It Multiplies, It Does Not Deplete

Everywhere you look, people are talking about protecting your energy.
Setting boundaries. Avoiding burnout. Guarding against depletion.

And sure—boundaries matter. You need them.
But I’ve learned a different kind of math.

The kind you don’t find in self-help books or productivity threads.
The kind a dear friend once showed me when she looked straight at me—barely eighteen—and said,

“You are just like looking in a mirror.”

The Algebra of Sacred Friendship

She was thirty years older than me—an artist, a teacher, a woman who had lived enough life to recognize soul when she saw it.
We were “twin sisters raised a mile and thirty years apart.”

She answered my midnight panic calls.
She witnessed my very worst without trying to fix it.
She mirrored back my wholeness when I couldn’t see it myself.

For ten years, she was my anam cara—the Celtic word for soul friend.
Someone who sees your essence and holds it with reverence.
Who walks beside you—not in front, not behind, but with.

I was a traumatized, grieving, brilliantly gifted teenager when she found me.
She didn’t flinch. She saw through the wreckage and the radiance both.

From her I learned the quietest kind of alchemy:
When love is given from lineage, it multiplies. It does not deplete.

The Wound and the Turning

For years, I didn’t believe her.
I thought love was something that drained you—something you gave until you vanished.
Every kindness felt like a small death.

In my family in my teens, what passed as “love” was extraction, at best.
I’d nearly disappeared in caregiving before I could drive.

Weirdly, much later—after my mother died—life has handed me many of my own painful moments in reverse.
To witness. To correct. To pay forward. To guide someone else directly out of.
I meet people who mirror my younger self—traumatized, brilliant, afraid.
Sometimes older than me, sometimes young enough to be my child.

I found myself saying the words she once said to me.
Tilting my head the way she did.
Holding others with the same steady softness I had learned from her hands.

That’s when I realize: I had become her.
Or rather, she was still here, moving through me.

The Alchemy of Paying It Forward

When you stand in lineage instead of transactionality, something changes.

Every time you catch someone’s spiral, the memory of being caught straightens you back up.
Every time you witness someone’s wholeness, you remember what it felt like to be seen, fully.
Every time you carry what someone can’t, you feel the hands that once carried you, reinforcing.

It’s not depletion. It’s remembering.

The love you were given becomes the love you freely give.
And in the giving, you get it back again—not necessarily from the person in front of you, but from the lineage itself.

It is infinite.

The Lineage Continues

The friend who taught me this is gone now.
She didn’t get the last third of her life.
She got ten years with me, and I with her. She missed out on so much with her family, friends. She’d be nearly eighty now.

Sometimes I see a woman that age with a similar stature, style, demeanor. I wonder what she’d have been like, now.
I don’t stay there. She didn’t get to stay here.

But every time I pour what she gave me into someone else,
she fills me right back up.

Maybe you’ve got someone like that, too.
Someone who is in the depth of terror right now—launching, grieving, becoming visible, making changes.
Someone whose nervous system is shot but who’s doing it anyway.
Maybe you feel the pull to be their steady ground.
That’s you standing where someone once stood for you—doing the sacred work of witnessing and staying.

Giving without the expectation of return. Because you can.
That isn’t codependency.
That isn’t lack of boundaries.
That’s lineage.

The Echo

Sometimes I still feel her guiding me. In the red hearts that show up when I wonder about a decision.
In the echo of her voice saying my name. Renaming me.
In the way sunlight hits the plum-colored couch against my sage green carpet—our accidental twin living rooms. (I could never update.)

Every time I show up for someone—every late-night text, every “I can catch it,” every quiet moment of being a safe space in a loud room—I feel her hands on my shoulders.

She’s still teaching me. Still showing me how all of this works.

That’s the gift of sacred lineage.
That’s the truth about real mentorship: It’s not about having all the answers.
It’s about holding space for the version of someone they’re still too scared to reveal.

You don’t do it alone. No one really does much, entirely alone.
You do it with everyone who ever held you—standing behind you, filling you, as you pour into someone else.

It multiplies. It does not deplete.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it leaves red hearts, or little white feathers, in its wake. Just to let you know.