We Came Here Together
When you trust your pets more than you trust people
We’d just finished a release on self-acceptance. Friday’s call, near the end. She was about to leave. She said as much, then asked if she could say one more thing first.
Growing up, she didn’t trust people. So she loved dogs and cats instead. They were loyal. If anyone ever asked who she trusted most, she’d name a pet, because she couldn’t yet name a person.
Then, sitting with the release she’d just done, something else came into view.
Her body had been loyal to her the whole time. Through everything: arrests, protests, what she called her misunderstandings, it had never left.
We came here together, and we’re leaving out together.
Loyalty isn’t a promise you get from someone. It’s something you notice, afterward, has already been kept.
She’d spent years looking for it outside herself, in animals, in people she still wasn’t sure of. The one relationship that had held, every day without exception, wasn’t one she’d been managing at all.
I offered a different name for what she’d found: self-acceptance. Not something to build. Something already demonstrated, day after day, by the one part of her that kept showing up regardless.
She hadn’t gone looking for it there. The body wasn’t a substitute for the search. It just hadn’t been part of it.