Some of the most beautiful chapters begin with the quiet realization that you stayed longer than you should have. Not as self-criticism. As honesty. The places that had already said everything they had to say. The relationships that had reached the natural end of what they were. The life you kept returning to out of familiarity long after it had stopped being true. There is no shame in that. Staying was its own kind of trying. Its own form of hope. What is emerging is not more of the same with better execution. It is something entirely new. A chapter that could only begin from here. Not in spite of the past. Because you have finally taken from it what it came to teach. You are standing at the edge of something truer than what came before. And that changes what meets and matches you now.