In my twenties I was a fragmented piece of a human being. I didn’t know that then, of course. Back then it just felt like living. Chaotic, vivid, confusing. Like I was made of different parts that didn’t talk to each other.

A friend of mine at the time lived a similar split. He liked to have affairs — hidden, compartmentalized, carefully kept out of sight from his girlfriend — yet he also loved his slippers, the Sunday paper (yes, that was the era), long breakfasts, and football on the couch. He held both worlds as if it was normal to crave tenderness and betrayal in the same breath.

I wasn’t different. I had an affair while being in a relationship. And it was devastating to realize that you can love someone deeply and still break their heart without wanting to. To feel that the love was real, but something inside you remained unsatisfied — not discontent in a harsh or cold way, but in that quiet aching way where something unnamed still reaches out into the dark. Looking for what? You don’t know. Only that something feels missing.

I felt torn. As if two versions of myself grabbed my arms and pulled in opposite directions. One wanting the safety, the closeness, the familiar warmth. The other wanting the spark, the unknown, the aliveness that comes when the rules fall away.

My friend accepted this split as unavoidable. As if it was simply the human condition: we want coziness and we want wildness; we want the nest and we want the sky. He surrendered to the idea that the self is made of contradictions that can’t be resolved. That this tearing-apart is just how it is.

But I couldn’t settle for that. Something in me refused to believe we are doomed to fracture ourselves to live. That we must betray one part of our being to satisfy another. I kept sensing — quietly, stubbornly — that there must be a way to live from one center. A way to feel at one within yourself, instead of split into competing impulses. A way where peace doesn’t mean suppressing your vitality, and aliveness doesn’t mean sabotaging your integrity.

This was the beginning — long before I knew words like alignment or integration — of searching for a life that didn’t require me to abandon myself. A life where the inner conflict softens, and the pieces of you begin to turn toward each other instead of away.

It was the beginning of aligned living, even if all I had back then was a feeling that wholeness must be possible — and that the path would have to start inside.