What if it was part of the plan?

About the so-called glitches that are actually the reason it all works

CARE check*: What are you running towards?

What are you running away from?

Is it still serving you?

What if looking back was the only way to truly see the way forward?

What if all goodbyes were now officially seen as the foundation of any hellos?

What would you suddenly let yourself know that you know?

I hope this week’s letter will shift something in the way you relate to the part of all new beginnings that we so rarely talk about.

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In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

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Hi CARE friend,

What’s new? How are you? What is one win you got this week? What is one kind thing you can say to yourself right now? What are you grateful for—not from the world or Life but from YOU? What is one thing that you truly appreciate about who you are and are becoming?

Please don’t brush over those questions. Please answer them with intention, presence and Love. Please lean in towards your magic, even if only for a few seconds today. Please share it with me if you feel called to!

And also… What's sticky? What’s “still” there, still bugging you, weighing you down, troubling you, scaring you, what’s refusing to leave and/or what can’t you accept and let go of just yet?

And can we let that be okay? Can we look at it together right now, sigh, and let it be, even if only for today? Or not even for the whole day. Even if only for the time it takes you to finish reading this love letter.

It’s hard, I know. I’m with you.

But we’ve got this. We’ve got each other. And I know that you’ve got you.

I’ve got me too. I’m learning that like never before right now.

I think I’ve reached a new phase of the immigration process. This is not a journey that we can embark on fully prepared for what’s to come, as it is truly something you can only understand through experience… and because it is a journey within as much as it is a journey across the world.

And I’m guessing it’s never really the same for anyone, even if there are some common threads that we all need to build on.

I left France to follow my heart song. I left France to follow my joy. I left France to sing in New York, and singing in New York is what I do, everyday more. It’s an awe-inspiring adventure that cannot fully be put into words—and that’s not for lack of trying on this page.

I am finding what I was looking for… I have no regret, only appreciation and hope.

AND you have to fully leave a place to truly arrive somewhere else. That part is a lot trickier that it looks.

I have left my country, I have left my family of origin, I have left the life I shared with my friends.

I have not left them “behind”, but I have left all the same. And I haven’t learned how to allow myself to grieve what I never wanted to lose yet, so I have no idea how to give myself permission to grieve what I am glad I left.

I never belonged in France, of that I am sure. I understand that it was in my Soul’s contract to be born far away from my true home, and I salute my intuition for never letting me ignore or doubt that home had always been and forever would be New York. And home is New York for sure.

New York is my great love, my best friend, my lover and my one true harbor. It is where I feel the safest and where I feel the most alive. It is where I feel the deepest. It is where I come home into my heart and where I’ve always wanted to anchor and unleash my voice. It is where my dreams feel like they have already happened, even if I’m the only one who can see them dance into forms for now. New York is home.

But France is also where I was born and there’s no shaking an heritage that is imprinted in my blood, nor the memory and impact of a land that hosted me for more than three decades.

I don’t miss anyone from my family of origin, because I much prefer loving them and I can only do that from a very safe distance.

Still, it hurts to not hold those kinds of empowering and meaningful bonds in my hand and there are parts of me that wish that it could all just be different and change. That we could just talk it out, rewrite the codes and start over. Problem is that I’m the only one who wants to…

And the problem is that there are parts of us that will never stop yearning for our parents—whether they’re dead or alive, whether they’re the parents we dream of or not, whether they tried to build or end our lives. I will never stop caring about my mother even if it feels like her enraged fingers are still wrapped around my neck as I type. I will never stop adoring my father even if he betrayed me more times than even my nerdy brain can count.

Have I ever told you that my dad used to walk me to school every morning when I was in kindergarten? Or that he cooked me lunch almost everyday during my last two years of high school? He would come and wait for me at the door as I came home and always made me feel so welcome! (A widely different approach from my mother who slapped me once for daring to come home early from school because a teacher was away, without having the—yes, I quote—DECENCY to call to ask for permission first). Have I ever shared how comforting the sound of his voice has always been to me or how insightful he can be when he truly listens to what someone is going through? Have I ever highlighted how unbelievably patient he is and that he will drive for ten hours straight, no questions asked, to get you where you need to be if you simply ask? I love my dad.

