the child was raised in a room of knotted threads.
each thread was a problem without solution.
pulling on any one changed nothing.
they never learned how to be soothed.

as an adult, meeting someone meant building a simulation of them.
a departure was system crash, core corruption.

they feared the tangle of another's threads, the loss of their own careful archive.

then they met a gardener.
the gardener offered soil.
the child planted one of their own dry threads into it.
a difficult sprout grew between them.
the work of tending it became shared structure.

recognize your inherent worth operates independently of external metrics or validation.

a 'good enough' internal state means acknowledging your current capacity with quiet acceptance.

approach trust as an iterative process of observing behaviors and sharing incrementally, like deploying code in stages.

vulnerability is presenting your current internal experience with clarity.

when past emotional data surges, acknowledge its origin. then consciously select actions grounded in the present interaction.