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Welcome to the In Spirit Podcast. I promised I would never write about it. How can I, my tears guiding the lines around it? My fear as I fall and fall and fall again, looking for something to hold on to, I think I'm fearless to live without it. But I've given myself away again, and now I have nothing to hide in. I am there in front of it, naked and crying, trying to be everything that I need to be, so I put on a costume and I dance to be seen. It'll cost me my shell for their fire, but at last what it means to breathe. So why does it burn when I enclose around it, pretending it were my own when I've just found it? We treat the child within us all very differently. Everyone has a child within us, whether we know or not. I spent the last twenty six years of my life shutting him out and pretending like he didn't exist. A boy trapped in a cell. I spent twenty six years embodying a masculinity that felt empowering fitness, career growth, financial growth, materialistic success, but I always felt like I was goddamn running. I couldn't bear to sit in my own head, I couldn't bear to hear the boy inside me still crying until I had no choice. Success is doing what everyone desires. Fulfillment is being who you truly are. I've spent so long being someone else, abandoning who I am for others around me, abandoning the kid who had already been abandoned enough, wondering what the hell he did wrong. I realized that there wasn't enough space for me in my own life. I realized I was on someone else's path. I was giving myself away to others to find the love of the boy trapped in the cell of my own soul. Each time finally breathing but getting burnt as I enclose around it, because it was never my own. I had just found it.