So, what separates a person who identifies as a victim from one who identifies as a survivor? How does a woman who has been victimized over and over throughout her life not succumb to the belief that she will forever be a victim? How does she become a heroine in her own life?

I’ll break this down by sharing what I’ve learned throughout my own journey. Of course.

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The Victimhood Mentality

It wasn’t until the dissolution of my marriage and the ending of a close friendship that made me confront the ways in which I had been victimized throughout my life. My main abuser was my mother. I suffered her narcissistic abuse and her emotional neglect my entire childhood, and her patterns have continued into adulthood. That relationship, coupled with an absent father, left me carrying a pain I could hardly put into words.

After every argument or every fight her favorite turn of phrase was, “I guess I’m the bad guy. I gave up my whole life for you and you are ungrateful. I’m tired of the way you treat me.” Though she was 20 years my senior picking screaming matches with her not-yet-teenage daughter, somehow she was the one that had been slighted. She was the one being treated unfairly. She was the one that was owed an apology.

Now, as a mother myself, I can understand the emotions she was trying to express. Overwhelm. Exhaustion. Being stretched too thin with little to no support. The weight of single motherhood had been placed atop her already crippling unhealed sexual and emotional traumas from her upbringing. She first became a victim when she was merely two years old.

That is only to say, I understand why she is wired the way she is. Trauma of a sexual nature is hard for even a seasoned and strong woman to heal, so I can only imagine that being victimized before she was even potty trained had to do some real, lasting, “invisible” damage to her psyche.

And, unfortunately she passed this down to me.

This relationship pattern that I called home led me to forming bonds with people that had the same manipulative tendencies as my mother (i.e. the friendship that ended). It also meant that, in order to survive, I took on her manipulative ways and absorbed the shape of the identity that she modeled for me: the victim identity.

The way in which my two closest relationships ended left me reeling. I was alone in a foreign country, the two people I had moved there with lived their lives together while I was confined to the house with my barely 1-year-old. I had no money of my own, no friends to call (re: 12-hour time difference), and no power to change my circumstances without the help of my family back in the states.

To me, I was a victim. I had trusted not just my husband, but also my best friend to carry me until I found my footing as a mother living abroad. Then the rug was pulled out from under me, first my husband and then my friend.

To them, I was a reactive, temperamental, emotionally unsafe person to be around. To me, I was struggling to grasp the realities and responsibilities of motherhood, the shame of not being able to provide for myself, and the dynamics of having another woman live with my husband and me. I was deeply uncomfortable with the way the “platonic throuple’s” relationship developed (the name coined by the other woman, despite my adamantly being opposed to adopting a polygamous dynamic), but any attempt I made to change the dynamic was thwarted by them both. They had, somehow, formed an alliance to which I was an outsider.

To me, I was doing my best to set boundaries with them. To them, I was simply “unhealed” and “needed to keep de-conditioning” myself.

It took me almost an entire year after the mess of those relationships to finally get down to the truth.

The Moment of Accountability and Recognizing Everyone Has a Unique Perspective

In total honesty, the most painful part of this experience wasn’t the losses themselves, it was accepting the fact that I had gotten myself into that mess.

You see, I was accountable for those relationships.

I was responsible for agreeing to move in with that woman. Despite having voiced discomfort, concerns, and a strong unwillingness to do so, I still did it.

I was responsible for agreeing to move across the world, though I knew my husband and I were unstable, both financially and as a unit.

I was responsible for allowing them to be as close as they were.

All because I did not hold firm to the boundaries I created in my mind.

The emotional reactivity and instability was something I had been aware of about myself for years. I had been in therapy when I lived in New York and was still actively working on that part of myself before and during my marriage. When it began popping up in the friendship, I took ownership of those behaviors and put effort into learning new ways to communicate.

Did I slip up after my husband ended our marriage? Abso-fucking-lutely. Did I begin to lose control of my composure as this woman slowly and consistently began to treat me in a way that I told her I did not want to be treated? Yes, of course. I will not sit here and deny that I was still working my way out of the FLEAS (the term for mimicking narcissistic behavior as a survival mechanism) that I picked up from my mother. But what made it hard to accept accountability for those relationships—the way in which I really was victimized by the both of them—was that they made me the scapegoat.

To them, I was the only problem. The whole problem. To them, they could’ve lived a happy, peaceful life if I hadn’t been there to whine. To them, I was the discardable link. The bad apple. As they ended their relationships with me and laid every ounce of blame at my feet and on my shoulders, they shirked their own responsibility for the ways they had mishandled me in my vulnerability. They painted me as the only villain.

Worse, still, they led me to believe that I deserved the isolation and the severance. That they had done no wrong. That their only faults were in “loving too hard.”

I couldn’t understand this, couldn’t wrap my mind around how they could do such a thing, until I remembered my mother. My own mother, in her attempt to shy from the fact that she was mistreating her daughter, had done the same thing. This was when I realized that everyone has their own version of events.

No two people are living the exact same experience, even if they are living together across the world. I learned that, unless someone is actually in my skin, in my mind, in my heart, they do not know what it is like to live my life. This leads me to the final piece of the puzzle for the lesson of victimhood: identity was my saving grace.

Forming a Sense of Self Was the Only Way Out

When I began discovering that I had not stuck to the boundaries I had wanted to keep, I asked why. The answer was simple: I lacked a sense of self.

I did not know who I was, therefore I was not confident enough to accept the consequences of setting a boundary. In this case, with the stakes being so high, the boundaries would have led me to ending the relationships myself before they ever got to where they got. I did not know that I would be okay if I lost her or him. I was entirely disconnected from my power. The victim mentality that my mother passed down was still the foundation of my psyche. I had been raised by a powerless woman, thus I believed I had become a powerless woman.

From my perspective, I was a new mother who hadn’t worked in over a year. I was dependent first on my husband and then, when his money ran out, we were dependent on this other woman. By the time I knew his money was so low, we were already 9,000 miles away from Texas. So, yes, I have grace for myself. (Which was the next biggest step, by the way.) I have grace for myself because I knew not what I had done.

I did not know I was powerful. I did not know that it was I who held that family together. I did not know that being more honest with my husband before we left would have prevented this all from happening. I did not know that I could’ve ended that friendship before it got so far, in the first months when she wanted things out of a friendship that I did not want. When it was clear she had boundary issues. When I first noticed the inner whisper of she is not for me. I did not know how to gracefully end a friendship when there wasn’t something outrageously wrong.

I did not yet know the cost of ignoring my intuition.

I simply did not know.

And how could I? Who was there to teach me? Certainly not my mother, nor my grandmother, nor my aunts. These were all small-minded, small-town girls. They did not live a life I desired to imitate. I truly was on my own in the realm of discovering what it meant to be a powerful woman. A woman who took control of her own life. A woman who knows who she is.

I was raised with no father by a woman who had a blank space in the spot where her Self should have been. Nobody taught me about character, about the “I am”, about true confidence. I had to figure that out the hard way.

It wasn’t until I had the two closest people in my life try to tell me that I was a vicious, dangerous person — which I knew was not the true core of my character, even if I didn’t what the truth was — that I became forced to discover what it means to become the heroine of my own life. To stop believing myself to be powerless. To stop believing that I have no control.

It wasn’t until the most painful rupture to date that I discovered who I really am. It was this discovery of self that pulled me out of my victimhood. It was the strength that I found and used to face my darkest shadow, my deepest pains, my honest mistakes and failures of character, that allowed me to begin saving myself.

In short, the path out of victimhood and into heroineship begins with accountability.

You must be willing to admit when you’ve gone wrong, not just towards other people but also towards yourself.

