She sees the cathedral
inside the stone.

I married at twenty. Had three children by thirty. Built a life the way women are taught to build one, around everyone else, on everyone else's needs, with everyone else's happiness as the metric.

For a long time, I called that love. It was self-abandonment. I just didn't have that word yet.

I divorced at forty-four. Started over. And because I hadn't yet understood the pattern underneath, I built a new chapter on the same old foundation. I remarried. We moved to Spain. By every external measure, it was the dream: the country, the light, the life I was supposed to want.

I was miserable.

Not in the dramatic, visible way. In the quiet way that women are miserable, functioning perfectly, performing beautifully, disappearing slowly. There was emotional abuse. There was a version of me who stayed because leaving meant admitting I'd gotten it wrong again. And then one morning I woke up and understood something I could no longer unknow: I had built my entire life on the wrong foundation. Not the wrong man. The wrong self. The one assembled from selflessness, from accommodation, from the quiet belief that my worth lived in what I gave.

In 2020, I chose one word: selfish.

I bought a one-way ticket back to Canada.

I came home and I began the real work. Not the performance of the work, but the actual excavation. I went down into the foundation I'd been standing on for fifty years and took it apart piece by piece. The self-abandonment. The need to be needed. The belief that wanting things for yourself was a character flaw. And I built something new in its place. Not from what I owed the world, but from who I actually was.

That word transformed every area of my life. My work. My relationships. The way I move through the world. I now live on the 27th floor in Vancouver, ocean, mountains, forest, sky, inside a life that is finally, completely mine.

This is why I do this work. Not because I studied it. Because I survived it, thrived inside it, and now I know exactly where to go when a woman is standing at the edge of her own before.

I can see the cathedral inside the stone. I hold that vision until she can see it herself.