The Art of Embracing the Dark: The Story of the Moth and Butterfly

For so long I thought healing meant becoming brighter, louder, easier to love. I thought if I could just learn how to shine like everyone else, I would finally belong. But the truth arrived quietly, like moonlight slipping through a cracked window. I was never meant to burn like the sun. I was meant to glow in the dark.

Some of us are not built for daylight applause. Some of us are built for sacred shadows, for the soft spaces where the world finally exhales. We are the ones who feel too much, see too deeply, love too fiercely. We are the ones who were told we were too strange, too sensitive, too different. But different was never the problem. Different was the design.

I spent years calling myself a broken butterfly, when all along I was a powerful moth. Not lost. Not wrong. Just searching for love in a place that could not see me. And the moment I stopped trying to belong to the sun and turned toward the moon, everything changed. My wounds became wisdom. My softness became strength. My story became a lantern for others still stumbling in the dark.

If you have ever felt like you did not fit anywhere, let me tell you this with my whole heart. You are not meant to disappear. You are meant to illuminate the night.

The Art of Embracing Our Shadow

Living With Complex PTSD

Living with complex PTSD is waking inside a storm that never learned your name. It teaches you to give until your body collapses, to offer yourself as proof of love, and to forget the good in yourself because no one ever reflected it back. The belief that you are too much and not enough at once is not truth. It is the echo left behind by other people’s unhealed wounds.

The Ones You Locked Away

I spent most of my life believing the parts of me that fought the hardest were the ones I needed to silence. The anger. The fear. The intensity. The pieces that learned to survive in a world that did not feel safe. I thought healing meant becoming softer by erasing them. Quieter by abandoning them. Better by pretending they never existed. But the truth arrived in a whisper I could no longer ignore. Those parts were never my problem. They were my protection. They stood between me and the fire when I had no armor of my own. They carried me through storms no child should have had to weather. And when I finally turned toward them instead of away, I did not meet monsters. I met guardians. Wounded. Exhausted. Still standing. Still loving me in the only ways they knew how. Healing did not begin when I learned how to be different. It began when I learned how to be kind to the parts of me that had to become strong so I could survive.