Accepting the Different Truths

Last night I stayed up until 6 a.m. Just one of those nights where my mind refused to rest. After I journaled and read and scrolled, I decided to take a look at my ex-best friend’s Substack. I knew that I was healed enough so that I wouldn’t relive the hurt or anger. But to my surprise, she was also still writing about our relationship. Then I saw that she started a YouTube. The first video that caught my attention was titled “Reflections on processing a friend breakup.” It was posted 3 days ago. I watched the 12 minute video, and to my utter dismay, I found a smile creeping across my face.

Maybe it was the delirium of no sleep, maybe it was that my period was on her way, or maybe it was that I am actually more healed than I even anticipated. Regardless, I saw myself from outside of my body as I pressed “comment” and began typing. Here is what came out.

As I watched and listened to her speak about her takeaways from that disaster (which she called in another video “the friendship from hell”) I felt nothing but acceptance and gratitude. It was comical, really, to see that the relationship taught us similar lessons: the price of self-abandonment, the unhealed aspects of our relationships with our mothers, and what we do and don’t want out of relationships moving forward. She spoke about ignoring red flags and making herself smaller, both things I could say I also did throughout my time with her.

Overall, that video was extremely cathartic for me. I finally dug into the truth: I am still the villain in her story, even if she is not the villain in mine (anymore). And I am okay with that. I no longer feel hurt by this fact. I no longer feel the urge to prove her wrong. I no longer feel anger at the injustice, and even the original pain stayed clear of my energetic field.

Because I have formed my own identity, because I trust my own version of events, because I did take accountability, and because she is no longer an active participant in my life I am able to step into the powerful space of knowing that her opinion does not matter. Truly. It is meaningless. It holds no power over my life, my self-esteem, or my path.

In discovering who I truly am — who the Soul of Kylie is — I have naturally graduated out of the victimhood mentality that I inherited. In doing so, I have also graduated her out of her villainship. Instead of believing her to be the purely evil antagonist to my purely innocent protagonist self, I see the ordeal for what it was. We were just a group of children, really. Children with adult responsibilities, adult dreams, and fumbling our way through making it all happen. We each had our own motives, our own desires, which we thought were aligned. It wasn’t until we were in too deep that we realized they were not.

In taking full accountability for my own actions and then forgiving myself, I was able to see her in her fullness as another wounded woman and then forgive her as well.

The shift from victimhood to heroineship allowed me to release the entire season fully. There is no resentment. There is no anger, no bitterness. No ill will. There is only gratitude. Pure, joy-inducing gratitude.

I learned what I needed to learn. I grew. Most importantly, I discovered who I really am, and I am damn fucking proud of myself and who I have become. I am building a life that I am proud of, that I enjoy waking up to. I am studying a subject I love. I have a job that I can be truly proud of and grateful for. I will very, very shortly, finally have my own apartment. I am a good mother with a beautiful, brilliant, magnificent, happy baby.

After the worst heartbreak of my life, I really, truly, actually did take that pain and alchemize it to create something that I love and can be proud of. I am confident in myself, not because my body is the hottest or because I look like the baddest bitch (which I previously mistook for my confidence benchmark), but because I saw myself do the inner work of feeling, clearing, and transmuting. I witnessed myself choose to keep standing, to keep creating, to keep growing. I witnessed myself decide to be powerful and then put that power to good use.

To answer my original question, what separates a victim from a survivor is simply choice. It requires strength, yes, but as Villanelle from the show Killing Eve once said, “being strong is a choice.”

First and foremost, to kill the victim within we must first decide that we can and will overcome. We must decide, with the utmost conviction, not to allow this circumstance to kill us, to swallow us, to crush us.

To kill the victim within and become a survivor, we simply must accept that somewhere within us there is a power that can carry us out. It is the subsequent search for this power, the journey of self-discovery, that begins to shift our perception.

But always, it begins with a choice: To sink or to swim? To crumble or to fortify? To fall or to rise?

A Final Note to [Redacted]

Thank you for being my mirror. Thank you for being my teacher. Thank you for crossing my path and giving me a story and a lesson that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

I truly wish you nothing but love, peace, and abundance.

“Redacted” wrote an essay to me back when our split was final. I wrote a response, copying her style, but I had never sent it to her until I shared it in my comment. If you’d like to read it, it’s here on my page. I am proud of the woman I was that wrote that essay, too. It was her that carried me on to this point.

As always, thank you for reading, witnessing, supporting, and growing with me.

My sincerest love,
Kylie

I have found myself living with my ex-husband again for a brief moment in time. This essay is another reflection from the stirrings of my heart through these moments.

I hear myself asking, Why do you keep telling yourself you want him when you know you don’t?

Because, really, I don’t. I’m not attracted to him anymore. Of course, objectively, factually, he’s handsome. His strong jawline, his brown eyes that sparkle, his thick, dark eyebrows that make him seem severe. I can’t say that he’s ugly or even mid. What I mean when I say I’m not attracted to him is that my body doesn’t spark when we brush each other in the kitchen or when he leaves the restroom after a shower, still glistening with beads of water and smelling like Dual soap and minty mouthwash.

My mind remembers, and the body that hasn’t been touched in almost a year remembers too, so there may be some desire. But desire is not the same as arousal. Desire is carnal. I can feel desire anytime. What I mean is, he doesn’t arouse me anymore.

And that’s why I keep wondering, You know damn well you don’t want him inside the life you’re building, so where is this pang coming from?

Friendship is the answer that whispers back to me.

There was a time when he knew me better than anyone else. The only person on Earth to know the intricacies of my spiritual life. My interests in music, books, movies. My workout routine. He was the only person I lived life with. (All of my girlfriends are long-distance, so the most I ever get with them are the catch-ups.) Everyone else in my life knows me in pieces, as who I was when we lived in the same city and the events that I have stumbled through since leaving that city. They know the headlines, the tidbits, but not me—in my entirety—in the way that he did.

I just finished reading Loved One by Aisha Muharrar, assigned reading for my book club. It was about a woman who lost, you guessed it, her loved one. He died young, twenty-nine, and the story follows her grief journey while she goes on a quest through Europe attempting to track down his lost belongings. There were several things in the book that reminded me of my relationship with my daughter’s father.

The romance that the two characters had when they were young, a perfect summer, that ended abruptly because he had felt a relationship would impede on his own personal development. How one of his ex-girlfriends had said that she felt like she was teaching a boy how to be in a relationship. The way that he and Julia, the main character, had separated and then found their way back to each other later, that time staying friends for years, until he realized she was actually the love of his life. (Okay, so that part hasn’t happened to me, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t fantasized about it.) The most relatable thing, though, was how Julia said that they could just talk. Talk and talk and talk. And talk. And talk.

I’d said that about my ex-husband at one point, and even still, after the events of the past year, it is still true. So many times this month I’ve had to catch myself, literally stop myself mid-sentence, from talking too much. We find a topic and then we just go. We theorize together, critique together, laugh together, question together. From something simple like, “Why did they name that grocery store Fiesta?” To something more complex like, “I wonder what money is going to look like when Violet is old enough to make her own?”

Endlessly we go on. Seamlessly. Without pause. Until we reach the natural lull between topics and the energy shifts because we realize we’re doing it again. The realization of our new shape gliding across our faces in unison as the awkwardness descends and we move away, finding something to do with ourselves that doesn’t involve each other.

Today while I read on the couch, feet up, sky-blue moo moo on, hair freshly washed, and he cleaned up the kitchen, humming along to petal that played through his headphones, I thought to myself, It isn’t supposed to be this easy.

After the heartbreak, the betrayal, the selfishness, the childishness, and the hurt I both received and doled out, it shouldn’t be this easy for us to cohabitate. It shouldn’t be this easy to play house. It should still sting. I should still feel a deep, throbbing, ache, the wound being reopened, gushing. A just-healed scar suddenly ripped apart.

