What is Mine to Carry

For years, I found my footing by borrowing other women's steadiness before I'd built my own. Then a friendship that felt like sisterhood turned out to be something else, and what followed taught me almost as much as the betrayal itself. I watched people I knew turn my worst season into a kind of entertainment, and that took as long to metabolize as the original wound. This essay is about what it took to walk my own field again, what I pulled, what I kept, and what I finally learned to water. It's also about a practice I keep coming back to, that both things can be true at once, and what that has meant for how I show up now.