18/01/2026 - Bare, unfiltered, exposed.

Hello readers,

I feel slightly overwhelmed this morning. I’ve been staring at this screen for almost an hour, unable to write a single word, not because there are none, but because there are too many. They’re all trying to come through at once, fighting for priority, for shape, for order. So I’ll take it step by step. I’ll unfold it instead of forcing it.

This book (this entry is a part of the book I'm writing) will be finished in a month. And as proud and excited as I am about it, I’m also terrified. Because committing to it means I will publish it. It means being seen as I am, bare, unfiltered, exposed. I’m offering a very vulnerable scene here. One that requires not only courage to create, but courage to hold. My nervous system needs to be trained to tolerate this level of visibility.

My mind decided to create a project my soul believes in. And now my body has to go through everything that comes with making it real. That’s the tricky part. I have a visionary mind. It naturally thinks beyond social norms, conditioning, and personal comfort. But vision comes with responsibility, the responsibility to care for the body that must carry it into matter.

And when I speak about caring for the body, I don’t mean food, exercise, or discipline in the conventional sense. I mean the body as an emotional data storage. The mind stores memories and narratives. The body stores emotions and reactions.

The two meet through the ego, my unconscious self, whose only mission is safety. The ego draws conclusions from past events and turns them into predictive mechanisms. Automatic responses. Patterns. I can’t believe I just wrote that, I really am the woman I believe I am lol.

The ego isn’t the enemy. It’s protective by nature. But its understanding is limited.

If I simplify it, imagine I once got burned by fire. My mind recorded the presence of fire. My body recorded the pain. And my ego concluded that fire is dangerous. Left unquestioned, this can become trauma. Even phobia. A complete rejection of fire. Irrational, uncontrollable.

This is where I come in. By "I", I mean the awareness inhabiting this body. The part of me capable of observing with distance. With distance, my mind can reframe the event. Fire isn’t inherently dangerous. Fire is dangerous when I touch it.

For a long time, I believed that understanding this was enough. Once my mind had reframed the story, the work was done. I was free. But over the years, I noticed something else. Sometimes I understood perfectly. I avoided the situations that once caused pain. And yet, my body still reacted. There was no fire in the room anymore, but I still felt the burn. I wasn’t afraid of fire. But my body behaved as if it was.

And yes, I could live like that. Fire isn’t essential to survival anymore. But it would also mean never experiencing its gentler side. The soft light. The dancing flames. The warmth of embers. It would mean rejecting pleasure alongside danger. And I wasn’t willing to do that.

That’s when I realized something fundamental. Taking care of the body’s memory is just as important as reframing the mind’s story. And that requires something far less comfortable. It requires sitting with the sensation I tried so hard to avoid. Revisiting it without the physical threat present. Letting the body react, discharge, recalibrate.

It requires reconditioning the nervous system, not just educating the mind. Understanding that yes, I could burn myself again. But also knowing that I survived before. That I learned. That I can trust myself not to repeat the same unconscious movement. And just as importantly, not blaming fire for the pain. Fire wasn’t the enemy. My lack of awareness was.

By taking responsibility with my mind for what led to the burn, and releasing the fear stored in my body, I become free again. Not naïve. Not invincible. But integrated. I grow through it. And I can be proud, not for avoiding pain, but for meeting it consciously instead of letting my ego dictate my life from the shadows.

I become the programmer behind the processor of my human system. I no longer wait passively for life to happen to me. I step into the driver’s seat. I may not know the destination, but I trust my ability to navigate the road. Which allows me to stay open to life’s beauty, because I know I can handle its pain.

After writing this, I feel both stunned and humble. Stunned by the depth of what’s unfolding. Humbled by the realization that I’m probably only touching the surface. We are complex in our simplicity.

And this brings me back to the book itself. Because visibility is what I’m writing with right now. Not as a concept, but as a lived direction I consciously chose. My mind rewrote the narrative along the way. It understands why being seen matters to me, why this exposure is necessary, why this story needs to exist outside of me.

But my body remembers something else. It remembers past moments when visibility meant judgment. When opening myself meant rejection. When being vulnerable came with pain. So now, even though there is no fire in the room, my nervous system still reacts as if there were.

This is the work I’m in at the moment. Not convincing my mind, it already knows. But gently meeting my body where it learned to brace, to contract, to protect. And the fire doesn’t stop being fire here. Visibility is fire. Love is fire. Creation is fire. So is intimacy, truth, ambition, and freedom.

Fire can burn, yes. But it can also illuminate, warm, gather, and transform. And the lesson is never to avoid it entirely, nor to throw myself into it unconsciously. The lesson is to learn how to sit near it, how to tend it, how to trust myself in its presence. This is true for every experience in life.

Pain doesn’t mean danger forever. Fear doesn’t mean no. And protection doesn’t always mean retreat. When the mind takes responsibility for meaning, and the body is allowed to release what it has been carrying, the experience stops ruling us. It becomes something we can relate to, rather than something we must escape.

And maybe that’s what freedom actually looks like.

Not the absence of fire.

But the ability to stay present beside it.

With love, Loune.