It shouldn’t be this easy, because then what does that mean about our love? Had it ever really been love? Was it simply two kids fumbling around, misplacing their excitement for life inside of a random, exciting person? Or are we secretly still in love? Are we hiding the truth even from ourselves in our own attempts to make the breakup mean something?

Is it a case of bad timing, or does it mean we are better as friends? And, further still, what do I do with this information now?

I told him when I first got here that we couldn’t be close. I couldn’t be his friend. But now, weeks later, my resolve has lessened. Coparenting in the same house, making each other meals, taking Violet out together, watching movies as a family, it’s all weakened my defenses. Plus, it’s been almost a year since things ended romantically. The emotions of that moment are now just memories. I’ve, clearly, processed well enough that now the images only knock quietly on the door of my mind. So quietly that I can pretend I didn’t even hear them.

What walks more confidently into my mind is a note from another creator here on Substack. wrote, “To reconnect with the people that have hurt you is disrespectful to the version of you that suffered.” And that snaps me back. Because she’s right.

I’m not sure what it means—us cohabitating this calmly. I don’t know what it says about me, him, or our bond. I did have the thought that maybe this is actually why we couldn’t make it. Because this making it look easy was exactly what we did when we were together. From the outside, things looked fine. We cooked and cleaned and laughed and talked and walked and occasionally made love. But underneath it all was this cavern, this gaping divide that separated us. The topics that really mattered—his heart and mine—never being spoken of. Just danced around. And it’s happening again, only this time it’s on purpose.

To reconnect with the people that have hurt you is disrespectful to the version of you that suffered.

We both got hurt. We both had wounds that needed to heal. We both suffered through our love and after it. So we’re doing what we know how to do: covering ourselves up.

The end was ugly. It was mean. It was bitter and it was downright unfair. So, while I may have healed and found acceptance through it all, I owe it to the version of myself that suffered, truly suffered, to not go back. I owe it to every version of myself to not go back.

Every version of Kylie that ever fawned and people-pleased her way into acceptance. Every version of Kylie that was abandoned, manipulated, and crushed. Every version of Kylie that kept believing in people long after they showed her who they were. Every version of Kylie that just wanted to belong. They deserve this version of her, me, us to say Enough.

I can forgive. But I will not forget.

I may miss his friendship, but I respect myself more.

I am whole now. This version of Kylie is whole. She is, I am full, drunk on the weightlessness of my own light. I do not need his love to prove that I am lovely. I do not need his interest to tell me that I am interesting. I do not need his approval, his energy, or his money to sustain me any longer. I have learned that I can give myself everything I need and everything I want.

It shouldn’t be this easy, after everything we’ve been through, but for my daughter’s sake I’m glad that it is. And perhaps that’s the real reason that it is. That’s the best reason I could come up with anyways. For the beautiful, angelic, perfect little girl that we made.

I can bear the pangs, the questions, and the uneasy ease of my relationship with my ex if it means my daughter gets both of her parents without the traditional tension or fighting that comes with a split up home.

It’s a strange situation I’ve found myself in, but I must be doing something right if my daughter is smiling and laughing every day. She is surrounded by people that have her as their first priority, and that is the only thing that matters.

xo,
kylie

My mind began racing through all the things he could be doing, all the people he could be laughing with, or worse, the unthinkable. I shut down the images flashing behind my eyes before they had a chance to become disgustingly, nauseatingly vivid.

Kylie, stop. This line of questioning is not helpful. I slinked my way back to bed where I moved in slow motion, twisting and turning, moving pillows and rearranging blankets, trying to find some physical comfort without disturbing the angel lying next to me. I closed my eyes, willing sleep to take me once more.

It refused.

When I checked my phone it showed 3:34. How on earth did that much time pass already? Is he seriously still not home? Kylie. Ugh. Stop.

This time instead of ignoring the thoughts I chose to actively combat them. First, I told myself that whatever he’s doing is none of my business. Truth. Then, I dared myself to face an uncomfortable question—why do you still care so much?

Oh. Um. Honestly, the idea that he’s living his life without me, happily, and not even thinking of me… that hurts still. Truth. Saying that to myself made me suddenly aware of an ache in my chest. A familiar ache. It was smaller than before. Decidedly less urgent, less aggressive. Not gone, but not as heavy as it once was. This brought me some solace. I’m not back at square one. I’m just in a tough spot. Living with him and all. This is not forever. This too shall pass.

The hours passed quickly considering the stillness, the quiet, and the lack of things to do. I rotated between praying for sleep, reading articles (one of which was titled “The Economics of Centering Men”), watching my daughter and kissing her softly on her perfect little cheeks, and playing the New York Times games until, at 4:57, I heard the door open.

Immediately I felt the familiar flush of heat, anger, and it pulled me out of bed. I turned my flashlight on the lowest setting while I searched for some comfortable clothes, at last relinquishing the desire and need to fall back asleep. I waited on him to finish his shower then commandeered the bathroom to get ready in record time. I was too tired and it was too early/late for me to care about looking cute. Clothes (black leggings, bralette, baggy black shirt) brush teeth, hair in a bun, and done. I grabbed my bag, texted him “I’m heading out” (to which he responded by “liking” the message), picked up some shoes I’d been needing to return, and headed out the door with only the desire to kiss my daughter one more time making me pause. I decided against it. He was already in bed with her and she sounded like she was stirring. My presence would make her cry, and absolutely nobody wanted that.

His mom was sitting on the porch, phone in hand and Bible in her lap. I told her I couldn’t sleep and now that he was home I was going to find something to do with myself. I made the walk to where my car was parked on the street and immediately felt lighter once I sat in the driver’s seat. I googled “diner near me” and settled on The House of Pies.

For the entire fifteen minute drive, I listened to Beautiful Chorus’s newest album. It’s been one of my go-tos lately. I’m being mindful and intentional about my consumption in all things, especially music. I let their modern techno-jazz-Afro-beat tracks and repetitive lyrics cleanse my mind and felt my body relax under the softness of the affirmations.

I arrived at 5:58, but the marquis out front informed me that I wouldn’t be able to receive dine-in service until 6. I used the extra minutes to put on some rosy lips Vaseline, brush my eyebrows, and redo my bun. At 6:03 I grabbed my bag—packed with my iPad, book, journal, 2 pens, keys, cards, headphones, and phone—and my jacket and walked inside.

The sign on the front door let me know that this establishment is a recognized part of Houston’s history, and the sign inside at the counter told me that this location was the original, established in 1967. Wow! That’s pretty cool. It made the moment feel more special for me.

I was the only diner inside. The place was innocent and still smelled fresh from the night’s cleaning. The burnt orange booths called me away from the bar where I normally would’ve sat. I picked a smaller table right in the middle of the restaurant because it felt the coziest. And, unusual for me, I sat with my back to the door. It was okay, though, because there was a mirror on the wall I faced, so I could still see if anyone came in behind me. The wallpaper that bordered the top of the walls showed watercolor images of various diner foods.

The Hispanic woman that came to my table was older than my mom but not quite as old as my grandmother. Mid-50s I’d say. Her desert brown skin was dull and her service was far from exceptional. I wondered how long she’d been awake. If she’d worked another job before coming here. How long she’d have to be there today. I made sure to always use “ma’am” and “please” and “thank you”. She made sure to always keep my coffee refilled.

I journaled while I waited for my country breakfast to arrive. Eggs (scrambled), bacon, buttermilk pancakes. A classic that you just can’t miss at a true, authentic diner. I decided against adding chocolate chips and whipped cream to the pancakes because I knew I was going to get a slice of pie. I didn’t care that it was 6 a.m. I was at the House of Pies. I wasn’t leaving without eating a fresh slice.

