Baba Yaga The Wise

Describe one positive change you have made in your life.

I learned to stop abandoning myself.

For most of my life, I bent like a branch in other people’s winds—shaping, softening, offering more than I could sustain. I called it love. I called it responsibility. But somewhere in the quiet, my spirit thinned.

So I chose to turn inward.

Not out of selfishness, but out of necessity. Out of a deep knowing that something essential in me was being lost. To choose myself meant breaking old spells—people-pleasing, overgiving, the quiet bargains I made to be accepted. It meant seeing clearly the ways I had participated in my own diminishment, and beginning the slow, deliberate work of changing.

There is a cost to breaking patterns. When you step out of a role others depend on, it unsettles the ground. Some were hurt. Some did not understand. But I could no longer live in a way that required my silence to keep the peace.

In solitude, I began to hear myself again. I sifted through old wounds, old stories, old identities that no longer fit. I learned that healing is not a single moment, but a practice of returning—again and again—to truth.

I have not done this perfectly. I have faltered, questioned, and grieved the years spent disconnected from myself. But even in that, there has been wisdom.

Now, I move differently. More rooted. More intentional. I no longer disappear to be loved. I stand in myself and let love meet me there—or not at all.

And in that choosing, something unexpected happened.

Life began to open.

Not loudly, not all at once—but in quiet, steady ways. New opportunities. Deeper connections. A sense of belonging that does not come from being needed, but from simply being.

For the first time, I do not feel like I am performing my life.

I am living it.