You learned how to read the room before you learned how to read yourself.
Now you'd give anything not to have to be in the room at all.

Nobody really knows you. And some part of you wonders if that's your fault.

You watch other people — with their moms, with their partners, with their friends — and feel something you can't quite name.
Maybe it's jealousy, but you don't want to admit that. Something heavier. Like you missed some detail everyone else caught on to.

It feels like there's a version of you that never got to show up. You miss her. Even though you're not sure you ever really met her.

You're not someone who keeps everything locked away. You've told people things about your life. Real things. Hard things.

But you decide just how far it goes. The people in your life accept what you allow them to know about you.
But they don't know how you arrived there, or what it cost you to get there.  You share the fact of what happened, not what it did to you.
And afterward you tell yourself that counts. That you were open. That you let someone in.

You know that's not the whole truth. But it's kept you safe so far.

And yet when something actually hurts, you talk yourself out of it before anyone else can see it happen. 

“You should be over this by now. It was so long ago.”. You've said that to yourself so many times it doesn't even feel cruel anymore. It just feels true.

But it hasn't made the pain go away. The late-night staring at the ceiling.
The distracting yourself into oblivion just so you don't have to be alone with your thoughts.
The chaos of your day-to-day life has helped you hide from what is underneath.  

You watch someone cry in front of other people and feel something crack open a little. You're not annoyed. You're jealous. How can they just do that? 

Because you know if you let yourself feel one thing, you don't know what else comes out. What you remember. What your body does.
You've been holding on for a long time, and you can't afford to fall apart right now. Your life doesn't stop. 

So, you stay at the edge of it, circling what feels like a ditch with no floor. Close enough to feel it, far enough to keep moving.
When you do finally cry, you don’t even know why and then you shove the feeling down. 

And you tell yourself that's fine. 

You're terrified that if you finally jump into the ditch, what's there is going to be really, really bad.
You don’t know that you have what it takes to find your way back out. 

Taking a leap without knowing how you'll land is the ultimate test of trust. You've spent your whole life longing for the leap.
Something always kept you anchored.

But you will land. That part is inevitable.

A soft landing isn't about control. It's about what happens when you stop bracing.
When you jump rigidly, you get hurt. When you let your body be fluid, you land softly.

That's what this is. Learning to be fluid. A soft landing.

You can learn how to soften in a world that has tried relentlessly to harden you.

Therapy with me isn't about going back to how things were. It's not about changing yourself into someone altogether different.

It's about learning to claim space for who you are now.