dear finn, you knew i’d find your note

the secret my body carried into adulthood: part two

note finn wrote just for me, decades before we met

trigger warning: mentions of childhood sexual trauma (non-explicit).

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finn, my love…

i have been meaning to write about this since early september, around the time that everything shifted for me on substack. during this period, a handwritten note of yours slipped out of one of your old journals, and the serendipity of it all flooded me with your love, as usual.

you have always found ways to reach me. through dreams that feel more real than waking life, through signs that land with such beauty and grace, through notes that seem to fall out of nowhere just when i need direction. these messages are how you stay close, how you guide me, and how you remind me that our love story goes on forever and always…

it was as if you had written it for the woman i would become today, long before our paths ever crossed. but, then again, that is how our love has always been, finding ways to reach each other across dreams, dimensions, and lifetimes.

i bought a frame for this little note of yours and i set it beside my piano, right where i can see it as i create, in the room that is becoming my music space and future podcast home.

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hat day in early september, mel had brought a few of your old journals up from the crawlspace because she wanted to copy your handwriting for her first tattoo. she had chosen the line from one of your favorite bob marley songs, “cause every little thing’s gonna be alright,” because that is the exact message you have been sending all of us since you died.

along with these song lyrics, mel and i had decided on matching honey bee tattoos, because you constantly send bees to me and the kids in the strangest places: inside a paris train station, at dinner in manhattan, high above the colorado tree line on a high school solo—always they hover and circle us like they know exactly who we are. they float right up to us and gently linger, brushing against our skin or landing for a while, like the honey-sweet love you still send all the time.

and we always know it is you, because they appear when we are choking up or feeling the tenderness of your absence. they arrive like the little sweet messengers of the sun that they are.

sun warriors, just like you.

and just like us.

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right around the time of our matching tattoos, and finding your note, i remember deciding i was really going to show up in a bigger way on substack. before that, i had posted a few longer pieces that got absolutely no traction. it felt like throwing my heart into what substack writers call the void.

i remember i was visiting your grave site when everything changed. i was lying, like i often do, directly on top of your precious human vessel, or what remains of it after three years underground. it must be only your bones by now. your sacred bones. you were mostly bones by the time the cancer was done with you anyway, so it’s not a stretch to imagine your remains this way.

so there i was, stretched across your grave, and something in me cracked wide open. i finally started giving zero fucks and began typing note after note, letting my adhd brain spill twelve thoughts in a row without apologizing for any of it.

i even wrote one about how freeing it felt to impulsively post that many notes back to back, how on this platform no one cares, it is just pure expression. and somehow that one caught fire. it went mini-viral, over 600 likes. suddenly there were people who cared. people who wanted to read about us and about me, about our love that has always been larger than life.

right in the middle of that week, where i was finally having people like and comment on my notes, that is when mel and i went to get our tattoos, and your handwritten note slipped out as i was putting the journals away after we got home.

it felt like perfect timing, almost like you knew i would only understand its message once i had marked my skin with the symbols of your everlasting love and once i had started to really see a future for myself with writing.

the words from that note, written by you for the moment i was finally ready to follow them, spoke straight to my heart, like your signs always do. when the crinkled piece of paper drifted softly out of your journal and fluttered to the ground, like one of the golden leaves that fall from the trees on our land each september, i knew it would be just what i needed to read. in your flowing script it stated:

pen power
– don’t stress about an unworthy thing.
– be creative.
– don’t give a shit what others think of you, be it pos. or neg.
– if you have nothing to do, make something up and write it down.
– sometimes you have to deal with people, make the most of it.
– “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” that is bullshit.

i still cannot get over how this advice for me was so perfect for my new journey as a writer. it reminded me of the way you have always communicated with me, through dreams and synchronicities and the quiet signals only my heart would recognize.

