Are you watering what you should be pruning?

There comes a quiet moment in every soul’s journey—somewhere between the ache of loyalty and the yearning for peace—where you realize that not everything you’ve nurtured was meant to bloom.

We often find ourselves tending to connections, relationships, and habits as if they are sacred gardens, when in truth, some of them are already withering vines—long past their season, yet still drawing from our well. We pour and pour, convinced that patience is a virtue and selflessness is holy. But who told us that love is only real when it costs us ourselves?

Maybe you’ve been reaching out into echo chambers, checking in on people who rarely meet you halfway, offering your heart with trembling hands only to be met with silence or scraps. Maybe you’ve been taught—explicitly or by omission—that goodness requires endurance, and that sacrifice is the currency for love or belonging.

But here’s the question that keeps rising like mist from the earth: Are you watering what you should be pruning?

The Fear That Keeps Us Rooted

A dear friend once shared her story with me. She had been in a long-term relationship where the emotional return was threadbare. She admitted—quietly, almost like a confession—that she knew it wasn’t right. Still, she stayed. Not because she believed in him, but because she feared the absence of him.

Loneliness, after all, is not just a feeling. It can be a shape, a season, a ghost. And sometimes the fear of facing it alone outweighs the truth that something—someone—is no longer serving your becoming.

Eventually, the truth made its entrance. His absence had a name, and it wore the faces of other women. That betrayal was her permission slip, the sharp snap that finally broke the spell. She walked away. And I swear, the next time I saw her, she looked like spring incarnate—light pouring from her like she had been storing it in secret for years.

She had stopped watering the wrong tree. She had begun to prune.

The Garden Within

So many of us are tired—and not just physically. We are tired of being good at the expense of being true. Tired of extending grace without boundaries. Tired of performing our worth through how well we can hold everyone else.

We are gardeners of a sacred inner terrain. And some things—some people, some roles, some expectations—were never meant to grow there.

Imagine this: you have a tree, and you know it needs pruning. The branches are wild, tangled, overreaching. You sense it’s not thriving, not really. But instead of cutting back, instead of shaping it toward light and fruitfulness, you decide to water it—three times a day. You drown it in effort. You flood it with hope. And all the while, it grows heavier and more unruly, its roots unsure of what you're asking it to become.

That tree is you.

When Courage Looks Like Letting Go

Pruning is not cruelty—it is clarity. It is choosing the shape of your life with intention. It is understanding that energy is not infinite, and love must not become a bottomless ledger of self-denial.

Trim the branches that no longer reach toward the sun. Walk away from the table where your soul is not fed. Let go of the jobs, the lovers, the conversations, and the commitments that only water your fear—not your freedom.

Your wholeness cannot be a reward for proving your loyalty to broken things.

The Invitation

This is your invitation to pause. To put down the watering can and pick up the shears—not out of bitterness, but out of reverence for your own becoming.

You don’t need permission to protect your peace.

You don’t need to explain why you no longer wish to carry what’s been quietly crushing you.

You just need to remember: some of what you’re trying to revive was never meant to grow in the soil of who you are now.

So go ahead. Prune the tree.

You owe it to yourself to bloom.