I savored this breakfast. I picked up each piece of bacon as though it were sacred. I bit softly, chewed slowly. I seasoned my eggs (salt, pepper, opted out of Tabasco for today) and ate them with just as much intention. The pancakes I slathered with too much butter (though there’s really no such thing) and zig-zagged on the syrup before spreading it around with my fork.

I ate my pancakes the way I always do: all the edges first, turning the stack in circles (spirals, really) until it’s just the middle left. The middle is the softest part, the best part. And with food I always save the best for last.

I smiled to myself as I ate. I was aware I probably confounded the servers based on their glances that quickly diverted anytime I glanced back. But I didn’t care. I felt like I’d taken myself back in time. I used my phone only to take photos. Everything was analog. Slow. Un-distracted.

After I finished my first course, I went back to my journal to finish the thought that my food had interrupted. I put pen to paper and found myself writing something that, to me, felt quite profound:

Suddenly all of life began to make sense. A weight floated gently off my shoulders and a small smile made its way across my face. I could finally see the way forward through life.

Gratitude immediately followed that personal revelation. When I began to think of all of the things that lie ahead of me—part-time school, full time work, mothering, writing, fitness, and doing all of these things without a partner—I just felt grateful to have learned the true meaning (for lack of better word) of presence before entering that chapter.

I am starting from zero in my new apartment. I don’t own any furniture, having sold it all before the move to Thailand. All of my clothes fit into one small and one medium suitcase. So filling up a new 846 sqft apartment with just the necessities will be a feat in and of itself, and I’ll be doing it while starting school and a new job. And it’s going to happen slowly because, finances.

My next chapter is going to be busy. It’s going to require true, honest, full presence. It’s going to require patience and gratitude and strength. It probably won’t be “pretty” at first. But now, thanks to the lesson that gracefully entered my being this morning, I feel equipped to climb this particular mountain.

With my closing remarks of gratitude, I shut my journal and ordered a slice of French Silk pie. Dark chocolate custard layered with milk chocolate mousse, topped with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles. The crust was soft and crunchy at the same time, and the whole thing just melted in my mouth. I felt almost seductive with the way I slowly devoured it. It took me one whole chapter of my book to finish the slice.

The server had placed my check down with my slice, but I didn’t look at it until I was ready to leave. I turned it over and saw the total: $18.24. I chuckled to God. That was my lucky number. Just further confirming the déjà vu I had when I left the house earlier—that I was where I was supposed to be.

There ended up being a Whole Foods right across the street, which reminded me of the shoes I needed to return. I stood outside my car for a moment, basking in the soft sunlight that had finally made its way above the horizon. The sky was a hazy blue, cloudless. The warm air invigorated and soothed me simultaneously.

I was in and out of Whole Foods in less than 1 minute. I knew I didn’t wish to return to the house just yet, so I decided to go to Bayou for a walk. I started at a different point today because why not? and decided to make it a stroll, not an exercise. No headphones, phone in my pocket on DND, just me and the creatures and the trees.

I somehow began walking a path I didn’t even know existed. It was peppered with creatures—squirrels, bunnies, birds, dragonflies, and lizards—that graced me with their presence. Some ran, some watched me, some completely ignored my existence. They were all cute regardless.

The biggest blessing of the whole walk was the Lost Lake that I stumbled on. What? The Lost Lake? What is that?! How did I not know this was here?!

It was a beautiful, pear-shaped pond. Its edges swathed in moss, water plants, and grass. Dozens of little minnows of all sizes darted to and fro. One turtle dove under when he saw me and somehow disappeared beneath the grass that lay at the bottom. It was a shallow pond, so I was shocked to see the turtle just completely evade my sight.

I walked the edge of the pond slowly, staring into the water with the childlike wonder. On one of its banks was a 4-tiered waterfall that fed the pond. I sat by this for a few moments, closed my eyes, and let the sounds bring even more soothing to my being.

As I kept walking along the edge I peered in hoping to see another turtle. I love those little guys. Just as I was about to walk away I spotted a large one rounder than my head. I leaned down, my hands on my thighs, as I giggled at it. It was lying at the bottom, nestled on the soft green grass. It was moving its front legs and pushing its head forward, eating whatever came up off the floor when he disturbed it. I watched it until it swam away.

The rest of my walk felt just as magical as discovering that “lake”. I felt I was one with the Divine. That God and I were not separate, but instead that we were inhabiting this physical plane entirely together. I couldn’t contain a smile.

I returned to my car after an hour (wow, I didn’t realize I’d walked that long!) and let the windows down. Jill Scott’s “Golden” got put on full volume as I drove, contented, beaming, having forgotten the exhaustion I felt hours earlier. Tears of joy welled in my eyes as the words sprung forth from my throat.

I’m taking my own freedom
putting it in my song
singing loud and strong
Grooving all day long
I’m taking my freedom…
Letting the joy unfold
Livin’ my life like it’s golden

The ordinary becomes extraordinary when we choose to be fully present with the world around us. The unspecial becomes special when we allow ourselves to see it as such.

Life is golden even, especially, in the mundane.

It’s agonizing. Truly. The suspense and the anticipation create, in me at least, a relentless restlessness of my mind. My instinct is to replay every event, every conversation, every action, and every rest day so as to try and deduce whether or not I’ve done enough or put effort in the right direction.

Did I make the right choice there? Did I say the right thing here? Am I actually breaking old patterns or am I still inside of them and I don’t even know it?

It’s a litany of questions that I seem trapped into asking. That is, until I realized: the angst of the waiting period was also a part of my old conditioning. The question — am I still inside of old patterns? — helped me see that, yes, I was.

Me and faith have a checkered past, you see. I used to take an elliptical orbit around Faith. In some moments, when it was easy, I would fly in real close. My heart would open and the sun would shine on me fiercely. But when things got hard, well, then I would run back out as far as I could. I would question, What’s the point? Will I ever have it? Will it ever just be easy? And the sun would retreat behind the heavy, grey clouds while rain fell down my cheeks.

On and on that cycle went for a decade. Over and over I would be aligned, receiving what I thought I wanted or needed, but then something hard would come along and, in my weakness, I would believe that God had abandoned me. That my faith was useless, nothing but naivety.

But it was the faithfulness of my Creator that opened my mind.

God began showing up everywhere. In the sunrise. In the sunset. In the beautiful grey moth that landed on my shoulder. In the turtles that kept crossing my path. In the flowers that bloomed overnight. In the way my daughter smiles and laughs.

Once, God even gave me a gold coin. A literal gold coin. It was mine from years ago that I thought I’d lost in the handfuls of moves, and suddenly one day it was handed to me by a person that I least expected it from.

When I needed God most, They showed up. Through the countless synchronicities, winks, and blessings, I began to recognize that God is the ultimate example of faithfulness.

God is infinite. God is always. So, of course, God will always be there when we need Them. It seems so obvious to me now. But then I guess that’s how I know I’m really growing, right?

Since God, the Universe, Spirit, the Creator, whomever you call Them, is infinitely there, infinitely faithful, They need to know: Can you withstand the pressure of surrender? Can you release your grip on the outcome and walk by faith into the future? Do you trust me entirely, or are you still leaning on your own understanding?

For those of us that have been called to greater heights, for those of us that have always felt destined for something more, we cannot walk our paths alone. It is in the waiting season that we must integrate the habit of walking by faith rather than by sight.

I have never in my life related to a Bible verse in the way that I relate to this one now:

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.
James 1:2-3

The testing of our faith through trial and error, through hardship, grief, and pain does absolutely produce endurance. In the same way that our muscles grow stronger after we push them to their limits, our minds and our Spirits also become fortified, if that is what we so choose, through the disasters and detours of life. Because of this, I think the waiting season is not only a test, but a blessing too. It’s a time to pause and reflect and, more importantly, a time to rest.