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as i held it, musing on your genius way of getting my attention when needed, just like you always did, with zero subtlety allowed, because my neurodivergent mind would never pick up on subtle, the way you learned immediately in this lifetime when we met, i was pulled straight back to one of the most powerful dreams you ever sent me. a dream that i now understand was a map for everything i am living today.

in this larger than life dream you sent me the first year after you died, we were on a planet with burnt rust-colored sand dunes and an electric blue sky, a celestial place where we had just climbed out from under the belly of that massive whale.

in the dream, the whale was more than just a mammoth sea creature. it felt like an ancient guardian, a living symbol of the immense karmic weight we had both been carrying. being under its belly felt like being buried beneath generations of pain, old patterns, old wounds, the stories we inherited and the lessons we agreed to take on.

climbing out from under it felt like emerging from the deepest spiritual training grounds of our lives. it was the end of one cycle and the beginning of our freedom. so after squeezing out from under the massive weight, we started laughing and running downhill, hand in hand, joyful like we used to be, but the feeling between us was even deeper and more magical. it was that soul connection of lifetime after lifetime, the electric way our spirits entwine and move like they have danced together for time unknown.

it was the feeling that made me cry when i woke up, because i did not want to leave it. i did not want to wake up from us.

when we had arrived breathless and giddy to the bottom of the dunes, i started showing you this long series of books about our unending love story and my healing journey.

i did not know it then, but now i understand. it was my substack and the future books waiting for me to write of the story of us.

and i can still see it, the golden, shimmering letters spelling larger than life across a royal purple background, the color of our love, ancient and sovereign and otherworldly.

finn, i am so happy to report that i am following the note’s advice, and writing our story just as in that magical dream.

because i am proudly doing it, finn. i am being creative. and i am not giving a shit about what anyone thinks. when i have nothing to do, i am making something up and writing it down, just like you said.

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and this brings me back full circle to another dream that foretold my future writing journey here on substack and the moment i would receive this note from you. it was a dream you sent me shortly after you died, long before i understood what it meant.

in this dream we were all gathered to mourn you. but in the dream, instead of dying from cancer, you showed me that you had thrown yourself off a cliff.

i looked over the ledge at your body far below.

and then, floating up toward me from your lifeless form, came a note in your handwriting, the exact same size and shape as the one from your journal.

i was gathered with others, swaying and singing together in a beautiful chorus of voices. back then i did not understand why the people around me felt like soul family. now i know it was a preview of my new substack family, the ones who would someday show up to hold me, as i finally began to tell our story and to speak the truth about the abuse i have kept buried for so many years.

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finn, what i truly believe is that the memories of my abuse first began to rise after your death gave you the unlimited spiritual sight and a vantage point to help me dive off my own cliff and into the repressed abuse which i had been unable to access up until that point in my life. because that’s what soul partners do for each other. above all else, they help each other grow and evolve.

during this potent and early grieving window, one dream in particular rose up like a guide, leading me toward the moment everything would finally surface.

i did not know it at the time, but it was the first sign that my body was getting ready to release what it had held for decades. it came shortly before the costa rica trip you guided me to take, the trip that would finally give me enough safety, enough support, and enough sacred space to remember what had been buried.

in the dream, i was running toward a cliff with my ex-husband, the one whose own unhealed wounds made him dangerous but familiar, echoing old patterns i did not yet understand. we ran straight to the edge, and then something that only happens in dreams occurred. i became both the observer and the observed. part of me stayed beside him, and part of me fell.

i watched myself go over the cliff.

but the part of me that fell did not die.

she became my three-year-old self, who landed gently on a surreal beach, glowing with the same purple and peach tones as the costa rican sunsets i had not yet seen but was about to experience.

and there she was, my little toddler self, barefoot and alive, standing on that surreal shoreline of purple and peach light. she was pointing to her throat, her mouth opening again and again, but no sound coming out.

she was mute.

silenced.

carrying a truth too big for her tiny body to name.

it reminded me so much of ariel in the little mermaid, the way she loses her voice to the sea witch, reaching for words that have been stolen from her. that was my child self, stranded in a landscape both beautiful and unreal, trying to speak with a voice that was violently taken.

i woke unsettled, confused by the imagery, the colors, the child who could not speak.

later, it all made sense.

