It’s like riding your bike and hitting a pothole you didn’t see coming. One second you’re coasting, the next you’re flying over the handlebars, elbows, knees, palms meeting the pavement.

Dirt, rocks, gravel, blood, everywhere. Just when you think the worst is over, you realize it’s not. The fall wasn’t the most painful part, it was just the just the beginning. The hardest part comes when you have to clean it.

I can remember vividly the sting of a skinned knee, the way I would try to hide and shield it. I didn’t want anyone to pour peroxide on it or pick out the gravel. I didn’t want to wash it, or touch it, or even look at it. Because that hurt worse than the fall itself.

And that’s exactly what happens with our emotional wounds. We take a hit, sometimes small, sometimes catastrophic, and instead of cleaning it out so it can heal properly, we wrap it up. We hide it. We tell ourselves— Don’t touch it. Don’t breathe on it. Don’t even look at it. Because to really face it feels like it would destroy us.

At first, the tonic often hurts worse than the tear.

That’s the part no one warns you about, the sting of truth, the shock of air hitting an old wound, the way it bubbles and burns when the medicine finally reaches what’s been festering underneath. But that’s what is required for lasting healing to take place.

If you don’t clean or set a broken bone, you can still get by. You might walk with a limp, but you’re walking. You adapt. You start to believe this is just how life feels now, a dull ache you learn to live with. Until one day, you realize you’ve forgotten what it’s like to move through the world without pain at all.

And that’s what happened here. I’ve been doing the deep cleaning. The kind that makes you want to scream and flinch and run from your own skin. No anesthetic, no numbing, no shortcuts. Full frontal field medicine. Extracting the bits and pieces that had been lodged in a soul-level wound for a lifetime.

It’s been rough, my friends. So rough. But it’s done now.

The history remains unchanged. What happened, happened. Damage was done and there’s still a scar, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. I can touch it, look at it, talk about it without wincing or hiding or pretending it’s not there. It’s just part of my experience now, not all of me. It doesn’t define me. It doesn’t hurt me. And it doesn’t control how I move through the world anymore.

I came to North Carolina on a multi-dimensional mission, and I’m leaving with every single objective met. Charlie is safe. Her assets are protected. And for the first time in my life, I am truly free to move about the world without a looming anxiety about the day when I might be forced to deal with this, to clean up and make sense of this mess once and for all. Peace and freedom. That’s what I came for and that’s what I’m leaving with. That and so much more.

I had come to terms with the situation before I arrived. I’d grieved it, accepted it, managed it, built around it. But this is different. Though this experience and process, I found a way to make the whole thing work for me. Everything is a gift when you learn how to work with it.

The peace I have now wasn’t born from resignation; this is peace born from release. I have never known this level of calm in soul. What was once the deepest wound of my life, the mother wound that shaped everything from how I loved to how I led, is no longer there. I don’t feel it anymore. Not because I’ve numbed it or buried it, but because it’s healed. It’s no longer something that I’ll have to deal with eventually, something waiting for me in the future. It’s dealt with. It’s done. What used to ache is now quiet. What once felt heavy is simply gone.

Peace and freedom are not external prizes. They are internal practices, states of being that begin to return the moment we stop resisting them. I don’t feel free because anyone handed it to me; I feel free because I cleared out all the things that once convinced me I wasn’t.

That clearing hurt like hell. Emotional wounds are real, and they infect every part of our lives if we don’t tend to them. To heal, the medicine has to go deeper than the wound. I had to reopen mine, the oldest, deepest one, and clean it down to the bone. It was brutal. But when the infection was gone, so was the limp.

I told y’all at the very beginning of the month, everybody who watches my Instagram stories knows, that October has historically been my least favorite month. At least for the past fifteen years, it’s carried a kind of weight, some shadow that grew darker and heavier year after year. But I feel differently now.

After getting to the root of this mother wound, I’m lifting my head and going through the catalog of long-held pains, and that tome is not nearly as thick as it once was. There are so many things that just don’t hurt anymore.

It’s wild, now that this one enormous thing, this wound that had been breaking my heart in a thousand different ways for so long, doesn’t ache anymore, everything else feels lighter.

The weight that lived on my heart, my mind, my soul, it’s gone. And in its absence, all the other stuff I used to obsess over? Potentials never realized, personal and professional heartbreaks— the could’ve should’ve would’ve’s that used to play on repeat in my mind late at night— the lot of it just doesn’t seem to fucking matter anymore.

By diving deep into the darkest place, into the most painful part of my story, most everything else suddenly feels like small potatoes.

I’ve been holding my breath for a long time, maybe years if I’m honest. These last three months have been a consistent, steady inhale. Doing the work. Staying composed. Carrying the weight until it was safe to set it down. And that moment has come.

This victory is free of fanfare. No fireworks, no applause, just a felt sense of peace and the quiet release of something I’ve been holding for too long. The tension has drained from my body. My nervous system finally believes what my mind has been whispering: it’s over. I no longer have to wait for the day to arrive, its already behind me.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I can breathe freely. Slow, steady, real breaths that reach all the way down to my core. For ages I’ve been waiting to exhale like this, and it’s indescribable. Well worth what it took to get here, even though it was a lot more than I thought I bargained for.

Now, as I prepare to pack up and close this chapter, I can honestly say: all is well with my soul. Everything that once hurt me no longer defines me. Everything that once felt like punishment now feels like preparation.

It looks like I have one more week here. Tying up the last of the paperwork and transfers before I head west and toward what’s next. Moving forward, I’m not just living this work. I’m teaching it.

In the coming year, I’ll be sharing the system I’ve applied here, a grounded, repeatable method for emotional healing that anyone can use. Because I’m not special. My story isn’t unique.

For so long, I wore my wounds like armor and called them identity, the full complement of childhood abuse, the orphan-soul persona, all the stories that convinced me I was different in my pain. But the more I spoke honestly about my experiences, the more people told me their own. Different details, same stories. That’s when I realized: we are not alone in our suffering. We are united in it, and we can be united in our healing too.

I once told a group of people I wanted a future that didn’t require me to choose between the labels of victim or survivor. I didn’t know then what the alternative could be, I just knew I that there had to be a door #3. All these years later I’ve found it, its called healed. And I made it for myself.

It’s grief work. It’s hard work. It’s identity work. It’s trauma work. It’s all of it, all at once. And it’s doable. You have to take every step for yourself, but not by yourself.

I wouldn’t call it easy. Not glamorous. But possible. And when you stay with it long enough, it gives you back everything you thought you lost.

If I can do it, you can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. The formula isn’t sexy. It takes grit, patience, and a willingness to tell yourself the truth all the damn time. But it works. It’s objective. It’s repeatable. It’s a path to freedom in all of it’s forms. And I’m beyond excited to share what I’ve learned.

It’s not that there aren’t going to continue to be growth edges and more places to explore, but I’m no longer running from anything. I don’t feel the need to. I’m ready to apply this method anywhere it’s called for, from here on out, with confidence, knowing that what’s behind me has prepared me for whatever may be yet to come.

I’m grateful for what happened here, even though I didn’t want it. I’m grateful for what it revealed, even though it burned. And I’m grateful for what comes next, a life that doesn’t need to defend its wounds anymore.

Because peace and freedom aren’t rewards for surviving; they’re our natural states waiting underneath all the noise to be reclaimed.

And they are available to everyone willing to do the work.

-Sunny