Rising From the Ashes: A Woman’s Journey to Finding Love Within

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At 40, she had never experienced love—not real love. She had grown up in a toxic environment surrounded by dysfunction, where love was more of a concept than a reality. She had seen glimpses of what she thought love was, accepted what was given, and convinced herself that it was enough.

But deep down, she knew it wasn’t.

Year after year, the same script played out in her life, just with different characters. The names changed, the faces changed, but the cycle remained the same. And at some point, she could predict the ending before the story even began.

The Wake-Up Call: A Mindset Shift

Her pastor always told her, "You have to change your mindset." But what did that even mean? She had no blueprint, no reference for what healthy love looked like. So, she carried on, unaware of the depths of the wounds she was operating from.

Until one day, the teacher appeared.

It’s said that when the student is ready, the teacher will show up. When she finally reached a point where she was exhausted from repeating the same pain, her lesson began. Life forced her to reflect and deconstruct everything she thought she knew about love, relationships, and, most importantly, herself.

Healing was not easy; it was painful. It required her to unlearn survival tactics she once thought were love: people-pleasing, overextending, accepting the bare minimum, and mistaking chaos for passion. She had to accept that much of what she had accepted in the past was simply a reflection of what she thought she deserved.

But she did the work. She unraveled years of conditioning, released the need for validation, and learned to pour into herself the way she had always longed for someone else to do.

Still Believing in Love

With everything she had gone through, no one would blame her for giving up on love. It would have been easy to become hardened, to accept that maybe love just wasn’t in the cards for her.

But she still believed.

Not in the fairytales, not in the illusions she once clung to, but in something deeper. A love that felt like home. Not a home built on dysfunction, pain, or survival, but one rooted in peace, safety, and reciprocity.

She knew now that the love she longed for could only be experienced once she truly embraced the most important love of all—the love within herself.

And so, at 40, she was no longer waiting. She was becoming.

The love she deserved would find her on this path of healing, growth, and authenticity, and now she was finally ready to receive it.

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