It is a period where we get to practice living our faith before we receive that which we have so effortfully worked for.

Can you have faith even when you aren’t where you want to be?
Can you have faith even through the delay?
Can you have faith even in the uncertainty?
Moreover, can you learn to rest into that faith? Can you relax and slow down and enjoy where you are before you receive your hearts desire?

Are you willing to let your faith, not your own hands but the hands of God, carry you across the threshold?

Because a faith that requires answers isn’t really faith.
A faith that requires fruit to be borne immediately… isn’t really faith.

Accepting the waiting season with gratitude rather than frustration is the key to moving forward. Learning to appreciate the pause is the true mark of wisdom. Because the truth is, those dreams you’re asking for aren’t going to be “easy”. They are going to require work, energy, effort. They are going to challenge you in ways previously unknown. They are going to ask more from you than you believed you had. So take all the rest you can before God releases the catapult to which you are strapped.

Endurance isn’t built so that it can sit. Endurance is built so it can be used. You, we, didn’t work this hard just to quit right before things got good. We worked this hard so that we could maintain the life we desire.

If, like me, you are in your waiting season I invite you to get cozy. You’ve done all you can do. Let God show you what only God can do. In other words, rest up, buttercup. Because when that door opens, there’s no slowing down.

See you on the other side.

With love,
Kylie

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I arrived at Eleanor Tinsley much later than I anticipated, but luckily there was a coolness to the morning that was also unexpected. The dark gray clouds hung low in the sky, hugging the buildings and the trees with an anticipatory energy. It was going to rain soon.

Good.
That’s exactly what I was hoping for.

I hit the ground walking so fast I almost forgot what I was I even there for. Five minutes into the walk I decided to take a seat. To breathe. To gather my thoughts and to set my intentions. I found a stone bench nestled in the green bushes, protected from the busy sidewalk. I placed my feet flat on the gravel, rested my hands gently on my thighs, dropped my shoulders and breathed.

“I am going to walk this loop, the same route the three of us used to take, and when I am done I will no longer be carrying the past with me.”

I stood, pressed play on my Outdoor Walk Workout and got back on the path. (I also put my AirPods in because I knew I was going to vocalize this process, and I didn’t want to look like a crazy person talking to herself.)

As I walked along the trail every curve and corner had a memory, and I let myself relive them in detail.

The tree that they stopped at and sat by together. My first twinge of discomfort. I could see them still so vividly. Her huge mass of kinky, ink-black hair pulled into a low puff and covered with a white and red silk scarf. Her red cropped tank top and her black leggings. Her arm stretched out to let her palm lie flat against the bark, one leg bent so that her weight was resting mostly on the other. His go-to pose: cross legged on the ground. His back against the tree, his eyes closed. Her eyes closed. Their breath synching up as their bond seemed to connect and congeal, the tree as their conduit. My stomach clenching ever so slightly at the sight of it. My body knowing I didn’t like it but my mind not having enough wits to say why or, simply, no.

I breathed as I speed-walked past that memory. Then I just let myself go. For the first forty-five minutes of the walk I spoke out loud every grievance I still held against my ex-husband and ex-best friend. On and on and on I spoke until, breathless, there was nothing left to say. I had sufficiently, though not succinctly, expressed every last ounce of pain. The words and their heat carried my legs faster and farther than our original route required, but my spirit was so alive that my body didn’t register any fatigue.

I reminded myself that my intention was not just to relive, but to release as well. I chuckled at the squirrel running beside me. So silly of me to get so caught up that I almost forgot what I was doing.

As I rounded another curve — the famous curve where we three either clotted closer or feathered out further from one another — I smiled and decided that I wanted to remember the good things too. Because nobody is all bad. No relationship is ever without goodness. They deserved to be remembered for the things they did right, too. And I deserved to remember the moments that I was being loved.

She taught me how to shop. Like really shop. Not just in and out, grab what I need and go. Nope. She taught me how to take my time. To walk down every aisle, inspect each item that calls to me, circle back if need be. I savor it now. I forage. And I still think of her when I enter stores. One very potent year of shopping with that woman, and my habits are changed forever.

She taught me about femininity too. The outward expression of it at least. The power of adornment. The ritual of self-worship through beautification for beauty’s sake. Not vanity, but true love of self. I hadn’t been up close with a woman like that before, and I’m grateful to have learned the importance of it.

He… he did a lot of good things really. After the obvious one of helping me create the most amazing little girl in the world, my favorite thing he did was help me embrace my creativity. The seed had been planted by another one of my former lovers, a summer romance that ended when he left for Yale’s acting program in the fall, but I wasn’t brave enough to water that seed on my own. When my husband came into my life he showered that dream just enough to make it sprout. Then he gave me the courage to feed that dream on my own.

Next, there is something they both gave me when they left that was one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in life thus far: always trust myself. Trust when it feels off. Trust when I want it to end. Trust myself enough to set a boundary and uphold it without guilt or shame.

What I’m most grateful for is that I learned never again to let another person make me question my own mind, my own heart, or my own soul.

Thunder crackled and rolled in the sky just as I finished my grateful goodbyes. I smiled again and slowed my pace, and that’s when my body tensed. That space just below my ribs suddenly went rigid. It was discomfort, a desire to just hold on. To not let go. Because it knew, I knew, that the other side of that hollowed out space is going to be something greater than what I could ever conceive on my own.

I acknowledged the discomfort for what it was, and then I kept going.

The second I began to utter the words, “I release…” the clouds opened up and the water began to fall.

“I release my anger,” drop, drop, drop.

“I release my sadness,” drip, drip, drip.

“I release the pain. I release the weight of the past,” and the drips and drops came faster then.

The rain fell in small, soft kisses so that one could believe it was merely a sprinkle. But it fell so abundantly that in no time my body was completely covered in the waters of the heavens.

God was washing me clean.

It kept raining as I kept repeating, “I release, I release, I release.” And, as if I were in a movie, the last drop fell just as I ushered my last statement: “I release the past because I cannot change it. They are not important anymore. She is not my friend or my sister. He is not my husband. But I am still me. I don’t need them because I have myself.”

I gazed upon the sky and grinned from ear to ear. My arms lifted slightly as my eyes slid closed. I was hugging God. Giving my thanks to a faithful Creator whose unending presence made my healing possible.

I took a breath there, and then I kept on walking.

I realized that I had about a half mile left until I made it back to my car, and I still wanted to be intentional. I popped on my Soul Balm playlist and let the music carry me through the end. It was the icing on the cake — to fill the freshly emptied space in my heart with words and sounds so sweet and uplifting. So encouraging and loving. So hopeful.

There was something surprising though about the feeling I held in my body. I didn’t actually feel lighter. I didn’t feel energized. I didn’t feel “different” the way I had expected to. And as soon as I noticed this, God dropped in the reason. The two reasons, actually.

One, that is proof of how much work I’ve already done in releasing them and that storyline. I didn’t feel lighter because the toils of these past nine months were fruitful. My nervous system wasn’t the one holding onto them, it was my mind. Which leads me to…

Two, this walk was a ritual for my mind. It was the intentional decision to relinquish the pieces of my identity that were still wrapped around being the victim in that story. This was about closing the mental loop. It was about surrendering the part of myself that believed I needed a sob story in order to create the life I am walking into. And it was about creating a memory to look back on whenever my mind decides to wander backwards. A mental flagpole that I can look to for a clear before and after. To say to myself, No, we are not going back there. You released it already. You are free from it.

Once I understood the fullness of what I had just done, I simply felt pride. My heart opened, and golden light spread out of my chest like warm honey. It covered me in the soft glow of pure love.

