22/09/2025 - The freedom I’ve been chasing all my damn life.

Crazy how my body has completely adapted to this new lifestyle. I don’t even feel the twenty to twenty-five kilometers anymore. We’re meant to change, to adapt, and in that process, to evolve. If the body can do it, then so can the mind and the heart.

That’s what I was thinking about while walking this morning. How the Camino keeps pushing me out of my comfort zone, forcing me to adapt, and therefore to grow. I’m recognizing what truly matters, what I am really made of. Not what I think I do, or what I wish I was, but my essence.

I’m making space inside my thoughts, finishing cycles, clearing patterns, circling endlessly back to myself. What an incredible opportunity to face myself day after day. In my “normal” life I can’t, there are too many distractions. And thank god for them, I wouldn’t want to sustain this intensity forever. But being here now, I see how precious it is to give myself this moment. To stop, to meet myself fully, to look at every angle of who I am.

It highlights so clearly what’s superficial, what lies I’ve kept telling myself. It pulls up the core wounds that repeat, the ones asking to be healed. It reveals everything I’ve tried to hide, to mask, to bury. And in that exposure, I feel more whole, more accepting of every piece of myself, more authentic. This is the freedom I’ve been chasing all my damn life. And for the first time, it feels accessible.

Even in my writing, I used to care too much about perception. I liked the idea of a book because it meant I could keep it hidden for a while, protected in the shadows, promising myself that “one day” I’d reveal it. But not yet. Well, this is me. I am all of that, and more that I don’t even know yet. I am not fixed in time. What I write today I might contradict tomorrow. I am moving, unfinished, and I always will be. But I accept whatever wants to come through me. I release control over how it’s received. Even if badly judged, it’s still my truth, and truth is unique.

I love my truth. Doesn’t mean I love all of it. Some parts still trigger me, but I accept them. I’ve stopped battling myself. I raised a white flag and decided we’d be at peace, contradictions and all. And I don’t think I’ve ever felt this serene within myself. It’s not the shallow “I don’t care what others think.” It’s the deeper “I know what others might think, and I’m okay with it, because my own opinion of myself matters more.” I always believed this state existed, but I couldn’t fully lean into it until now.

It’s through audacity that I arrived here. By daring to do what feels uncomfortable, to me. Maybe not for someone else, but for me, yes. And I did it anyway. I looked my discomfort in the eyes and moved toward it. My biggest trigger being people's perception, my appearance, what I post, the judgments I hold onto. All of it tied to the same thing: the fact that I cannot control how others see me. Over the years, I’ve surrendered piece by piece. Releasing, confronting, daring. Every time finding something valuable on the other side.

Am I fully there yet? No. But I’m on my way. Maybe it’s aligned with my Saturn return in the 11th house of circles, belonging, affiliation, social medias... Maybe my birth chart really is a design meant to guide me toward embodiment and acceptance. It feels like it.

On the Camino today, I walked with that energy. At peace. Like the hidden anxiety and unconscious control lifted overnight. Since I realized I’m ready to claim the identity I desire, and not let myself be shaken anymore.

And okay, here we go again. I know I said I’d stop writing about this subject. That was two entries ago. And then again yesterday. And yet here I am, third round, still circling back. Honestly, I can walk twenty kilometers without breaking a sweat, but apparently I can’t walk away from this topic just yet.

But the truth is, Johana and I talk about whatever is raw and alive for us in the moment. The past few days, it’s been love. So of course I updated her. And what I claimed to her was simple: I want one partner. My partner. The man I’ll share my life with. She knew about it obviously, but she used to have some reserves around it too. Now, I could tell that she understood it was my path, and a part of my story necessary to embody the woman I am becoming.

This quest for love has been the teacher I never asked for but always needed. It forced me to learn devotion to myself first. To see the difference between compromise, which is natural, and sacrifice, which erases me. It showed me how easily I confused chaos for passion, and how often I chased unavailable men as if their distance proved my worth. It made me face my own escapist tendencies, the ways I dissociated when things got real, and how often I betrayed my innocence just to be relatable. It’s through all this that I discovered commitment isn’t a prison, it’s safety. That real intimacy doesn’t shrink me, it grounds me. And that love isn’t something I’ll find “out there” unless I embody it here, in myself first.

So yes, it’s here again on the page. But lighter now, not in loops. Just the truth: I want one man, the right man, and I’m finally becoming the woman who can meet him fully. Because I am full of this love already.

With love, Loune.