Surrender has never been my thing.
It’s always been the last resort—and I think that might be true for most of us.

Surrender isn’t a soft word. It’s a war term.
It’s the moment in battle when you lay down your weapons because you’ve come to a truth you can’t outfight.

It’s not a passive experience—it’s a deliberate act of cooperation with what’s stronger than you.

And it’s certainly not effortless.

And for me? It has never been my first choice.

Who walks into a situation hoping to surrender? Not me.

I enter trying to win.
Trying to protect.
Trying to control the outcome.

Surrender usually comes when all of that stops working—and sometimes not until I’ve exhausted myself in the fight.

When I first heard what needed to happen for Charlie, and the situation unfolding in North Carolina, my immediate response was:

Absolutely not.
Anybody but me.

Someone else is more qualified.
I don’t have a relationship with her, and besides—she needs tenderness I can’t offer.

She wasn’t there for me—why the hell should I be there for her now?

It all sounded so reasonable. So perfectly rationalized.
But none of it was actually true.

The longer I sat with my “no,” the more I saw it for what it was—resistance.
And that resistance was keeping me from the very thing I want most: peace and freedom in every corner of my life.

No one could have forced me to take this on—and plenty of people completely understood why I felt the way I did.

But in the quiet moments, when I was with myself and honest in reflection, I had to admit that my “no” was rooted in fear.
It was rooted in self-protection.
It was rooted in expired anger.

I hadn’t stopped to ask whether the boundary I set fifteen years ago—no contact—was still necessary.

Back then, it was essential for my safety. It kept me protected at a time when I truly needed distance.

But boundaries should guard our well-being, not barricade us from possibility.
And when they start preventing us from growing, they’re no longer protection.

They’re just walls.
Self-imposed limitations.

I told myself this wound was handled.
Not that I’d found peace—but that I’d found forgiveness.

I’d been working on it, on purpose, for a long time.
Years of looking at my own patterns, my own history, my own part in the mess.

I’d come to a place where I could see the truth in that old saying: hurt people hurt people.

Not intentionally. Not because they wake up in the morning planning to cause harm.

But I know from my own life that when I was carrying a spinning ball of pain and chaos inside me, it inevitably hit the people around me. I had hurt people I loved and been the one causing damage—more than once—even when I didn’t mean to.

From that place of self-reflection, I found real understanding.
I found compassion.
I found forgiveness for the people who had hurt me—including, and most importantly, her.

But peace? That was still out of reach.

Because my forgiveness was conditional.
I could forgive as long as I didn’t have to look at it.
As long as I didn’t have to touch it.
As long as I didn’t have to interact with it or keep it in my daily life.

I could forgive from a safe distance.

But real peace—the kind that can stand in the same room with the thing that caused the wound—that was another story.

And here’s the thing about deep, unresolved pain: it doesn’t vanish just because you’ve decided to step around it.

It becomes a fault line in the terrain of your life.
Most days, you might not even notice it’s there.

But under the right pressure, it shifts. Cracks. Quakes.
And suddenly, you’re face-to-face with it again.

I realized I’d been making an unspoken exception in my own beliefs.

I’d been saying that no emotional wound is too deep to heal, no situation too far gone to find some kind of peace—
Except this one.
Except her.
Except us.

And if I left that exception in place, I wasn’t living in full integrity.
And that wasn’t something I was willing to ignore anymore.

So I had to ask myself:

Because if I believe emotional pain doesn’t have to last forever…
If I believe transformation is always possible…
If I believe no story, no scar, no grief is beyond repair…

Then my “no” couldn’t stay a “no.”
Not if I wanted to live the truth I share with others.

So my hard “no” began to shift.
It became a yes.
Not reluctant.
Not halfway.

A full-bodied, eyes-wide-open, willing surrender to the challenge and the opportunity life had dropped at my feet.

This wasn’t about being a good daughter.
It wasn’t about paying back a debt.
It wasn’t even about her.

It was about me.

For the peace I say I want.
For the integrity I choose to live by.
For the freedom I believe is possible.

So I packed my car.
Pointed it east.
And took to the highway.

Across state lines, in silence and through the ever-changing scenery, I let myself soften even more.

The hum of the tires became a kind of meditation.
Wild deserts gave way to lush farmland.
Rolling hills to city skylines.
Sunlight landing differently in each new place.

Somewhere along the way, the daily phone calls with her started to feel different too. Less forced. Less tense.

We weren’t circling old wounds or replaying the same tired scripts.

I found myself listening instead of bracing.
Speaking instead of defending.

And little by little, I started seeing her as a person—not the root of all my problems. Not a symbol of everything that had gone “wrong” in my life.

Just a human being, flawed and trying, carrying her own history.

And with every mile, I felt more peaceful.

Not because she’d changed. Not because the past had been erased.
But because I was showing up differently.

As I type this from my dear friend’s Chicago apartment, I realize there is still plenty of rubber yet to meet the road.

I don’t know what will happen when I get there.
There’s no way to know how the days will unfold or how the conversations will go.

But I do know this—surrendering my way to the highway isn’t just a one-time thing.
It’ll be a lifelong practice.
And I’m ready to embrace it.

Surrender, for me, has always come after a fight.
After I’ve exhausted every way of trying to bend reality to my will.
After I’ve resisted, argued, and tried to negotiate my way into a version of the story that feels safer, easier, or more familiar.

But here’s what I’m learning:
All that resistance is just time I could have spent in peace.

Surrender isn’t rolling over.
It’s not pretending you don’t care.

I heard it best described as, the active state of non-resistance.
It’s deciding—before the fight is over—that maybe the fight isn’t the point.

When I cut the fight short, when I let go of needing it to be my way, I stop burning energy on the illusion of control.

And in that space, something else has room to show up—creativity, connection, unexpected solutions, even joy.

If there’s one thing this trip is teaching me, it’s that surrender isn’t a moment.
It’s a muscle.

And the more you use it, the stronger—and easier—it gets.

The formula I’m working with now looks something like this:

Rinse and repeat.

Every time you run up against a hard no in your heart, check if it’s really danger… or if it’s just discomfort.

If it’s the latter, maybe that’s your cue to surrender.

Thanks for riding along with me on this one.
We’ll see where the road leads.

—Sunny

If you want to explore this work for yourself, these four books have shaped the way I think about surrender, forgiveness, and freedom:

Each offers a different doorway into letting go of the illusion of control—and stepping into something deeper, truer, and freer.