For the Saints That Weren't Held

Some carry the energy of the Silent Saint or the Invisible Mother—those whose love, attunement, and quiet labor have been mythologized, praised, and extracted from without recognition. These are the ones who serve from devotion, who give not for validation but because their hearts are tuned to the needs of others. Their selflessness is not performative, but born of spiritual conviction or inner vow. They endure not because they lack boundaries, but because they’ve believed—sometimes rightly, sometimes at great cost—that holding others is holy. Their love is real. And it has too often been expected to flow in only one direction.

This isn’t just personal—it’s archetypal. It names something many have lived but couldn’t quite language. And in that, it becomes medicine.

We are the feeling ones. We feel through. We attune before being asked. We descend before it’s safe. We speak in the language of tenderness because it’s the only one that feels honest.

This isn’t just sensitivity. It’s a cultivated way of being—finely tuned, deeply embodied, and born of years of listening and meeting what others avoid. It is a strength shaped by heartbreak and devotion. A fierce kind of clarity.

And often, we find ourselves alone there.

We offer presence. We listen with our whole bodies. We love from a place that has nothing to prove—but everything to offer. And still—again and again—we are not met.

People long for intimacy, but often haven’t practiced what it means to truly sit in it. They may reach for vulnerability, but from the outside—mirroring ideas instead of offering attunement. And so we find ourselves becoming the current—the one who offers, the one who reaches, the one who flows toward what others cannot yet meet.

The imbalance isn’t just about effort. It’s about resonance. It sounds like:

I descend, and they stay on the shore.

I open, and they call it too much.

I attune to them, but they can’t feel me.

I hold them, and no one holds me.

This isn’t just about care. It’s about courage. It’s about a way of being that is practiced, honed, and refined—through heartbreak, through listening, through an almost devotional relationship to feeling itself. It’s not performative. It’s not reactive. It’s not loud. But it is unmistakable.

And it is lonely.

And then, when we don’t open easily to what isn’t real, people call us closed. They say we’re afraid of love. They project fear, guardedness, woundedness—when what they’re actually meeting is discernment. It’s not that we can’t receive. It’s that we’ve stopped opening to what cannot hold us. But because the world favors quick explanations, it names our boundaries as blocks. Our silence as shutdown. Our longing as avoidance. And then it prescribes its favorite medicine: just surrender. just open your heart. just let love in.

As if depth is the problem.

As if our quiet wisdom needs fixing.

As if the soul hasn’t already been holding the door open for years.

Because when people float above, deflect, freeze, retreat, spiritualize, or simply can’t join us—something in us starts to learn:

Being this open is dangerous. Being this needing is humiliating. Being this deep is lonely.

So we shift. Quietly. Almost elegantly. We stay present instead of hope. We give because giving keeps us close—even if no one joins us in the deep.

And so we go alone. We’ve loved and felt the most in the dark, behind closed doors, when others had no idea. And it didn’t matter if they knew. We were no longer playing the "I'll love you if you love me" game. You could be in love if you wanted to. We love when no one is looking. We love without needing to be chosen. We love because it’s who we are.

The world claps for this. Spiritual spaces call it selflessness. Feminine conditioning names it grace, motherhood, or sainthood. Entire systems are built on our willingness to feel without needing to be felt in return.

But when the world calls your one-way love holy, it’s not praising you. It’s using you.

Our one-way loving isn’t praiseworthy or weakness. It’s a brilliant adaptation—a way of staying connected without continually breaking. But even the most beautiful survival strategy can begin to ache.

Because even when real receiving is offered, it doesn’t always land. It breaks the terms of the internal contract we've lived by. When giving has become our way of staying connected, receiving isn’t just rare—it’s foreign. And when something is foreign, the nervous system often treats it as threat, or at the very least, error. We may find ourselves thinking:

Do I deserve this?

Should I give something back?

Is this too much for them?

Will they disappear once they’ve given to me?

What will this cost?

It’s the internalized belief that love must be earned, presence must be reciprocated instantly, and that our very receiving is a burden.

So yes—when someone offers something real, soft, freely given… we have to pivot. We have to practice allowing. We have to unlearn the reflex that says, “reach toward them” and instead let ourselves lean back, open our hands, and trust: this love is landing. We don’t have to pay for it.

But that’s not easy. Because this pivot is not just behavioral—it’s soul-deep. We’re asking our systems to believe something they haven’t experienced enough: that we can be met. That love can arrive without extraction. That we can be held without needing to hold it all together.

This is why receiving isn’t passive—it’s a courageous, rewiring act.

And our guilt is not a flaw.

It’s proof of how much we’ve given,

how little we’ve received,

and how ready our hearts are to begin believing again.

And slowly, a new question rises:

What would it mean to be joined in the deep—

not just witnessed, but held, felt, mirrored?

That is the intimacy we’re beginning to make space for.

And it changes everything.

And maybe the most radical act now is to refuse the systems that taught us to serve without being seen. To wake up from the myths of sainthood, of singular gods, of mothers as silent vessels, of love that only moves in one direction.

These myths don’t arise from wholeness—they arise from colonial, white-supremacist, individualistic worldviews that flattened our cosmologies and privatized the sacred. They replaced the web with a throne. They asked for our devotion but gave no relational nourishment in return.

It’s time to restore the humanity of our saints, our mothers, our healers—not by admiring them, but by loving them back.Loving us back.

This is how we return to a sacred world.Where love is not a performance, but a field we stand in—together.