The moment there is recognition of what is real, everything that was buried inside begins to rise…
Fear teaches the heart to calculate how close one can safely allow another to come before closeness starts to feel like danger. Every disappointment trains the mind to anticipate loss, even when loss never actually happens. Each experience of abandonment builds the resilience of the one who learns not to need anything or anyone, while betrayal teaches to hide the places that have not yet healed. Eventually, we cement these shields into the character and wear them as identity. We stop seeing these shields for what they are: fear disguised as protection. Shields that made us forget who we were before we needed them.
Then love enters like an unexpected houseguest, without asking permission and with very little concern for what we had planned. Just when we think we have understood ourselves, another human being appears and shows that self-knowledge acquired without intimacy may have been only the introductory course.
This is the point where intimacy becomes terrifying. We think that fear is the opposite of love. But what I am discovering now is that fear appears precisely because love has reached a place where we can no longer stay untouched and stagnant.Â
All the fears we had so carefully and neatly tucked away start to rise to the surface. What was hidden behind the mask can’t stay hidden. Love reaches into the places we learned to protect, bringing forward the fear of abandonment, rejection, betrayal, loss, and being truly seen.Â
Genuine intimacy is the process of discovering oneself through another. We look into another being deeply enough, beyond their history, personality, wounds, beauty, roles, and projections, and eventually discover the same mystery looking back at us. That which lives as me lives as you.Â