Echoes of Queen

   “If you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche I have loved this quote for years before I understood it. It was beautiful. Mysterious. Haunting. It sat in my Notes app, in random captions, in the quiet corners of my mind. Oh, I loved how Nietzsche played with words. I admired the quote without fully grasping it. Until it became something I had lived through instead of something I had simply admired. Now I understand it the way you understand a scar, not from reading about it, but from touching it. Here's what nobody tells you about trauma: You do not just carry it. If you're not careful, you start to become the shape of it. The Fear That Built the Very Thing I Feared I used to tell myself, almost like a prayer, that I would never become my trauma. I said it to myself in the mirror. I said it in my journal. I said it every time an old wound tried to resurface. I refuse to become this. But fear does something strange when you feed ...

 We like to believe we're rational creatures. We often tell ourselves that when something or someone hurts us, we'll leave it behind. We'll walk away, close the chapter, and never look back. But the heart has never obeyed logic. Sometimes, the very place that breaks us is the place we instinctively run to in search of healing. That is the cruel irony of pain. Pain has a strange way of exposing the parts of us that logic cannot reach. It reveals that we are not merely creatures of reason. We are creatures of attachment. We don't always run toward what is good for us. More often than not, we run toward what once felt like home. Perhaps that's why healing is rarely as simple as "letting go," as we so quickly like to say. When we hear the statement, "You want to be soothed by the very fire that burned you," our minds immediately wander to romance. A broken heart. A relationship that ended. A love that became a wound. But I don't believe this iron...