Holding Both: How Can I Be This Sure, and Still So Scared?

 I meant every word of my vows.

Every syllable was true.
Every promise was made with my whole heart.

Choosing Trase — loving him — being chosen back — is the safest decision I’ve ever made.

And yet, some days… it doesn’t feel safe at all.

Some days, I wake up next to the love of my life and still feel a pit in my stomach.
Not because of him.
But because of what life taught me love could be.

Some days, the very thing I cherish most — his presence, his warmth, his trust — feels like a ticking clock counting down to when it might all disappear.

And I hate that.

I hate that I can be this certain and still have to fight off the fear.
I hate that I can be so deeply in love and still brace for loss.

I wrote those vows as a woman who had fought to get here.
Who had loved hard and lost harder.
Who knew what it was to sleep in a bed alone for days, wondering what she did wrong.
Who had begged to be chosen, only to be left behind — again and again.

So when I said:

“I will never take your love and commitment for granted…”

I meant it with my entire soul.
Because I know what it feels like to have that love disappear without warning.

And when I said:

“I will always hold sacred the gift of truly and deeply seeing you…”

It was because I’d lived a lifetime of being invisible.
Of having to shrink myself into something tolerable.
Of being "too much" for people who never had the capacity to love me back.

But here’s the thing they never tell you about healing:
Even after you find safe love — even after you build a life with someone who genuinely chooses you — the fear doesn’t just vanish.

The fear walks with you.
The scars don’t dissolve just because you’ve found someone who would never dare to reopen them.

So I find myself living in this tension —
This ache of holding both.

Of being so completely obsessed with my husband that the word “love” doesn’t even do it justice…
And still, sometimes feeling like the scared little girl who was always just a few tears away from being abandoned.

I know it’s not rational.
I know he’s not them.
I know that what we’ve built is real and grounded and sacred.

And yet —
When he walks away from an argument,
Or needs space,
Or simply doesn’t understand the storm inside me —
My body still braces.
My mind still whispers: “This is it. He left too.”

But he doesn’t.

He stays.
He holds space for me to unravel, and then puts his arms around the pieces.

And every time, it rewrites the story just a little more.

So maybe this is what healing in real love looks like:
Not the absence of fear — but the courage to keep choosing truth in the face of it.

To keep choosing him — and to believe that he’s still choosing me.

To hold my vows in one hand, and my scars in the other.

I can be wildly in love and deeply afraid.
I can trust him and feel the sting of old abandonment.
I can build a forever and still need reminders that I’m worthy of it.

So if you’re like me — if you’ve found your person and still feel haunted by the fear of losing them — please know:
You’re not broken.
You’re just healing.