🏚️ i didn't choose this house. i chose who i could become by being here.

Beloveds,

i've been in this house before.

not as a child — that house, the one i grew up in, is down the road. worse condition than this one, if you can believe it. this is my sister's house. she doesn't live here anymore and i'm so happy for her as she recently moved into her newly built home. but i do, for now. and the last time i lived here, i had just left my marriage with nothing. no money. nowhere to go. bankrupt in ways that went deeper than my bank account. the man i'd married — The Fox — was gone, and so was everything i thought i'd built.

i spent two years here rebuilding myself from scratch the first time.

and now i'm back.

i only wanted to return to this community when i was rich.

that was the deal i had made with myself. i would come back when i had the money to build the community center i dreamed about, help fix the roads, put up the big beautiful house on the land. i would come back when i had something to show for it. when the version of me who had once arrived here broken had become someone they'd be proud of.

instead i came back with a toddler, an almost-empty fridge, and the slow realization that this house — my sister's house, the one that caught me the last time i fell — is not something that can be fixed.

not really. not in the way i used to think "fixed" meant.

the damage is too deep. what it actually needs is to come down and be rebuilt from the ground up.

and maybe that's exactly why i'm here again.

Gifftid wanted to move because the rent in mobay had been eating him alive. $90,000 JMD a month. he'd been stressed about it for weeks, and honestly, so had i — just differently. he wanted to cut. i wanted to grow. we are not the same about money, and we never have been.

but i stopped fighting it.

a previous version of me would have dug in. found a job (i've been out of work since the October 2025 hurricane Melissa that fucked up so much of this island). made it work on my own just to prove i didn't have to go back. i've done it before — held things together with both hands when nobody else was holding anything. i know how to fight like that.

this time i just... didn't.

i let him make the call. i packed the house. i came.

and i kept thinking: i already survived this house once. i already rebuilt once from inside these walls. what does it mean that i'm here again?

the first night, i went to bed exhausted in a way that felt deeper than tired. we'd packed, moved, started to unpack — all of it in the heat, with Prince, with everything that carrying a whole life from one place to another actually costs your body. i woke up around midnight to go to the bathroom and just felt drained. HOLLOW. like my body had finally had the chance to admit how much it had been holding.

but i also felt something else.

a release!

i can't explain it better than that. just — something loosened in my chest that had been tight for longer than i realized. like the house remembered me. like it said: you made it out once. you'll make it out again. but first — stop.

i'm in integration week right now, coming off 40 days of a devotion called Rooted in Rest. and i keep thinking about how much of my life i've spent unable to settle until everything is "perfect". dishes done. laundry finished. every box unpacked. every surface clear. like rest was something i had to earn.

the last time i was here i was in survival mode. i didn't have the luxury of rest. i was clawing my way back to something.

but last week, i watched a movie while jabari napped and there was a pile of dirty dishes in the sink and clothes waiting to be washed and stuff still in boxes and i felt no guilt.

NONE.

same house. different woman.

that's the whole story, actually.

here's what i know now that i couldn't have known the first time:

this house was never going to be saved by repairs. what it needs is a foundation built from scratch (and not necessarily by me). and you can't build that without first accepting what's already standing, exactly as it is, without flinching.

i think that's true of more than just the house.

i came here at the end of my marriage with nothing and i left with the little Prince growing in my womb as a journeyed to a divine becoming & unbecoming of myself. i don't think it's an accident that i'm back here at another threshold. another rebuild. another woman being born out of the same four walls.

the community is still here. the family is still here. we had nothing to eat our first night and someone fed us — because that's just how it is here. i forgot that. i forgot what it felt like to be held by a place instead of fighting to hold everything myself.

i didn't choose this house.

but the first time i was here, it chose me when i had nowhere else to go. and something got rebuilt in me inside these walls that i've been living off ever since.

maybe it has one more thing to give.

i'm not here to fix it. i'm here to find out who i become while i'm in it.

not patched. not managed. rebuilt from the ground up.

that's the only kind of fixing that was ever going to matter anyway.

i'm building something that holds this kind of work at its center — the innner rebuilding that happens before anything on the outside catches up. The Sanctuary app opens june 21st. 22 founding member spots at $44/month, locked for life and before it opens to the public - secure yours today.

Talk Soon,
Santana Chevel 🌹