Fairytale House

It began as a modest house.
The kind you rent because it’s in your budget.
Brown floors. Plain rooms.
We needed shelter — and yet.

Even then,
I was already measuring
what I could hold.

I felt tenderness for the older man who owned it —
he could not afford to live there otherwise,
so our modest contribution mattered —
a deciding weight.

Somewhere between evening and morning
the house grew,
as if it had been given
a dose of Jack’s magic beans.

Rooms multiplied.
Floors appeared
where I did not even remember stairs.

Doors appeared —
some led to occupied rooms,
others went nowhere at all.

What a curious Wonderland.

People then began to arrive,
leaving their footprints everywhere.

By dawn I was holding a mop,
and the certainty
that the job was fruitless,
that it could never be done.

Surely not by me.
Not even with help.

The floors stayed dirty.
And I didn’t feel anger,
or even that I was a failure.

The task was simply
beyond me.

And that was finally
a boundary I could live with.

Saying no
to no one in particular
went against everything
I was raised to believe.

Yet it was the only answer.
The conclusion.
And it felt like a victory.

Mt. Tabor park ~ bj 2023

Steadier When Lived

I was conditioned to hyper-attunement when young.
To notice — for how could I not — the vagaries
and inconsistencies of the humans around me.
And so I sought answers — which now seems absurd,
as if there ever were any.

Instead of realizing — a thing learned
later in life, after many experiences —
that life, by definition, requires living.
Not planned or controlled,
but stepping onto its stage,
and not without consequences.
Even when we do the best we can,
we are still wading through.
Living it.

Daunting, really, especially
in the midst of chaos.
Even if we think we know more than we do.

Fundamentalist religions attempt
to provide a container,
but it is only one container —
and a disempowering one, at that.
There are rules which, if done “right,”
insinuate themselves through repetition
and eventually land as one’s own truth.
Our inner voice.
And we learn to trust that.

In my case, that was a mistake.

I never settled, as a result
of man-made guidelines.
It took me years to discover
that the best voice of conscience was my own.
I now realize that was the voice
of intuition. My voice.
Not memorized and internalized
from another’s viewpoint.

Part of reclaiming my inner authority
was learning it was no longer
my responsibility to convey,
with missionary zeal,
what worked for me as New Truth —
a new religion, if you like.
Instead, it might empower others
to discover their own inner compass.

I had convinced myself that control
masqueraded as care,
and realized how easily
the preacher’s self-assurance
translated into something combustible
living within.

From parents to preachers,
I had no examples
of anything else to emulate.

Now. I am learning restraint — and this matters.
And because it is important to me,
I will not set myself on fire
to illuminate another’s fog,
leaving myself burned
by my own passion.

Integrity, I am discovering,
is not louder when shouted.
It is steadier
when lived.

Mahukona ~ bj 2026

The Moment I Stopped Abandoning Myself

There comes a moment in every life,
though most never name it,
when the soul refuses to go one step further
in distortion.

Mine came quietly, without ceremony.
No lightning bolt, no grand gesture.
Just the unmistakable knowing that
if I kept living the way I was taught to live,
I would vanish inside my own skin.

People think that when a woman steps away
from a marriage, a family system, a set
of inherited roles,
she is abandoning loved ones.

But that’s not what happened.
I did not abandon my children.
I abandoned the identity
that required me to abandon myself.
I walked away from the version of me
that survived by softening every truth,
absorbing every projection,
and making myself small enough
to keep the peace others depended on.

I left behind the mother-role scripted
by fear, the wife-role scripted
by early religious indoctrination,
the daughter-role scripted
by obedience. Not out of anger.
Not out of pride.
Not out of selfishness or defiance.

But because my soul could no longer tolerate
the distance between who I was
and who I was pretending to be.
This is the part no one tells you:

Leaving the role is not the same as leaving the people.
You can step out of the performance and still
love them fiercely. You can refuse the old shape
and still hold compassion. You can stop contorting
and still be rooted in truth.

Love doesn’t disappear when illusion falls away.
Love doesn’t depend on roles. Love doesn’t require
self-betrayal. Love simply is — steady as the tide
unconcerned with human constructs, unaffected
by whether anyone understands.

To walk away from the old identity was not
to forsake my sweet girls’ family foundation,
it was to stop forsaking myself. And that, finally,
when it arrived,
was the only way to ever love them honestly.

That is liberation. That is sovereignty.
That is maturation of the soul.

Our front door ~ bj 2025

The Hidden Truth in Walking Away

There’s a whole spectrum of human relationship —
and most of what we struggle with isn’t danger, but discomfort.

I keep seeing the messages —
those tidy spiritual slogans circulating through feeds and circles:
“Walk away from anyone who hurts you.”
“Cut off people who trigger you.”
“Release what no longer serves.”

Sounds clean.
Sounds powerful.
Sounds like sovereignty.

But real life isn’t a meme.
And healing isn’t an exit strategy.

Walking away from someone may give you temporary peace,
but if you haven’t turned toward the part of yourself
that reacts, collapses, flares, or fuses,
then the pattern simply follows you
into the next relationship,
the next home,
the next decade.

There is a time to step back.
There is a time to choose distance.
There is a time to stop contorting yourself
around someone else’s fear.

But “walking away” is not the medicine people think it is.

The deeper work — the work that actually restores you —
is reshaping your relationship with yourself.

Because the “other” is never just the other.
They are the mirror of your unhealed edges,
your unspoken boundaries,
your swallowed truths,
your inherited wiring.

Cutting people off is easy.
Facing the ways we abandoned ourselves
within those relationships
is not.

And no amount of spiritual language
turns avoidance into awakening.

I have walked away when I needed to —
not from people, but from the roles I once played.
Not from love, but from illusion.
Not from responsibility, but from self-erasure.

I didn’t stop loving.
I stopped lying.
I stopped shrinking.
I stopped fusing.
I stopped betraying myself
to keep the story stable.

That’s the work.

Not cutting people off like dead branches,
but learning to grow new roots inside myself
so another’s choices no longer determine my direction.

The holidays bring all of this into sharper focus —
family stories, old wounds, old reflexes,
the temptation to fall back
into a shape you’ve already outgrown.

But here is the real truth,
the one no meme dares to say:

You don’t heal by walking away from others.
You heal by walking back toward yourself.

ai- generated photo ~ bj 2025

Fusion

My ego is not an animal
that needs feeding; the place
you can touch is my heart —
but please go gently,
with due respect.

You need only possess
a genuine concern
for the inner person,
fragile being not unlike yourself —
fellow traveler through
this brief burst in eternity.

You may keep your agendas,
images, projections;
I am overly weary of users
and artifice, and have no need
for hungry ghosts
whose desires appear bottomless.

I do not wish to increase
the volume of some
larger-than-life figure
you wish to impose
on a world already
overfull with blowhards,
attention-seekers,
spotlight-needers.

The circle is small
and can grow smaller
without my willing it so.
There is work
to be done in loving.

If you deny your own
quaking heart,
perhaps this deserves
attention.

There are many
desirous of the simplest
gestures of kindness;

find these ones,
seek them everywhere you go.

Then perhaps
we will have much to mull over
when next we meet.

---

Upolu Pt. ~ 2025 bj