In 2019, when I lost my beloved cat Sutti, I wrote a letter through tears. She was more than a pet. She was love incarnate. Losing her opened up a grief so deep and pure, it reminded me of something I had always known but never fully grasped: only love and truth open the floodgates of the repressed emotions of the child we once were.
And not the counterfeit love most people perform. Not the intellectualized, mimicked understanding that passes for "healing" in self-help books and therapy circles. Real love. A love that lives and breathes. A love that sees and feels.
All I ever wanted from Marty was love. That simple. Not perfection. Not rescue. Just authentic, feeling love. But instead, what I got was a crash course in unconscious defenses, emotional blindness, and the tragic repetition of childhood wounds.
In other words: I got a master’s in psychology.
I didn’t sign up for that degree. It was handed to me in pain. Every silence, every deflection, every moment Marty pulled away instead of leaning in forced me to go deeper into myself. And in that descent, I uncovered the truth: he wasn't rejecting me — he was rejecting the parts of himself he never dared to face.
He was reenacting. And so was I.
But I was also waking up.
Loving Sutti was different. There were no mind games. No projection. Just presence. She reminded me that love doesn’t demand, it flows. And it stays.
In a letter I wrote after her passing, I said:
"It took me a lifetime to liberate myself and create a home for myself. I’m looking forward to retirement and just spending the rest of my life with just me and the beings I love most... Now that I have created a home for myself and I’m emotionally free -- I wish I could live forever."
That’s what emotional freedom feels like. It’s not a theory. It’s a state of being. It’s the ability to grieve without collapsing, to love without clinging, and to walk away from reenactments that once felt like destiny.
Most people never experience this. They live in constant survival mode, surrounded by others just as wounded, just as lost. They read the books. They collect the quotes. But they never let the floodgates open. They never let truth and love break the dam.
"Without truth and truly loving ourselves and another breathing living being, we will never become a seeing and a feeling person, no matter how many self-help books we read..."
I look around and see people going through the motions. They masquerade as love while manipulating those around them. They don’t even know they’re doing it — because their childhood pain is still buried beneath layers of denial and pretense.
Marty wasn’t a bad person. He was just too afraid to feel. And in trying to love him, I was forced to feel everything. That’s what freed me.
My childhood and teenage years were the saddest chapters of my life. Most of adulthood was survival. But now? Now, I am home. Within myself. Within love.
I wish Sutti could be here for my retirement years. I wish we had more time. But what comforts me is knowing she experienced the real me — the one who became love.
And maybe that’s the final lesson:
We stop falling in love when we start becoming it. And if ever we meet another soul who has done the same, we don’t fall — we rise together.
As I reflect deeper on my journey, I think of a quote I once shared in an old blog from 2012:
“It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.” — Haruki Murakami
Going into the dark chamber of our soul alone — or with the wrong witness — can be extremely dangerous. Some people don’t come back from that descent. Some, like James Holmes, unleash their inner chaos onto the world. That’s why we need enlightened witnesses like Alice Miller. People who don’t look away. Who helps us face and feel our true story safely, without harming ourselves or others.
Because when we have the courage to open that door with truth and love as our compass, we don’t just find our story. We liberate it.
Read the 2012 reflection here.
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