BTWN LVRS

I have lived several lives inside this one.

Not in the glamorous, reinvent-yourself-every-five-years kind of way, although there has been some reinvention. I mean that life has introduced me to enough versions of myself to understand that human beings are not simple.

I have been tender and guarded.

Certain and completely mistaken.

The person holding everything together and the person quietly coming apart beneath it.

I have loved wisely, loved fearfully, loved generously, and occasionally loved in ways that made perfect sense only after I understood what I had been trying to survive.

That is the perspective I bring to this column.

Not the perspective of someone standing outside the human experience with a clipboard, pointing out what everybody else is doing wrong.

I am in it too.

I have known trauma, loss, responsibility, reinvention, marriage, motherhood, divorce, friendship, disappointment, purpose, spiritual searching, professional achievement, and the strange experience of becoming highly capable while parts of me were still learning whether it was safe to exhale.

Life taught me to notice patterns before I had language for pattern recognition.

I learned to read rooms.

To hear what people meant beneath what they said.

To recognize when silence was peaceful and when it was punishment. When laughter was joy and when it was camouflage. When someone wanted help, when they wanted saving, and when they wanted permission to remain exactly as they were while somebody else carried the consequences.

Those instincts eventually became part of my career.

But before they became professional skills, they were ways of moving through the world.

Some of what protects us early in life becomes wisdom.

Some of it becomes habit.

Some of it follows us into rooms where it is no longer needed, sits down without being invited, and begins making decisions on our behalf.

That is where things become interesting.

Because people are rarely doing only one thing.

We can be protecting ourselves and hurting someone else.

We can mean well and still cause damage.

We can be deeply loving and emotionally unavailable.

We can be loyal to people while abandoning ourselves.

We can crave intimacy and resist being known.

We can ask for honesty and become defensive the moment it arrives without gift wrapping.

Human beings are full of contradictions, and relationships have a way of placing those contradictions under excellent lighting.

Romantic relationships do it.

So do friendships.

Families.

Workplaces.

Parenting.

Partnerships.

Endings.

Beginnings.

Even the relationship we have with the person looking back at us from the mirror, especially once that person starts asking questions we can no longer answer with somebody else’s name.

Over time, I learned that recognizing a pattern is not the same as changing it.

Understanding why I became a certain version of myself did not release me from deciding who I would become next.

There came a point when I could no longer make my history responsible for every present choice. I could honor what shaped me without handing it permanent authority over my life.

That realization was not neat.

Growth rarely is.

Sometimes it looked like courage.

Sometimes it looked like a boundary spoken with a shaking voice.

Sometimes it looked like apologizing without explaining myself into innocence.

Sometimes it meant admitting that I had confused being needed with being loved, silence with peace, endurance with commitment, chemistry with compatibility, or understanding another person with actually being understood by them.

And sometimes growth looked much less profound.

Sometimes it was simply declining to participate in foolishness before noon.

We will make room for all of it here.

The ache and the absurdity.

The patterns that have existed for generations and the single conversation that interrupts one.

The ways people wound one another and the ways they repair.

The grief of becoming aware and the freedom of realizing awareness gives us somewhere new to go.

This column is not built on the belief that people are broken.

People are adaptive.

We learn how to survive the environments that form us, and then we carry those lessons forward, sometimes with wisdom, sometimes with unnecessary luggage, and usually with no receipt.

The work is not to hate the person we became in order to make it through.

The work is to recognize when that version of us has completed the assignment.

Then we get to choose again.

That is where responsibility becomes hopeful.

Not because we control everything that has happened to us. We do not.

Not because love fixes every wound. It cannot.

But because awareness can become choice. Choice can become practice. Practice can become character. And character changes how we participate in our own lives and in the lives of others.

Eventually, healing asks us to return to relationship.

Not necessarily to every person we left behind.

Sometimes returning means coming back to our own voice.

Our discernment.

Our humor.

Our softness.

Our standards.

Our capacity to remain open without leaving the doors unlocked for everyone.

It means learning that wholeness is not isolation. We do not become restored humans so we can stand magnificently alone, announcing that we no longer need anybody.

We become more whole so we can meet people without asking them to complete us, carry us, shrink for us, rescue us, or disappear so we can remain comfortable.

We learn how to stay present.

How to listen.

How to speak.

How to repair.

How to laugh again after life has given us plenty of reasons not to.

That is what I want to explore here.

Not only the pain, patterns, and difficult lessons, but what becomes possible after we begin living with greater honesty. I have learned that knowing and loving ourselves more fully can deepen our love of life, and make room for relationships that feel mutual, joyful, peaceful, and deeply fulfilling.

Once I began building a life I could authentically honor and appreciate, I knew I had to share what I had learned with you.

Possibility can be difficult to reach for when we have never seen it, heard it named, experienced it, or encountered it in someone else’s story. Sometimes we need evidence that another way of living and loving exists before we can believe it may also exist for us.

So I will write about what hurts, but I will not leave us there.

There will always be a line toward hope. A reason to have faith in our capacity to grow, choose differently, love more honestly, and create lives and relationships that feel as good as they look from the outside.

Love, yes, but not only romance.

Life and all that jazz.

Friendship, because no relationship can become deeply intimate without genuine curiosity about who the other person is.

Communication, because loving someone silently does not always help them experience being loved.

Accountability, because good intentions cannot be the only evidence we submit.

Joy, because pain does not deserve exclusive ownership of our depth.

Humor, because human beings are hilarious, particularly when we are attracted to one another and temporarily lose access to basic reasoning.

And stories, because people often recognize themselves more honestly inside a story than they do inside advice.

I will write from my lens, but the column is not only about me.

Some details will come from lived experience. Others will be shaped by the patterns I have witnessed, studied, survived, questioned, and learned to name. The particulars may belong to one life, but the humanity will travel.

You may recognize yourself as the one who loved.

The one who withdrew.

The one who stayed.

The one who left.

The one who hurt someone.

The one who finally stopped pretending not to be hurt.

The one who knew better.

The one who had to live a little longer before knowing better became doing better.

There are no perfect people waiting for us in these pages.

Only human beings, capable of tenderness, fear, foolishness, responsibility, change, and the occasional decision that will require a very honest conversation later.

That includes me.

So pour the coffee. Steep the tea. Grab the blanket if the weather permits, or if you simply enjoy dramatic reading conditions.

Come as you are.

Bring your questions, your contradictions, your experiences, and your willingness to see yourself in more than one character.

We have some things to talk about.

If this column made you think of someone, send it to them.

BTWN LVRS grows through human recommendation, honest conversation, and readers carrying meaningful stories beyond the page.

Let the column begin the conversation.

And since you have already heard the advice, let me tell you the stories.

–Tee