by my own brilliance, might.
When you spend your whole life in survival mode, you convince yourself that you only need the bare minimum to be happy. You tell yourself that wanting more is greedy. You settle for crumbs in relationships, and you settle for crumbs in your finances, because you are just so grateful to not be starving.
But I am done with crumbs.
I don’t want the bare minimum in love, and I certainly don’t want the bare minimum in my bank account. I want the whole feast.
I want to be so completely saturated in my own joy, so insulated by my own success, that nothing can disturb my center. I want to look at my child and know that I didn’t just teach them how to survive the storm; I taught them how to own the weather.
And perhaps that is exactly why the butterflies came today.
Maybe the universe wasn’t being ironic at all.
Butterflies have always been the ultimate symbol of metamorphosis. Of going into the dark, digesting your own old parts, and emerging completely transformed, capable of flight.
They didn’t arrive as a sign that someone is finally coming to complete me.
They arrived as a reflection of what is already happening inside of me.
They came as a reminder that transformation is still occurring. That the harshness of the past few years did not turn me to stone. That softness still exists in the world, and more importantly, it still exists inside of my own chest.
They were a reminder that magic hasn’t left the building.
That younger version of me, the one who made the pact, the one who wanted so badly to be saved, she still exists somewhere beneath all the tough lessons, the disappointments, the rebuilding, and the resilience. I used to want to banish her, to tell her to toughen up and stop being so sentimental.
But today, looking at those white wings fluttering against the blue sky, I realized I don’t want to banish her at all. I want to protect her.
And I realized something else, too: she deserves more than just mere survival.
She deserves massive, uncontainable abundance.
She deserves breathtaking beauty.
She deserves absolute, unhurried ease.
She deserves a life so incredibly full, so rich in peace and overflow, that if love ever does come knocking, it isn’t arriving as a rescue boat. It is simply becoming another beautiful thing inside an already beautiful life.
Until then, I am no longer waiting for a sign that I am going to be saved.
I am just watching the butterflies, drinking my water, and getting back to the deeply sacred work of building my own empire.
