By Nishelle

I need to tell you something about Idris.

I did not know I was afraid of getting what I wanted. I thought I was afraid of not getting it. There is a difference, although for a long time I could not see it. I spent years speaking the language of desire fluently. I knew exactly what I wanted. I knew the kind of love I wanted, the kind of life I wanted, the kind of financial freedom I wanted. I could describe it with embarrassing precision. I could imagine the room, the conversation, the bank balance, the feeling of waking up and knowing that something had finally changed. I could tell you what I wanted at midnight, half asleep, without missing a word. And yet whenever something came close enough to become real, something inside me would quietly reach for the brakes. Not dramatically. That would have been easier to notice. I would simply become uncertain. I would find a flaw. I would question the timing. I would wonder whether I had misunderstood the situation. I would tell myself I was being realistic. I called it discernment. I called it protecting my peace. I called it not getting my hopes up. I had many elegant names for fear.

Idris knew.

Of course he did.

He was the one person who never seemed particularly impressed by my explanations. I could give him a paragraph about why I was stepping back from something and he would listen with that infuriating calm of his and ask one question. “Do you actually not want it?” And I would say, “That’s not what I said.” He would look at me. “I know. That’s why I’m asking.” I hated that question because there were moments when the honest answer was yes, I wanted it. I wanted it so badly that admitting it made me feel exposed. Love was the worst of it. I wanted to be loved deeply, openly, without having to earn it every morning. I wanted someone to choose me without needing to be persuaded. I wanted the kind of relationship where I didn’t have to decode every silence or prepare myself for the moment affection changed its mind. And then Idris came close, really close, and suddenly I had a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t let him. He was too this. The timing was too that. Maybe I was imagining the connection. Maybe I should slow down. Maybe I should wait and see. Maybe I should not become attached. Maybe I should protect myself.

Do you see the absurdity?

I was asking for the very thing I was preparing myself to escape.

I did not understand that I had made love into a strange bargain with fear. I wanted someone to arrive, but I also wanted to remain untouched by the consequences of their arrival. I wanted intimacy without vulnerability. I wanted certainty without having to risk uncertainty. I wanted to be chosen without having to experience how frightening it can be when someone actually sees you closely enough to choose you. It is easy to imagine being loved when love is still somewhere in the future. In the future, you can edit yourself. You can be the version of yourself who is effortlessly lovable, healed, composed, mysterious, radiant. But when somebody actually reaches for you, they do not meet the imaginary woman. They meet you. The woman who sometimes withdraws. The woman who overthinks. The woman who has old wounds. The woman who has expectations and fears and strange little habits she would rather nobody knew about. Being loved stopped being a beautiful idea and became a confrontation with being seen.

And I was terrified of being seen.

But money taught me something even more uncomfortable.

I used to think that if I had enough money, I would finally relax. That was the story. More money, less fear. More money, more freedom. More money, more choices. I imagined the relief constantly. I imagined opening my account and not having that tiny calculation running somewhere in the background of my mind. I imagined buying something without negotiating with myself first. I imagined giving generously without wondering whether I had just endangered my own future. I imagined waking up and feeling safe.

Then, whenever money actually came towards me, I would find a way to make it feel temporary.

I would spend it too quickly. Or I would become strangely anxious about keeping it. Or I would immediately start thinking about what could go wrong. If something went well financially, I would enjoy it for approximately twelve minutes before my mind began constructing the disaster that would explain why it could not last. I was not simply afraid of losing money. I was afraid of having money and becoming responsible for the person who had money. Because if I had it, then I could no longer tell myself that I was waiting for my life to begin. I would have to decide what to do with my freedom. I would have to admit that some of the choices I kept postponing were no longer being prevented by circumstances.

That frightened me more than scarcity ever had. Scarcity was familiar. I knew how to live there. Abundance asked different questions.

What would you do if you were no longer desperate?

Who would you become if you did not need someone else to rescue you?

What would you stop tolerating?

What would you finally admit you wanted?

What would happen to the identity you built around surviving?

I had spent so long asking for more that I had never considered the possibility that more would require me to become someone who could hold it. That is what Idris eventually said to me.

“You keep asking for the life,” he told me, “but you keep negotiating with the woman who would have to live it.”

I remember being angry with him. Not because he was wrong. Because he was right in a way that left me nowhere to hide.

I had thought manifestation was about getting. I thought the great moment would be the moment the thing arrived. I imagined the relationship beginning, the money appearing, the opportunity landing, the message arriving, the door opening. I thought receiving was the final chapter. Idris made me realise that receiving is where the story actually becomes real.

