I used to think acceptance would feel like clarity but with a bright neon sign – Beetlejuice style. Instead, it arrived quietly. No revelation. No grand healing arc.

Just a tired kind of peace.

And I damn sure don’t mean the kind of “peace” they sell in books. More like that exhale when you realize you’ve been clinching your muscles for years – usually because you have. I know I have.

Dating after abuse is extremely hard for me. For a long time, I treated love like a mountain I had to summit. If I could just be more open, more healed, more patient – more, more, more – maybe I would finally arrive somewhere safe. But every time I tried, something in my chest tightened. My body always remembers things my mind wished it could forget.

And for a long time, I believed the problem was me.

You see, my nervous system doesn’t believe that love is safe. As early as I can remember, I was taught that love was harm. Love meant control, abuse and not being believed.

The friendships I’ve built after abuse have taught me that some love is safe. But I have never been safe in romantic love. Ever. And still, something in me craved it.

But, something inside of me has shifted recently. I’m not sure “better” is the right word. Softer, maybe. Less combative with myself.

I stopped trying to convince my nervous system that romantic love is safe before it’s ready to believe it. And as strange as it sounds, that has made me feel lighter. Not hopeful exactly, but less at war with reality.

Next week I’m hiking Slide Mountain.

It’s close to home. It’s not dramatic or flashy, but it’s steady. A long, quiet climb through trees, rock and breath. The kind of trail that doesn’t demand transformation, just presence. That’s what I appreciate most about hiking, it never makes me feel like I have to outrun anything. No emotional summit waiting at the top. Just asks for my presence, my movement.

And there’s something honest about hiking when you’re tired. You don’t go to conquer the mountain. You go because your body still knows how to move forward, one step at a time. Especially when your heart feels heavy. And mine almost always is.

None of my hikes have been about reinvention. This one will be no different, only coexisting with grief and steadiness in the same backpack. Letting the forest hold things I don’t need to solve right now.

For years, I thought acceptance meant deciding something permanent about my life: who I would love, what I would have, what was or wasn’t “in my cards.” But lately, acceptance feels more like loosening my grip on the question entirely.

Maybe love will look different than I imagined. Maybe it won’t arrive at all. Right now, I’m allowing myself to rest from trying to predict it.

There is a quiet dignity in tired acceptance.

It says: I can live a full, textured life without forcing a future my body doesn’t trust yet. A future my body may never trust. I can walk into the woods carrying my history – my messy, heavy, hard history – without it needing me to make it softer. Without needing to rewrite it mid-trail.

I can breathe without performing hope.

That’s enough for this season.

Next week, when my boots hit the trail, I’m going to stop asking the mountain for answers. I’m just going to walk – steady, imperfect, honest, alive – and let the landscape hold me.

Sometimes healing isn’t about reaching a new peak.

Sometimes it’s about choosing the trail anyway.