There are seasons in a life when the heart behaves like a revolving door, spinning with beginnings that never grow roots. In my early twenties I lived in that motion. Days felt long and evenings even longer, each one poured into a small apartment that smelled faintly of detergent and worn carpet. The hum of a box fan became my soundtrack. It rattled against the window frame when the night wind shifted, a quiet reminder that the people who once filled that space were gone. The lights from passing cars drifted across the walls like ghosts of plans that never came true.

I had the love of my children, and I held it like treasure. Their sleepy breaths drifting through a darkened room, the quiet rise and fall of their chests, the way their small hands reached for mine without hesitation, all of it steadied me in ways they will never fully understand. They were my joy in a hard season, the reason I kept going when everything else felt uncertain. Even so, there was a hollow place inside me that motherhood could not touch. It was not their job to fill it, and it was not a failure of my love. It was simply the part of me that had not learned how to belong to myself yet.

I remember sitting on a faded couch one night while the boys slept in the next room. The air was still. A single lamp glowed on the table beside me, its bulb humming with a soft, electric buzz. Outside, the cicadas droned through the open window. I folded my hands and asked heaven why love seemed to pass me by. I asked why I felt easy to forget. I asked why every promise I reached for dissolved into silence.

The truth that came to me did not arrive with trumpet blasts. It came lightly, like dust drifting through a sunbeam. I realized I had not been searching for love, at least not the steady kind that endures when storms roll in. I had been searching for attention. I wanted to be noticed so deeply that I could finally see myself. That understanding carried weight, but it also brought comfort. It helped me understand why I kept reaching for sparks that were never meant to warm a whole winter.

Negative attention is not good attention. It took me years to understand that. I once mistook any kind of notice for connection, even the kind that left me feeling smaller than before. I thought being seen in the wrong light was better than not being seen at all. But negative attention thins the soul. It chips away at the parts of you that are still learning how to stand. It leaves you aching for validation from people who were never meant to carry your heart. Healthy love never asks you to shrink. Real belonging never requires you to disappear.

I have forgiven the younger woman I was. She tried to outrun loneliness with all the strength she had. She reached for flickers of light in dark places because she did not yet know how to kindle warmth within herself. And I will not judge anyone who stands where I once stood. Hurting hearts will grasp for anything that glows. We are human. We long to feel seen. We long to feel chosen. We long to feel worthy of the love we carry inside us.

But there comes a turning point. A quiet shift in the soul. It arrives when you stop begging to be chosen and start choosing yourself. You begin to understand who you are when no one else is clapping for you. You begin to notice the difference between those who love your light and those who only want its glow. You learn that love is steady and patient. Love is not rushed or reckless. Love stays when the air grows heavy and the night grows long. Attention is a spark. Love is the slow burning fire that warms a whole life.

Healing begins when you stop running from your own reflection. When you lift your face and tell the truth. You were never unlovable. You were unanchored. The right relationships come from rooted places. They rise when you are no longer performing for affection but standing firm in a worth that does not bend with someone else’s presence or absence.

If your heart is weary today, or you feel suspended in the waiting, take courage. Restoration does not rush. It comes softly, the way morning light slides across a mountain ridge. One slow sweep of gold and lavender at a time. And when it reaches you, it brings clarity. It reveals the difference between what once pulled you in and what will finally carry you forward.

A new chapter begins the moment you honor where you have been and rise anyway. The moment you decide the story will not end in that hollow place. The moment you believe you are worth more than the attention you once begged for. There is beauty in beginning again. There is strength in becoming whole. And there is hope waiting for you in the quiet spaces where your heart finally learns to rest.