How does it feel to be back, my therapist asked, seated in her pink armchair. Her voice carried that familiar gentleness. Before leaving the therapy room for the final time in 2025, I shared that the next time I would return would be when something specific happens.
That specific something has happened.
The pace of the work in 2025 was intense. There were unexpected moments and encounters later in the year that both tested and affirmed the work done. Some things, however, could only wait quietly for their time to surface, before the work around them could finally begin. Perhaps certain griefs could only emerge when I am surrounded by enough steadiness, care, and presence to face them.
They returned first through dreams. In them, people disappeared. My dream self wandered through abandonment and helplessness, searching, waiting, trying to make sense of what was unfolding. Then came the daytime flashbacks. Past moments involving incessant waiting began replaying themselves with startling clarity. Anxiety and anger crept in with each passing minute in those moments.
Those were traumatic moments, she said, as I sat on the familiar grey couch recounting what had happened in the past. Sometimes, while speaking through those memories in recent sessions, I find myself bewildered by some of the decisions I made then, by how much I convinced myself.
When the flashbacks first surfaced earlier this year, my partner gave me a piece of homework - to tell myself ten times each day that I love myself and I am worthy of love. We spent an evening circling an estate multiple times, being unconditionally held in a space where what surfaced could simply be honoured and heard. This was one of the first things I shared with my therapist when I returned, and she laughed softly. I still haven’t been very consistent with my homework.
For much of 2025, I kept returning to the same quiet question, wondering why people continued showing up for me when I feel like I had so little to offer in return. That question has followed me into this year too, and I recently posed it to my friends and partner. Somewhere along the way, I began realising that being heard did not need to be earned nor begged. Presence and space is simply offered, unconditionally.
Perhaps that has been one of the quieter shifts unfolding within me, slowly learning that love and presence can be received unconditionally, and noticing how that has begun changing the way I see myself.
Somewhere in the middle of 2025, I began approaching friends and people around me with an idea that had quietly begun forming.
This Substack slowly became less of a journal documenting events, and more of a place where I could meet myself honestly in the aftermath of moments, conversations, and encounters. Reading the posts from beginning now would feel a little like witnessing someone slowly loosen their grip on inherited narratives.
The fuller lessons, struggles, grief, and quiet wins, however, deserve a space of their own, where they should be properly witnessed and honoured. This Wasn’t The Plan, And Yet is perhaps less about life not going according to plan, and more about accepting that healing, love, and becoming can unfold differently than once imagined, perhaps more honestly than before.
I would love for you to read and witness it one day.