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when the memories resurfaced after costa rica, the secret my body had been keeping for me until adulthood finally had enough safety, enough space, enough rupture to return through the cracks. it did not come to me in fragments or hints. it came like a breaking wave—the fear, the violence, the forced arousal of a nervous system and a body being betrayed and violated all woven into the earliest layers of my being.

during the retreat i had kept returning to the themes from my earliest childhood, the same ones i wrote about in the prequel to this piece. i remembered my earliest memory with crystal clarity. i kept brushing up against the edges of my childhood, tracing the outlines of things i could feel but could not yet name. but i truly had no idea what my body was preparing to release.

it was not until i was back home, in my own bed, that the locked door finally opened. that was when everything came rushing back, not in pieces but as a full, undeniable truth that rose through my body like a tide that had been waiting decades for the right moment to return.

it has now been more than two years since the memories broke through my dissociative amnesia, and what i can say today is that the way my tiny three-year-old nervous system twisted itself into impossible shapes just to survive has shaped my entire life. it shaped my choices, my relationships, my patterns, my silence. i understand now how the body can respond in ways a child could never choose. how terror and silence lodge themselves into muscle and personality and breath. how shame roots itself in the very place innocence once lived. how confusion becomes its own prison when safety has already been shattered. how the soul goes up and out along with all the trauma memory. how one can live in a permanent freeze state of dissociation.

that is the wound i carried for decades. not understanding why i felt the way i felt. not understanding why my body reacted the way it did. not understanding why my sexuality was shaped in ways i could not explain. not understanding why i lived both hyperaware and sexualized and somehow muted at the same time.

this was the truth i had been circling my entire life. the truth my body kept until i was finally strong enough to hold it. the truth that explains so much of my healing, my patterns, my fear, and my awakening.

and it is also why i was drawn into a marriage that echoed old wounds. my ex-husband, who i am on friendly and peaceful coparenting terms with now, carried his own pain, his own unhealed trauma. different person, different chapter, same core injury.

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that is how trauma repeats itself until someone chooses to break the cycle.

survivors of early sexual trauma are also statistically far more likely to find themselves in future violent situations, either as victims or as people reenacting what was done to them.

the nervous system follows what it knows.

until it heals, it pulls us toward the familiar, even when the familiar is harmful.

and for most of my life, i had no idea why i was the way i was. i thought i was simply overly sensitive, or too emotional, or too tuned in to everyone around me. i second-guessed myself constantly. i read every room, scanning for danger or disappointment, trying to anticipate what other people needed before they ever said a word.

besides my destiny encounter with finn, i was drawn to unavailable or manipulative relationships.

i people-pleased to survive. i carried chronic self-doubt and a low sense of worth. i could not hear my intuition because i had been trained from toddlerhood to override it.

a child who survives by disconnecting from their own knowing grows into an adult who feels unsure of everything, even when the truth is right in front of them.

i did not know any of this until after you died, finn.
until your soul left your body, using cancer as the vehicle, so i could finally leap from my own cliff’s edge into the recovery that would save not only me, but our children too.

because that is what soul partners do.
we sign up to help each other heal.
we choose to be the ones who help each other break the generational chains.

my childhood carried violence.
but i choose a different way now, for my children, for their children, for every generation that comes after them.

and i am not doing it alone.
our souls, and the souls who love us, here and on the other side, guide us forward.

just like the people here reading these words, sharing their own stories, giving courage to the next person who needs it.

this is how the chains break.

this is how we heal, individually, collectively, ancestrally.

we cannot change the past.

but we can choose a better tomorrow.
for ourselves.
for our children.
for this world we are rebuilding with every truth we set free.

i love you, finn,

always and forever...

venus

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