What Does 'One Step Closer to Being Mine' Actually Mean?

I wrote the line but I'm one step closer to being mine in a single sitting, crying, on one of the worst days of my life.

I did not sit with it afterward and think about what it meant philosophically. It came out because it was true. When I listened back to the song, I understood what I had written. But I want to explain it here, in prose, because I have had the question asked in different forms over the years in my books and my Substack: what does it actually mean to be yours?

The answer I have arrived at is not the one I would have given ten years ago.

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What it does not mean

Belonging to yourself does not mean being self-sufficient. It does not mean that you stop needing other people, stop longing for connection, stop reaching for your parents or your partner or the versions of love that were incomplete in your history.

It does not mean being healed in the sense of having finished something and put it behind you. It does not mean that the longing resolves. The longing is in the song. I'm still the woman who craves her mom. Still the girl who longs for her dad. The longing is still present in the chorus. "Being mine" is not what happens after the longing is over.

This is the part that most people who are in a healing era get wrong, and I say this gently because I got it wrong for a long time too. They think belonging to yourself is a destination. A state you reach once you have done enough work. Once you have resolved enough. Once you have healed the mother wound and the father wound and the relationship pattern and the inner child and the nervous system dysregulation and all the rest of it.

That is not what it is. It is not a destination. It is a relationship.

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What it actually means

Abraham Maslow, the psychologist best known for the hierarchy of needs, wrote in later revisions of his framework about what he called "self-actualization" as distinct from what he had earlier described. He noted that the most self-actualized people he studied were not people who had stopped having needs. They were people who maintained what he described as a "centered" relationship to their own experience — who used their inner life as the primary source of guidance rather than external approval or external validation.

More recent work by researchers in self-determination theory, particularly Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester, describes this through the concept of "authentic functioning," which is not the absence of needs but the ability to act from your own values and inner experience rather than from the fear of disapproval or the hope of validation.

To be yours, in both frameworks, means to use your own interior life as the compass rather than as the problem.

Most people who grow up with mother wounds or father wounds learn to use their interior life as a diagnostic of how wrong they are, rather than as a source of guidance. The longing is evidence of neediness. The grief is evidence of weakness. The desire is evidence of being too much. The interior becomes something to manage and hide rather than something to listen to.

Belonging to yourself means reversing this. Not by resolving the feelings but by changing your relationship to them. By letting the longing be there and still acting from your own values. By letting the grief be real and still choosing your own direction.

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What "one step closer" is about

The specific phrasing matters to me.

I did not write "I finally belong to myself." I did not write "I have become mine." I wrote one step closer. Because that is what it is. A direction, not a destination. An ongoing practice of return, not an achievement.

There are days when I feel fully present to myself, grounded in my own experience, clear on what I value and what I am doing. There are days when the longing for my parents is so strong that it temporarily reorganizes my interior landscape and I am reaching again rather than standing. Both of these happen. Both of them will probably always happen to varying degrees.

What has changed is not that the reaching stopped. What has changed is that the reaching is not the whole story anymore. There is a version of me that can hold the reaching and also hold her own ground simultaneously. The two no longer cancel each other out.

That is one step closer to being mine. The capacity to be longing and present at the same time. To be unresolved and still oriented. To be still becoming and also, already, yourself.

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For the people who have been waiting to feel ready

If you have been waiting to belong to yourself until something resolves, I want to offer the same thing the song is offering.

You do not arrive at belonging to yourself after the healing is complete. You practice it in the middle of the healing. You return to your own experience on the days when you have been living from someone else's template. You let the longing be real and you also let yourself be real alongside it.

One step closer is enough. It is always one step closer. That is not a deficit. That is the practice.

Listen to MINE →

For the book that goes deepest into this philosophy specifically, You Are the Love You Seek covers what it means to stop waiting for someone else to provide the belonging you are actually capable of practicing for yourself.

For the connection between this and the specific wounds that make it hard, read You Can Still Long for Your Mother at 35 and The Father Wound That Never Fully Goes Away.