Champagne Confessions

To be seen is to be loved.

We learn that early, even if no one ever says it out loud. We learn it in the way attention feels like oxygen, in the way neglect teaches us how to disappear without dying. What is loved must be seen, witnessed, acknowledged, held in someone else’s line of sight. what happens when that never comes? What happens when you live an entire life performing visibility and still feel fundamentally unseen?

We spend our lives wanting something. Not casually wanting, needing. We shape our choices around it. We wait for it. We tell ourselves stories about when it will arrive and who we will be once it does. We chase it through relationships, through ambition, through self-improvement, through silence. Time passes quietly while we’re reaching. Days stack into weeks, Weeks blur into years, and somewhere along the way, belief doesn’t break, it erodes. Slowly. Gently. Almost kindly.

You don’t wake up one day hopeless. You wake up reasonable.

You begin to believe less in yourself, less in the unreasonable size of your dreams. You start trimming them down to something more socially acceptable. Something that won’t embarrass you if it doesn’t work out. You learn to call this maturity. You learn to call this growth. Underneath it, something else is happening: you are learning how to live without being fully seen.

Resentment grows in that space,not sharp resentment, not the kind that screams. It’s quieter than that. It accumulate, It settles into the body, and one day you realize the ordinary isn’t neutral. It isn’t benign. It’s heavy. The routines, the repetitions, the constant emotional labor of showing up while feeling invisible, it weighs on you. Not enough to crush you. Just enough to make everything harder.

I still don’t know whether I lost my drive because I was disappointed too many times, or because I became afraid of failing publicly, afraid of wanting something so deeply that its absence would confirm what I had quietly suspected all along. That wanting, in itself, might be the vulnerability we are punished for.

So I learned contentment.

I learned how to praise the small things the way people do when they are trying to survive rather than thrive. Find the little joys, they say. As if joy is something you scale down when the bigger version feels too risky. As if wanting more is childish. As if hunger is a flaw.

Right now, my little joy is the life growing inside me.

And calling it “little” feels dishonest.

It is sacred.

It is overwhelming.

It is physically exhausting in ways no one warns you about.

It makes me nauseous and emotional and profoundly aware of my own fragility. It makes me soft in places I once armored. I rub my belly with awe, with disbelief, with tenderness that surprises me. And always, always, there is fear close behind. Not fear of creation. Creation is the easy miracle, bodies do that all the time. What terrifies me is what comes after.

Presence.

Being the kind of parent who does not look past what is asking to be seen. Being the kind of parent who doesn’t confuse love with provision, or safety with silence. Being the kind of parent who understands that children don’t need perfection, they need attention. They need to be witnessed. They need to know that their emotions make sense to someone outside of themselves.

That is the part that keeps me awake.

People say life changes when the baby arrives. That’s not true. Life changes long before that moment. It changes quietly, internally, without ceremony. My body has already changed. My thinking has changed. My emotional tolerance has shifted. My habits, my patience, my priorities, everything is rearranging itself without asking permission.

There is a particular kind of terror in that. The terror of becoming someone new without fully knowing who you’re leaving behind. The terror of realizing that you can never go back, not to the body you had, not to the freedom you took for granted, not to the version of yourself who only had to consider her own survival.

And yet, there is beauty there, too.

A strange, grounding beauty. A sense that something real is finally anchoring itself in your life. Not an idea. Not a hope. A responsibility. A presence. A future that is not theoretical.

This is not how I imagined it would happen. This is not the order I planned. This is not the version of the story I outlined when I still believed control was the same thing as safety. But it is the truth I am living inside of now.

Sometimes I wonder if this love, the intensity of it, the fear braided through it, is my inner child finally stepping forward. Maybe she is feeling, at last, what she learned to suppress. Maybe she is remembering what it feels like to be central to something, rather than peripheral. Maybe she is learning that being seen does not always arrive through romance or achievement or recognition, but sometimes through responsibility, through devotion, through choosing to look directly at what depends on you.

Maybe this is how the cycle breaks.

Not through grand declarations.

Not through perfection.

But through attention.

To be seen is to be loved. Maybe love, real love, begins the moment you decide to stop looking away, from yourself, from your fear, from the life unfolding whether you’re ready or not.

Change is terrifying.

Change is holy.

And I am standing inside it with my hands shaking, my heart open, and my eyes finally willing to stay.