the thing about love is that I love to watch it grow 💖 to see how far you’ve come, how far we’ve come, fills me with great contentedness and confidence that there are many more loving days ahead. have to share these very loving moments at @mimizhuxiyuan’s book launch 2 weeks ago. i cried every time I locked eyes with them as they read from their book and as friends performed themes from different chapters from the book. so deeply proud & overjoyed, bc you deserve this. here’s an excerpt that still sticks with me (and made me cry): “I used to think that healing was a form of "fixing," and that upon being "healed,” I would return to an unharmed version of myself. To find this unharmed version of myself, I would have to trace back to a time impossible to recall. Healing is not the pursuit of purity or pretense, and it is not a journey toward a flawless paradise. In “When Things Fall Apart,” Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes of life as being "the path." We may have our eyes set on a destination, a "healed" state, or a place where we can return to ideas of normalcy. However, Chödrön suggests that there is no destination, and that the path is "like riding in a train sitting back wards. We can't see where we're headed, only where we've been." As we look back and reencounter old wounds and painful triggers, we can believe that it will get less difficult, but we cannot expect that all our pain will magically disappear for good. Instead, we must trust that our healing is inherently worthy, abundant, and miraculous, and that "the source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very instant." Healing is a perpetual form of change and adaptation, and an act of compassion that we learn to extend toward ourselves. Healing is not clutching at ideas of who we were before we were harmed but remembering that we were always born whole. Healing teaches us that we are forever deserving of love.”