I have spent most of my life feeling things I didn't have words for.
Not the kind that comes and goes. The kind that lives in you. The kind that becomes so familiar you stop recognizing it as something separate from yourself — you just think this is who you are. Sad. Heavy. Hard to love.
I have been in a relationship with someone who refused to believe that last part. And I have spent years trying to convince him otherwise.
I pushed him away. I went quiet when I needed to speak. I got angry when I meant I'm hurting. I disappeared into myself and told myself it was better that way — that I was protecting him from the worst of me. What I didn't understand then is that the disappearing was the worst of me. Not the sadness. The silence.
We hurt each other. We said things you can't unsay. We died a thousand small deaths and somehow kept choosing each other anyway. I don't fully understand that kind of love yet. I'm still learning to let it mean something.
This year I broke open. Not for the first time — but for the first time in a way that felt like something cracking apart rather than just falling. And somewhere in that — in the rubble of the hardest season of my life — I started writing.
Not because I had answers. I didn't. I still don't. But because I needed somewhere to put everything I was feeling and I had run out of places. I had run out of words that were big enough. So I made new ones.
That's what Anchor & Bloom is.
It's the words I wish someone had handed me when I was drowning. It's the phrases I couldn't find when I loved someone and didn't know how to say it. It's for the person lying awake at 3am loving someone through their low and not knowing if they're doing it right. And it's for the person on the other side of that — the one who wants so badly to be okay and doesn't know how to ask for help.
I built this from the broken parts. Not because I'm healed — but because I think the most honest thing I can do with my pain is turn it into something that reaches someone else in theirs.
If you found your way here, I don't think it was an accident.
You are so welcome here. 🌿
— Monica, Anchor & Bloom