Cracking the Cage: A Journey to Self-Love
Romantic love—our reason for living, and also the reason many of us feel like we want to die. Love has been a source of immense joy and agonizing pain for me since as early as I can remember. I grew up in a home where love wasn’t freely given, and fear replaced love as the most common emotion in my environment. Love felt more like a prize that one must earn.
In addition, early exposure to soap operas didn’t help—General Hospital’s Luke and Laura being my ideal version of the ultimate romantic couple (iykyk).
When I finally fell in love, it was intoxicating. I would have died for my first love, literally. It’s such a paradox of the human experience that the very love we spend our entire lives searching and yearning for is the very love we are meant to give ourselves. Sounds simple, right? Yet, it’s one of the hardest things I have personally ever worked on in my entire life—and my childhood was filled with an addict parent, abandonment, and abuse.
Yes, one would say, 'Well, that’s why,' but no, I don’t agree. I’ve met people with none of the above, or only some of the above, and it’s still the same struggle up the same hill. The view on the climb up is just a little different. We all come with our own version of trauma, neatly wrapping our hearts in a nice steel cage from ourselves and others. The armor doesn't care about happiness; it only cares about familiar survival. The path to generating a frequency where one can truly open to loving and being loved is rediscovering the love of self. And I don’t just mean the pretty and generous aspects of ourselves; this includes the gritty and dark aspects of ourselves as well—the ugly jealousy, the coping mechanisms that push people away, the parts of us that still feel small and demanding
The thing is, there is no right way to do this. There are brilliant philosophers and self-help teachers with books, podcasts, and YouTube channels that give wonderful advice and words of wisdom, which can certainly help you on the path. The path itself, however, is a very personal and specific journey. This is because what our individual hearts and psyches need is very intricate to our lived experience, and the interpretations and decisions we made as a result of them. Then consider that the older you become, the more evidence you have to justify the armor, which ultimately just generates more to sift through. This is why this is such an important task—something we should be teaching our children early in life.
I started this work in 2008, and I only started to crack my heart open almost two years ago. That is not to say that all the work I did prior was ineffective; it’s just what my particular journey looked like.
I remember the heartbreak of a relationship feeling like a death. The pain of not being chosen by someone felt like a stab directly to my heart. In hindsight, the fact that I put all of my value—I mean every single ounce—into the hands of one normal, human person is wild. No one should have to carry that for anyone else. That person's choices defined me: who I was, my worthiness, and my value. And over and over again, someone showed me my worthlessness exactly how my armor set it up to be, in order to defend its position.
I am grateful for the results my work has given me. It’s much more empowering for me, and filled with a lot more ease and grace for those I engage with. I’m still in the process of integrating, so there are still moments where I feel triggered and have to do the work to recenter or reground. This is what it is to be human. However, for the first time in my entire life, I have chosen me fully and unapologetically. That doesn’t mean I don’t want love in my life—I do want to manifest partnership—but I want to come at it as a whole person, and I want to manifest someone who comes in whole as well. I am no longer looking for someone to save me, or for a place to hide. I am looking for an equal to walk beside. Until then, the space I’ve carved out within myself is more than enough. The cage is open, and for the first time, I am entirely safe in my own hands.