Have I ever told you how funny my mother was? Or how much she loved buying gifts for others? How she could read for hours under the sun and could criticize everything and everyone but almost never someone who had dared writing a novel? Did I tell you that she loved cooking, even if she liked her father’s cooking even more? Have I ever shared how lovely it was to discuss the latest Dawson’s creek episode with her for hours? And how deep and profound her advice was when she let her heart open? Have I ever shared how painful it was to watch my grandmother attack and demean her and how much I wanted her to know that she mattered, that I saw her and that I loved her? How much I still do… I love my mother.

I probably haven’t told you any of this, because those are my most cherished secrets. They’re fiercely guarded by my heart. Deep inside my chest, I get to hold this beautiful family and host for us the most joyous reunions. I get to tell them about the magic of New York and the power of songs. I get to show them how much I care and how grateful I am for all the opportunities they allowed me to encounter. I get to cry in their arms and know that I belong.

I built them the home I wish they could have created for us! And that matters—even if it’s only in my imagination. I know it does.

It’s been more than ten years since the last time I talked to my mother. It’s been more than a month that I haven’t spoken to my dad. Somehow those feel very similar. I never expected that a wedge would—or even could—be built between him and me.

I thought he was perfect… and no one ever highlighted that it could be a symptom, and not a fact. Which makes sense, because my friends know my father through me and so they had no way to spot the spell I was on.

That’s the thing with our parents. For most of us, they’ve just always been around.

We do not have a before/after moment around when they entered our lives. We have no contrast. We had no relationship skills before meeting them (!), no previous experiences or knowledge—and if we did at the soul level, we had no way to access it. They’re it. They’re the reference, the benchmark, the foundation, the model we get inspired by or trapped in.

Until the day when the veil lifts of course.

It will have been five years in May since my already vacillating denial got shattered into a cold harsh blinding and inescapable light. He had almost died two years prior that day, and I wonder what would have happened if he had left our planet before I woke up to a truer experience of the man that is, after all, so much more than just my father.

And I'm so glad it wasn’t the case. I’m so glad I get to truly see him now… Not because it makes the trauma work a tiny bit easier—even if it is still harrowing to unpedestal a dying man, it is still easier than to uncrown a dead saint. But because I get to truly love him now, for the first time.

It’s not an easy love. It’s not a pretty story with a nicely tied bow. No, it’s messy. It’s full of heartache, deception, projection and angst. But it’s real, even if it’s raw!

I get to meet the man who fathered me, and that’s better than idealizing a dad who never existed.

I’m not sure he would agree, I’m not sure he’s happy we get to replace a feel good tale by some gut wrenching authentic storytelling, but I know that deep down we both know we’ll be the better for it.

And the truth is the more I untangle from my father’s grip, the better I feel and, even more importantly, the better I sing.

Our parents are the reference, the benchmark,

the foundation, the model we get inspired by or trapped in.

So yes, there’s grief in becoming. There’s grief in any awakening. There’s grief, so much grief, in any triumph, any arisal, there is grief in freedom.

And we do not talk enough about that, so we convince ourselves that we are the only one screwing up our coming alive. We only expect the joy, the gratitude, the exhilaration. We do not anticipate the sorrow, the fears or the self-doubt. So we belittle ourselves and think that something has gone terribly wrong, and this is what keeps us enslaved to the past or jailed into abusive dynamics we have outgrown.

Because nothing is all good and nothing is all bad.

Even hell has its charms. Even heaven can let you down.

When a relationship ends, you do not only lose what broke, you also lose what still worked. And that applies to the relationships that were killing you, just as it applies to the relationships that you never wanted to part from.