I did it. I am free. My slate has been washed clean. That time is now merely a scene in the movie of my life. It is no longer the whole plot. I am open to receive and create the life that I see in my dreams. Finally, I am me.

If you’re interested in listening, here is the Soul Balm playlist I created. I hope you enjoy.

With love,
Kylie Rose

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Today I am walking along the event horizon, for the umpteenth time, but now I know that nothing will ever be the same once I leap off of this one. Or, maybe I’ve already leapt and I’m in the free fall. Yeah. That’s more accurate. Let me set the scene.

I’m back in Houston, one of my favorite cities. The city where I feel most free to be myself. I got here a couple of days ago. What was meant to be a two-day stay so my daughter could see her father suddenly became an indefinite stay after my mother texted, “I think you should just stay there when you go this week. I can’t do this anymore.”

Yeah. My mother essentially kicked me out and broke up with me. Honestly, I’m not surprised nor am I upset. And I definitely am not playing the victim. I saw it coming.

A couple of weeks ago we got into a fight, and I stepped way out of line. One of those moments where I was tired of being the good girl. The bigger person. The one who held herself together all the time. I wanted to show her that she couldn’t keep treating me the way she’s always treated me. And the moment I did it, the moment I felt my body close in on hers and my hand rise up to shove her face away from mine, I knew I had to leave. The next day I began mentally sorting out my steps and my timeline. But she beat me to it.

She read the pages of my journal where I was brainstorming my escape plan. And, ever the narcissist, to regain control of the situation she threw me out before I could leave her. I’m currently crashing in my ex’s room in his great-grandmother’s house where he lives (unemployed, still) with his great-grandmother and his mom.

You’re probably reading this thinking that I must be freaking out or that I’m so strong for not freaking out. Or maybe you’re thinking something entirely different, I don’t know, I’m not a mind reader. Honestly, the only thing I am feeling is excitement. Because this is what I asked for. Well, not exactly this. But I did ask to leave that run down, ant-infested, molding mobile home in the country — A.S.A.P. I did ask to be back in the city where I have friends. Where I can have a life. I did ask to get a better job. I did ask to get my own apartment with a gym and a pool and in a good location. And okay, yeah maybe I don’t have the job or the apartment yet, but I’m closer now than I was before.

In truth, I’m more shocked at the fact that I’m not freaking out. I am a fixed person. I thrive in routine, structure, predictability. I hate last minute plans or plans changing without proper notice. So I really caught myself off guard by how calm I’ve been about it all.

But that’s the thing about being present. Nothing can really be a surprise anymore. It all just… is. And if you’ve been practicing presence for a long enough time then you begin to realize that your present circumstances are all a representation of the actions you have taken. Nothing is a surprise because you either prayed for this, planned for this, or knew there would be consequences for this. (I just realized that I’ve been practicing presence for about nine months, which is the gestation time for a baby. I am quite literally birthing my new self. UGH God is SO COOL!!!) Somehow, my current situation is all three. And I couldn’t be more grateful.

From the outside, this situation could look like the same old pattern repeating. But how do I know that this time it isn’t? That’s right. Presence.

Over the last nine months I have slowly, painstakingly, laid the foundation of my true Self. I walked into my shadow. I walked into my grief. I walked into every painful thing I’ve ever faced, every belief that negated the faith I held deep within my heart, and I came out on the other side of it all still alive. Still hopeful. Still shining.

I did the fucking work. Every day. In my sleep. Exhausted. Mothering. At my wits fucking end. I showed up. I relinquished all that wasn’t mine to carry. I rewired the parts of myself that didn’t want to have faith. I put love into the spaces in my heart that needed it most. I was present with the heaviest of my emotions, and I loved them into the light.

That’s how I know that the next place I call home will actually be home. Will actually be solid. Because right now, while I am technically homeless; while I have no job and a daughter to raise; while I no longer have my mother, I am okay. I am alive. I am grateful. I am faithful.

I have proven to myself that I can. So I will.

I have leapt off of the event horizon, but I am not falling. I am not flailing. I am floating gently through the air like a feather. I am letting the wind carry me, trusting whole heartedly that wherever it places me is where I am meant to be.

With love and excitement,
Kylie

When there is anything new or challenging or curious in my life I hold it up to the light and spin it in as many directions as I can. I question it endlessly. I throw it against the wall or I dissect it or I melt it or I freeze it until I have seen and smelled and felt and heard and tasted every last inch of it.

Which is why you’re getting this essay.

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I am aware that I’ve been extremely inconsistent these days with posting essays. The weight of the drafts that have accumulated in my queue hangs heavy over my head. At first I thought it was writer’s block, but as the ideas kept flowing and the notes kept piling up, I realized that wasn’t the case. So I did as I always do — I dug.

I started by noticing a sinking feeling when I would press “create > article”. Even before opening my iPad, just the idea of writing for Substack started to invoke a sense of hesitation. A heavy pause. I allowed myself to sit with this pause for a while. I didn’t judge it. I didn’t criticize it. I didn’t shame it. I just noticed it until I was ready for the next phase: questioning.

Where is this pause coming from? What does it feel like in my body? What images come to mind when I sit with the pause long enough?

After internally questioning myself for days, mulling over this reluctance while I brewed coffee, showered, drove, or meditated, my morning pages uncovered that it was my fear of being seen as my truest self that was blocking me from continuing to write.

This was a huge aha! moment for me because it’s been a pattern in my life for as long as I can remember. It goes something like this:

Inspiration > Action > Encouragement (from God or others) > Fear > Give up

At almost every major beginning in my life I am able to look back and see how I let fear talk me out of continuing on, though throughout the years the fear itself has changed.

First it was the fear of failure. Then it was the fear of succeeding and having it all vanish. Then it was the fear of not being capable. Then, as I discovered was the case for this Substack, there was the fear of being seen.

Now, that fear being applicable here seemed silly to me at first because I’ve been quite vulnerable with you all. I’ve talked about the end of my marriage, the ugly feelings of motherhood, grief, and sex. I’ve also boldly claimed the good aspects of myself. My light, my joy, my perseverance, my strength.

I haven’t been “shy”, per se, but I came to understand that I was using this platform as a space to heal instead of as a space that can house my purpose. Because, as it turns out, being seen in my pain is not new to me.

My life has been one constant line of major changes. Between the pains of having an absent father, a narcissistic mother, moving at least once a year since I was 5, failed relationships, and the challenges of motherhood, I am no stranger to voicing the things that are hard or heartbreaking. But I am a stranger to embracing my mission, my purpose, and my identity.

So that, I found, was the gap and the reason for the pause. It wasn’t that I had nothing to say, it was that the topic of discussion needed to change.

The truth is, I’ve gotten too good at writing about the past. I’ve grown too accustomed to writing about why my life is hard and sad and frustrating. Though, yes, I am also writing about how I overcome life’s challenges, I am still writing about the things that hurt.

This thread of insight led me to the next inquiry: what comes after the healing?

When I’ve learned all I can learn from my past, what do I do with the lessons?
When I’ve sat with it, expressed it, and understood it to its very end, how do I give that pain a purpose?
What does my life become once I’ve decided I’m healed enough to start building?
What am I even building to begin with?!

Today I sat with those questions, and the answers were thrilled to find me finally open to receiving them. I understood the saying “what is meant for you circles you again and again until you are ready for it.”

So, please allow me to reintroduce myself. (For the ump-teenth time…)

My name is Kylie, but you can call me Rose or Sunshine, too. I am a mother, a creator, a scientific thinker, and a body mover. I value Love above all things. I am passionate about creating a world in which everyone is healthy — physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually — and where we are allowed to be our most authentic selves.

