It’s been three years that I’ve taken pen to paper. I stopped blogging and I disappeared.
Not physically, no. My body still showed up, did what it had to do, sometimes even smiled. But something inside me had been silenced, gently at first, then completely. I stopped writing. And without knowing it at the time, I stopped breathing with ease.
I didn’t name it then. How could I? I didn’t know what was broken in me. Only that I was broken.
I was navigating a season where everything around me, and everything inside me, felt like fog. I spent what now feels like three years watching life happen from a distance, as if I had been exiled from my own body, my own becoming. I was a spectator. A ghost with responsibilities.
During those years, I lost pieces.
Friendships I thought were anchored quietly drifted into silence. My sense of direction blurred. My rituals, once a sacred conversation between me and the Divine—felt hollow. My spiritual self, the part of me that used to kneel in awe and rise in gratitude, fell asleep. And I, not knowing how to wake her, simply let her be.
I was not numbed. I was aware. Aware that I was not well. Aware that I didn’t know what healing would look like, or if it would even come. I was just… floating. Functioning. Smiling for others. Caving inwards. Forgetting to ask myself what I needed.
And then, as life often does, it moved me.
Literally. I had to pack up everything, leave Tunisia, the place that had held me during the birth of my children and brokenness, and move to France.
That decision, that movement, broke the surface of the still water I had been lying in. It did not fix me. It did not erase my wounds. But it shook something loose. It allowed the idea of spring to enter. You know? That moment when something within you stretches again, timid but alive. A flutter.
That flutter was the desire to write.
Not to publish. Not to perform.
Just write.
And that desire… it felt like a hand reaching for me through the dark. That simple, sacred whisper…“Write.”…was the first sign that I was healing. Not healed. But healing.
It reminded me that rebirth is rarely loud. It’s not always triumphant or bright. Sometimes, it’s slow and unsure. Sometimes, it begins in a moment you could miss if you’re not paying attention. A sentence. A word. A prayer. A sigh. A tear that comes without understanding why.
And that’s where I am now. In the space between endings and beginnings. In the place where new skin is forming over old wounds. In the liminality of not-yet-whole but no-longer-broken.
I still carry sadness. I still question a lot.
I still ask myself if I’ll ever feel “complete.”
But I also feel something else now: the quiet certainty that I am walking toward something more honest. More aligned. More me.
And here’s the truth:
We don’t always have to wait for joy to be perfect to begin again.
Sometimes the act of beginning, of writing, breathing, praying, showing up—is what calls joy back in.
So here I am. Writing again.
A bit more fragile. A bit more tender. But deeply aware that this is what the beginning of a new life feels like.
And you?
What are you quietly returning to?
What whispers are asking for your attention?