Darkness and light. Everywhere always. Neither good nor bad. All of it intertwined because it cannot be otherwise.

I said goodbye to a lot of friends when I left France. And I didn’t have it in me to invest in keeping long distance bonds with people with whom I had never been truly myself before.

Which was quite easy to decipher, really. When you jump off a ladder seemingly overnight and say that you want to take a complete 180 and drop your white coat and stethoscope to step into songs and onto a stage on the other side of the ocean, rare are those who will not comment…

Those who truly knew me surprised me with a soft and peaceful “well, of course”. Those who thought they knew who I was gasped and told me that I would be back on the oncology ward in no time. Some still seem to believe it’s an option.

It felt easy even if saddening to end friendships that were built on lies—sincere and unconscious lies, yes, but lies nonetheless. The lies of people-pleasing, of fawning, of unconscious survival.

It sounded easy and empowering to strive to keep all my other friendships alive!

But easy is more easily said than done… and the truth is I have left and they didn’t.

Truth is they’re not moving to New York and I will not move back to France. Truth is we now live with a pretty important time difference, and in widely different lands. Truth is I have changed and so have they, and nothing can remain the same, ever, but especially not when everything is now different.

Again, I have no regrets. I trust that the friendships that are meant to pass this test will thrive thanks to it, and I trust the chapters that have to close for other books to be written and bring joy, hope, love and awe into this world.

They would never have wanted me to stay for them and that would be absurd to ask them to follow me on the path of MY sacred dream. But that doesn’t mean that there is no need for grief. That doesn’t mean that it doesn't hurt—and I believe that it is meant to.

So where am I going with all that?

I want us to hold each other's hands and look into each other's eyes, while we realize at Soul level that it’s all normal. That it’s supposed to be this way. That it makes sense. That we’re not doing it wrong.

It’s supposed to hurt. It’s supposed to feel like a challenge. Yes, even the “good” things. Even the so-called right choices. Even when we’re following our intuition, our sacred dream and our heart song.

It’s not a glitch, it’s a feature. Nothing went wrong, we’re on the right path.

Grief is part of joy. Hellos are built through goodbyes.

There’s no summer without winter and there’s no spring without fall. Mourning is not a tragedy, it’s a vital part of life.

I want us to help each other through this, instead of trying to shield each other from what is needed for us to truly come alive.

What could have been only could have been in our minds.

What had to end had to end because life is cyclical, and the only way to end the cycle is to die.

And we didn’t come to life to only survive until we die.

We came here to be, to become, to fall in love with this entire extraordinary unsurvivable experience, and to FEEL alive… as embodied hearts surrendered and devoted to our soul paths, until our last breath is released into the wild.

So dear CARE friend, let’s choose to follow our intuition into the shadow and into the light. Let’s choose to let our heart ache if it means our heart can expand, and let us trust that there’s a reason if the only thing we can control in Life is to choose to either surrender to Love or to suffocate behind mind-made lifeless walls:

That’s because Love is what we’re here for and Love is who we are.

And if Love created us and if we’re made of Love, it is impossible that melting back in Love could ever kill or even harm us—even if the form of Love we’re asked to experience that day is Grief.

Grief is part of creation. Grief is literally the only emotion that creates form! It creates water that can cleanse our weary psyche and release our pain into the world. So that it can be alchemized. So that we can feel whole again. So that we can remember that Love never leaves even when it seemingly flows away.

Grief is hard. Grief is harrowing. Grief is muddy, heavy and grief is holy.

Grief is at the core of the human experience and we’ve got what it takes to feel it.

We’ve got each other, we’ve got our hearts and we’ve got our body temples. We are equipped—the only thing stopping us is Fear!

And the only answer to Fear is ever looking for is LOVE.

Grief is part of joy. Hellos are built through goodbyes.

I want us to help each other through this,

instead of trying to shield each other from what

is needed for us to truly come alive.

With kindness, love and light—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not need to fear anymore.

leo