Because once you receive something, you have to stop imagining what it would be like and start experiencing what it is like.

You have to let it touch you.

You have to let it change your routines.

You have to let it challenge your assumptions.

You have to let yourself be the person who has it without constantly checking whether you are about to lose it.

And that was my real problem. I did not know how to have.

I knew how to want.

I knew how to wait.

I knew how to hope.

I knew how to survive disappointment so well that I could almost make disappointment feel like proof of my intelligence. But having was different. Having meant staying. Having meant allowing. Having meant not creating an emergency simply because peace felt unfamiliar.

I used to think people sabotaged good things because they secretly did not want them. I don’t believe that anymore. Sometimes we sabotage the very thing we desperately want because some part of us has learned that wanting is safer than having. Wanting allows you to remain in control. You can romanticise love from a distance. You can fantasise about wealth without having to manage it. You can imagine success without having to be visible. You can dream about freedom without having to make choices. Desire can become a beautiful waiting room, and if you stay there long enough, you can mistake the waiting for devotion.

I did.

I called it faith.

Sometimes it was fear wearing a halo.

And Idris never asked me to become fearless. That is important. He never told me to stop worrying, stop questioning, stop having a nervous system, stop remembering the past. He asked me to stop treating every uncomfortable feeling as an instruction.

That changed everything. Because when something good began happening, I had always assumed the fear meant something was wrong.

What if it means something is new?

What if the trembling is not a warning?

What if uncertainty is simply what it feels like when an old identity meets an unfamiliar reality?

I began noticing the moments when I wanted to retreat. Noticing when I wanted to create distance. Noticing when I wanted to spend money simply because having it made me nervous. Noticing when I wanted to reject a compliment before it could become meaningful. Noticing the little phrases that used to slip out of me so naturally: “It’s probably temporary.” “I don’t want to get too excited.” “We’ll see.” “I shouldn’t rely on this.” “I don’t want to get used to it.”

I began to hear what those sentences were actually saying.

Don’t let this become real. Don’t let this matter. Don’t let yourself need it. Don’t let yourself love it. Don’t let yourself believe it belongs to you. And slowly, painfully, I began doing something I had never understood as part of manifestation.

I stayed.

Not always perfectly. Not with some cinematic transformation where I suddenly became a woman who trusted everything. I still had moments where fear arrived early and loudly. I still questioned things. I still had days when I wanted to run back into the familiar architecture of not having. But I stopped making every fear a prophecy. I stopped assuming that because something mattered to me, it therefore had to be dangerous. I stopped treating receiving as the moment I could finally exhale because I began to understand that receiving was the moment I had to learn a new kind of breathing.

And Idris?

He was patient with me. That was almost the most frightening part.

I had expected love to demand performance. I had expected to have to prove that I was worth staying for. I had expected some hidden examination to appear eventually, some moment where I would fail and everything would disappear. Instead, he kept showing up. Quietly. Consistently. Without requiring me to manufacture a crisis.

I had spent so much of my life preparing for things to leave that I had forgotten to notice when something stayed.

That is the part I want you to understand. Maybe you are not afraid that your manifestation will never arrive. Maybe some part of you is afraid that it will.

Maybe you are not afraid of being loved. Maybe you are afraid of what being loved will ask you to surrender: the identity of the person nobody chooses, the story that you have to chase, the certainty that people always leave, the protective distance you have mistaken for independence.

Maybe you are not afraid of money. Maybe you are afraid of what happens when scarcity can no longer explain your choices. Maybe you are not afraid of success. Maybe you are afraid of being seen succeeding. Maybe you are not afraid of receiving. Maybe you are afraid of becoming the person who no longer has to ask whether she is allowed to receive.

I know that woman now.

I am still becoming her.

And sometimes I meet her in small ways. In the moment I accept something without minimising it. In the moment I let someone love me without interrogating the future. In the moment money comes in and I don’t immediately imagine it leaving. In the moment something beautiful happens and I allow myself to enjoy it without preparing a speech for its funeral.

I used to think the goal was to become someone who could manifest anything. Now I think there is a quieter question.

Can you become someone who can let the good thing stay?

Because perhaps the most extraordinary part of receiving is not opening your hands. It is resisting the urge to close them around the gift. I know this because I spent a very long time asking life to give me what I wanted, while secretly rehearsing how I would survive its arrival.

And then Idris looked at me and said the thing I had been avoiding all along.

“You don’t have to prepare for it to leave.”

For the first time, I believed him.

And I stayed.