I believe that being a healthy, joyful, honest individual is the purest form of rebellion. That to become fully ourselves is the only way to create a better world — which is evident we are in dire need of.

I say all of this because it’s painstakingly clear that we are witnessing the end of an era and thus are now responsible for creating fertile enough soil for the new era to take root.

My mission is simple: to Love and to share my gifts. To turn my passions into services for society. To share the wisdom I have gathered and will continue to gather. To build a community rooted in Love, truth, and health.

I am unabashedly optimistic about the future. In my heart of hearts I whole-heartedly believe that Earth can one day again be the Utopia it was designed to be.

I know there is destruction and demolition that is needed before the seeds of the new can grow, but I also know that with enough of us, we can survive that fire.

So, what does this mean for Becoming the Sun and The Sun Society?

There will be a new edition to my essays/newsletters… I am starting a podcast!!!! It will be called “THE SUNCAST with Sunshine”.

I haven’t yet decided on a schedule (most likely bi-weekly), but the first episode will be airing within the next two weeks. And because I know that this is a platform for writing and some of you don’t want to watch/listen to a podcast, I will still be writing about the topics discussed in the pod. It won’t be transcribed, but it will be the same thoughts in written-word form.

I am so excited to begin his next chapter of my Sunroom! I want to extend a deeply heartfelt thank you to all of you that have subscribed, shared, commented, and continued to encourage me on my journey. This platform and all of you that make it what it is has truly healed me and given me hope in the darkest period of my life. I will always be grateful to those of you that have been with me since the beginning, and I hope you stick around while this space grows.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or topics you want to hear from me, you can comment or send me a message!

With love, hope, excitement, and joy,
Kylie/Rose/Sunshine

They often happen suddenly, too. One day you’re living life like everything is fine, and the next day you don’t know which way is up or which way is down. The crumbling and falling and breaking down of all of your life’s structures have left you standing alone in a cloud of dust and smoke so thick that you can barely see your own hand in front of your face.

For me, this moment was when my husband decided to end our marriage just 6 weeks after we moved out of the country together. I woke up one day in a new country, grateful to be exploring the world with my family, and I went to sleep heartbroken, confused, sad, and angry. Shock had overtaken me. In the months that followed, the cloud of smoke and dust clung to me like a blanket.

And still, in the immediate aftermath of The Great Undoing (as I now call it), I didn’t run and hide. I didn’t scream out for help. I didn’t freeze.

I got busy.

I went into crisis mode. Eldest-daughter-to-a-single-mother-psyche ACTIVATED. My instincts took over, and I became hyper focused on finding the solution. The way out of the mess. The way out of the pain. The way back to equilibrium.

I searched the rubble for the pieces of myself that had fallen away. I crawled, coughing and crying and aching for relief, through the haze in search of myself. This bomb had detonated not just my life but my identity too. I was fractured, fragmented into countless pieces big and small. I had no idea who I was anymore beyond wife and mother.

Slowly, I did find all the pieces that had been severed from me. Slowly, the smoke cleared and the sun shone through. Slowly, my healing took root.

It’s been a little over 6 months since that fateful day, and finally all the dust has settled. The sky is a clear blue, the sun is shining, and I can see the reality of my life not from the perspective of a broken-hearted woman, but from the eyes of a woman who overcame.

The journey of the past 6 months has been the hardest of my life so far. It was dark. It was lonely. It was heavy beyond belief. But through it, I found my soul.

I was sitting with my mother and grandmother last weekend, and we were talking about the babies we’d all seen grow up in our family. They both told me that I was an easy baby. Problem-less. I never cried. I never begged for toys at the store. I never had issues eating or sleeping or potty training. “The perfect baby,” my mom said. “Except when you got a bit older and you used to just let everyone be so mean to you.”

That line led us to talking about a memory from my Pre-K days. There was a boy in my class that was always rude to me. Picking on me. Making fun of me. One day my mom overheard, and she told me that I needed to stick up for myself, that I shouldn’t let him talk to me that way.

That one simple direction — stated from goodwill and a mother’s instinct to protect — stripped me of my innocence and purity in one swift move.

Prior to that moment, I didn’t even know the boy was being mean. I didn’t take his actions personally. I didn’t internalize them. I mostly just laughed them all off. Kind of like the way SpongeBob acts with Squidward. (I’m a Gen Z kid, this reference was bound to appear sometime.) I had absolutely no negative internal reaction to the way that boy was treating me. Until I was told to defend myself.

Right then and there my ego was born. That one simple instruction opened the door to so many of my insecurities, hardships, and struggles. It was the beginning of the fragmentation of my self. The separation of my soul from my humanness.

It’s been over 20 years since that happened, and finally I have found my way back to that purity. I remembered a time where I saw only the goodness in people. When all I wanted was to laugh and play. When I didn’t take other people’s behavior personally, and not out of arrogance but out of innocence and purity.

The enlightenment that came with replaying that memory was the final piece of insight that I needed to fully move on. It allowed me to integrate the knowledge I already had (“people’s behavior is a reflection of them, not you”). Because I understood that idea on an intellectual level, but I struggled to grasp the sense of worthiness I needed to fully feel it.

Now that the dust has settled I see not only the ruins of the life I was building with my husband and our daughter, but also the foundation that my whole life up to that point was built on. That bomb of an ending didn’t just shatter what I thought I knew, it flashed a light on every part of myself that wasn’t mine.

Every mindset I’d inherited — fear, restlessness, lack, self-consciousness — became visible to me. I was able to witness every instinct that I thought was innate from a higher perspective, thus seeing that it was actually the survival tactic of my lineage.

Once the smoke cleared, I saw all of me. The beautiful and the ugly. The real me and the inherited me. My soul and my ego. When the sun finally shone again, I saw not just ruins, but truth. And in the clarity of such honesty I was given a choice. I could choose to pick back up everything I was taught and carry on, or I could choose to leave it where it lay.

I chose to let it all rest in peace.

The detonation of the life I thought I wanted was challenging beyond compare, but ultimately I see that it was a blessing. Now I am able to build a life that is fully mine. I get to build it from scratch. There is no ounce of my old self that I haven’t witnessed, named, or released. There is nothing from that old version of me or my life that I desire to go back to. The clearing out has washed me clean, and finally finally finally I am on the path that I am meant to be on.

When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know

Now, I say all of this with gratitude and joy, but I know the road ahead is still going to be hard. It’s going to take work. I am now a working mom, and I am going to be going back to school in the fall as well. I will also still be writing somewhere in the midst of all of that. I’ve got my plate full to the brim, and I know the commitment it will require of me.

But now I know that I can commit. Now I know that I can do it. Now I know that I want to do it. Not just for me, but for Violet.

For the first time in 25 years, my life is finally fully mine. I have nobody else’s opinion to consider, nobody else’s life to intertwine with, nobody else’s fearful mentality to sift through. My mind is mine. My heart is mine. My body is mine. My soul is mine.

If you are still in the haze of your own storm, KEEP GOING.

If you can imagine a life where you are no longer hurting, no longer suffering, and instead are living and laughing and are at peace, IT EXISTS.

The road is hard. The road is tough. To fight for that life will absolutely cost you, but if you can dream it, you can achieve it. All you have to do is keep going. Just keep going. I BELIEVE IN YOU.

With all my love and hope,
Kylie “Sunshine” Rose

I awoke this morning before my alarm. That hasn’t happened in a long time. I noticed that my energy was already vibrant. I wasn’t exhausted or sluggish but alert and awake from the moment I opened my eyes. But I know myself, and I know that if I don’t ground my energy in the morning I will just leak until I’m depleted by early afternoon. So I rolled out my mat, lit my incense, and sat down.

