if you are lonely, or push people away, or use humor to hide uncomfortable feelings, or try to be strong all the time, or think everyone will reject you, or keep hurting those who love you, or are overcome with jealousy, or don’t feel truly seen, or don’t feel like enough, then stagnancy is its own agony.

someone reaches out to you? Can you allow someone to need you?

That was always my underlying fear: that someone I loved would look at me like a stranger. Or that I would take such a circuitous path away from someone that I could never find my way back to them.