Personal Reflection
You don’t wake up one morning and decide to bloom. You reach a point where staying closed starts to hurt. It’s not courage at first — it’s exhaustion. You get tired of pretending safety feels like peace. You start to feel the pressure building under the surface, the ache that comes from containing too much life inside too small a space.
Nin understood that pain is a kind of compass. The bud doesn’t split because it wants to; it splits because it has to. The same is true for us. We stay sealed until silence becomes unbearable, until the cost of stillness outweighs the comfort of hiding. That’s when the soul begins its quiet rebellion — not loud, not triumphant, but necessary.
Growth isn’t graceful. It’s messy, tender, and often lonely. You lose parts of yourself in the process — not because they were wrong, but because they were temporary. What remains is raw, trembling, alive. And even if no one sees it, the act of blooming itself becomes an act of truth.
Sometimes healing isn’t a return. Sometimes it’s an opening.
Reflective Prompt
What have you kept sealed out of fear it might not survive the light?
What if the thing you’re protecting isn’t your fragility, but your becoming?
Memoirs of Madness 