Before You Turn the Page
A closing reflection for April, and a gentle opening into what comes next.
April asked something of you.
Maybe you felt it, and maybe you didn’t, but it was there the whole time — that quiet insistence, that gentle pressure behind the sternum that kept returning with the same question dressed in different clothes: Is this love, or is this habit? Is this a standard I am actually living, or is this a compromise I dressed up nicely so it could sit at my table without making a scene?
Self-love as a standard is not a soft thing. It looks soft from the outside. It looks like long mornings and deliberate nos and choosing rest when the world is still moving. But from the inside, it is one of the most demanding practices there is, because it requires you to keep looking at yourself honestly. It requires you to keep choosing yourself even when that choosing means someone else is disappointed, and to keep returning to what you know is true even when the truth asks you to give something up.
