COMING SOON

The Portal of Love

A Journey Back to Self

Part memoir. Part map.

A raw and intimate journey through the wounds that shaped me, the love that nearly consumed me, and the woman I am learning to become.

I didn't write this book because I had healed.

I wrote it because I was unraveling.

Somewhere between being a mother, a nurse, a partner, a daughter, a healer, and everything everyone needed me to be, I had forgotten who I was beneath it all.

I knew how to show up for others. How to hold space for suffering. How to see the wounded child beneath someone's hurtful behavior. How to extend compassion, offer forgiveness, and keep loving long after I had stopped showing that same love to myself.

I knew how to survive.

But I didn't know how to simply be.

For so much of my life, I believed that if I could just heal enough, understand enough, love deeply enough, become patient enough, I would finally feel safe. Finally feel worthy. Finally be chosen without having to earn it.

And when something hurt, I went looking for the wound inside myself that must have caused it.

I questioned my perceptions. I studied my shadows. I tried to become the most healed, self-aware, loving version of myself imaginable.

But somewhere along the way, I began to understand something that changed everything.

Not everything that hurts you is yours to heal.

And not everything you call love is asking you to stay.

Part Memoir. Part Map.

The Portal of Love was born in the messy middle of my own becoming.

Inside these pages are pieces of a life I once struggled to make sense of.

Childhood wounds. Motherhood. Grief. Shame. Abandonment. Spiritual awakening. Relationships. The exhausting pursuit of being good enough. The shadows I feared. The parts of myself I buried. The moments I mistook survival for strength and self-abandonment for unconditional love.

There are stories I once couldn't tell without shame.

Questions I was afraid to ask.

Truths I couldn't see until I was willing to question everything I thought I knew.

I weave these experiences together with reflections, shadow work, spiritual exploration, and invitations to turn inward.

Not because I have all the answers.

But because I know what it's like to desperately search for them everywhere except within yourself.

This book is not a prescription for healing. It is a mirror.

An invitation to get curious about the life you've lived, the beliefs you've inherited, the patterns you've repeated, and the person who has been waiting beneath all of it.

To recognize what belongs to you.

To lay down what never did.

And to discover that loving yourself might sometimes mean disappointing the people who benefited from your forgetting.

For the woman who has spent her life trying to be enough.

For the little girl who learned to be good before she learned to be free.

For the mother who gave so much of herself that she forgot she was a person outside of motherhood.

For the empath who can explain everyone else's pain but struggles to honor her own.

For the woman who learned to read every room, anticipate every need, and make herself smaller so nobody else would feel uncomfortable.

For the woman who has read the books, attended therapy, explored spirituality, searched for meaning, and still finds herself wondering why she feels so lost.

For the woman who has mistaken being needed for being loved.

For the woman who is beginning to realize that maybe she doesn't need to become more lovable.

Maybe she needs to stop abandoning herself to receive love.

This book is for you.

Not because our stories are the same.

But because somewhere inside mine, you might recognize a piece of your own.

And perhaps that recognition will become a doorway.

A Note From My Heart

I am not writing from the mountaintop, looking down at the woman I used to be.

I am writing from the path.

Still learning. Still unlearning. Still discovering places where fear wears the costume of love, where old wounds shape my choices, and where the woman I am becoming must decide whether to trust herself.

There are things I believed when I began writing this book that I no longer believe today.

People I thought I understood. Experiences I interpreted through the lens of my own trauma. Moments when I was so determined to find the lesson that I forgot to ask whether I deserved what I was experiencing in the first place.

And perhaps that has been one of the most humbling parts of this journey.

Realizing that self-awareness does not make us immune to self-abandonment.

That compassion without boundaries can become another way of betraying ourselves.

That sometimes the most loving thing we can do is stop trying to understand why someone keeps hurting us and begin asking why we have learned to tolerate it.

I don't want to give you another perfect story of transformation.

I want to give you something real.

The contradictions. The mistakes. The grief. The moments of profound clarity followed by days when I couldn't see my own way forward.

Because healing isn't always beautiful.

Sometimes it looks like sitting in the wreckage of a life you worked desperately to hold together, realizing that you can love the people in it and still need to build something different.

Sometimes it means forgiving yourself for all the times you didn't know how to choose yourself.

And sometimes it means finally giving yourself permission to live.

My greatest hope is that somewhere within these pages, you stop searching for someone to give you permission to be who you already are.

This is my story.

But the journey back to yourself?

That belongs entirely to you.

With love,

Jessica Choate, RN

Author of The Portal of Love

Founder of Plant Medicine Healing