Immediately I felt the tension in my neck, so I started rolling myself out gently, slowly, and with intention. That’s when I noticed that my mind was swirling. Not in a bad way, just with so many ideas. I’ve been planning a lot of things lately (for Substack, for other platforms *wink*, and for my life) and with this new Spring energy I was feeling motivated to just GO. I wanted to run full steam ahead towards every single idea that I had in that moment. Full throttle. All gas no brakes. You get the gist.

But that tension in my neck wasn’t easing up. It was begging for me to pay attention to it. To give it the softness it deserves.

That’s when I heard Spirit say “resist the urge to rush.”

Resist the urge to rush.

Yes, it is Spring. Yes, the air is fresh and warm and alive and calling for us to bloom. And, yes, we should listen to this call—but not at the expense of our rituals or our health.

I heeded this warning, and I stopped moving. I sat upright and breathed, steadying myself back into the present moment.

On my very first exhale my mind flashed to the dream I had last night.

I had forgotten all about it the moment I opened my eyes, but Spirit wanted me to remember. And remember I did.

In my dream I was sitting next to my ex-husband and my ex-best friend (let’s call her Nina). That I dreamt of them is not a surprise, it was what I did in the dream that was surprising.

I looked at Nina, her big curly hair, her brown eyes, her smile, and I smiled at her. I smiled at her, and I told her that I forgive her. I thanked her for leaving me because I learned very valuable lessons from it. I didn’t feel angry, I didn’t have the urge to give her an attitude, I didn’t even think about fighting her—all things I’ve done in previous dreams with her.

I smiled. I forgave. I let go.

Upon remembering this dream of mine, I began to weep. Not for a long time. It was really just a short outburst, and it wasn’t a sad weeping. I wept with gratitude at the arrival of peace.

On the very last night of winter, I released all that did not serve me. I released the heaviness, the pain, the anger, and the compulsion to make amends. I awoke on the first day of Spring fully free. This ushered in the second whisper from Spirit:

It is safe to release pain and to embody peace.

You see, I had spent this entire winter in an elliptical orbit around peace and joy and abundance. I would zoom in closely, but then the pain of last fall would climb back onto me and pull me away.

And then Spring came.

She came with such a vigor, so much light, that I almost sprinted into her with abandon, forgetting that self-care, grounding, and prayer are still necessary rituals that I must slow down for.

Spring does not ask us to abandon ourselves for her sake. Instead, she asks us to commune with her through our own wholeness. To harness her lively energy and weave it into the lives we have already begun creating. She tells us it is okay to let ourselves thaw and to ground ourselves into who we have spent the winter becoming.

She invites us to let our garden bloom, at our own pace, with intention and alignment.

I ended my time on the mat with a prayer of gratitude and some affirmations. This journey of mine has “been crazy but still, I’m stronger.”

And now I know who I am. It’s “time to go higher.”

I understand that going higher doesn’t mean going faster. It means moving in alignment with my own rhythm, listening to the Spirit within and around me.

Spring affirmations:

It is safe for me to release the past.
It is safe for me to release anger and pain.
It is safe for me to receive abundance.
It is safe for me to receive joy.
I am divinely protected.
I am divinely guided.

Happy Spring, my loves. May you be blessed with peace, joy, abundance, and opportunities to create and live your most beautiful life.

With love and hope,
Kylie <3

I woke up one morning last week feeling heavy, distraught. I couldn’t focus, my mind racing with the memories of my recent relationship endings. I felt a bit helpless at my loss of words and the overwhelming emotions. It was like I was back in a loop that I thought I had closed. At one point all I could do was cry.

The physical release of crying did loosen up some tension, but it didn’t clear me out all the way. I decided I needed some peace and quiet away from everyone, so I took a walk down to the creek behind my great-grandmother’s house, took all my clothes off, and laid on a rock. The sun melted over my body like hot butter, and finally I was able to breathe.

As I laid there with the sun’s rays kissing my bare body, I began to smile. The heat woke me up and brought me back to myself. I ran my eyes over my body: The breasts that fed my daughter for 15 months and now lay empty, the belly that is more jiggly than old-me would have liked but current-me is proud of, the legs that still miraculously look muscular, the tattoos that offer a glimpse into the optimism of my mind. I really took myself in, and I smiled once more as I laid my head back on the warm rock and closed my eyes.

I turned my attention onto my breath, and once my breathing steadied I began to notice the nature around me. The grass as it danced in the wind. The bugs crawling every which way. The sounds of the water trickling down the current. I was so peaceful that even a turtle made its way by, meandering along the rock until it met the water and glided downstream.

I stayed there sun-bathing for over an hour, and when I returned to my house I felt alive again.

Afterwards while I was taking my shower—the kind where it doubles as a concert—I laughed when I thought Oh, this must be what it means to love myself.

I noticed that I had taken a bad day, that once would’ve led to bingeing on junk food and crying myself to sleep, and turned it into a freaking dance party.

I chose joy. I chose rest. I chose to give myself the space to feel, sit, process, and release. All because I love myself. All because I really care about myself now.

This realization made me love myself even more. I’m doing it. I’m doing what I said I was going to do—Heal. Grow. Love. Be happy.

In the elation of that revelation I also recalled an interaction from the week before. A friend of mine asked me to join him in working with his brand. He showered me with compliments (“you’ve got the skill, the voice, and the look”) and told me that I could go far with him. I almost said yes until he told me to “drop the blog, focus on building this with me instead.” I scoffed at my phone as I read that text. You mean to tell me you want me to stop everything I’m personally doing and put all of my energy into you? Please.

Men’s audacity never ceases to amaze me, but there was something I was grateful to take away from that encounter: My energy is amazing. Desirable. Powerful. I smiled again to myself and just felt pure gratitude.

From there I continued to shower myself in love. I thanked myself for doing the work to get here—for having the faith, the determination, the strength. I thanked myself for not giving up. I affirmed that I am beautiful, on the inside and out, that I am wise, strong, brave, creative, and worthy of love. In short: I embodied self love for the first time ever.

And ever since, it’s been easier and easier to embody every day.

I went from clawing my way towards self love to walking in it effortlessly. It has changed the way I approach my life entirely, now that I’ve made it here.

Now I see my moods as facets of my personality, as a part of my wholeness, rather than something to be “fixed”. Now I have learned how to put joy into my day with intention instead of withering away into sadness or anger. Now I believe in myself—in my dreams and my goals and the steps I choose to take to reach them.

Now that I have discovered what the embodiment of self love feels like, every day is alive with the light of my soul. Even through the ebbs and flows of frustration, exhaustion (hello, toddler mom), and grief, I am able to create joy for myself.

My energy is one of a kind. My energy is powerful and undeniable. My energy is beautiful and strong. My energy is bright. My energy is golden.

I am no longer becoming the sun. I am being the sun.

Everything feels different from this side of the healing spectrum. Nothing feels impossible. Nothing feels far away. My dreams and goals all feel so close, so tangible, instead of distant wisps of thought. I am no longer fighting through each day, just clinging to God to get me through. I am co-creating with God. I am flowing through my days with intention and surrender, with faith in myself and in God. There truly is no going back anymore.

Abundance is mine. Peace is mine. Prosperity is mine. Love and joy and hope are mine. And they will be for all my days to come because I’ve learned how to give those things to myself.

Today I got to embody the bright, loving, strong woman that I am. I got to practice being her. To be honest, it felt awkward, clumsy, and uncomfortable. But that’s not the point. The point is that I did it.

I did it, I am doing it, and because of that I know that the light has finally returned. I am not in the shadows anymore. I am the light, and everything in my life will shine now.

If you made it this far, thank you and I love you. This is your reminder: if you are in the middle phase—from becoming to being—it’s time to be. It’s time to act like the person you’ve been visualizing in your mind. It’s time to behave like your dream self, this is the only way to bring that person forth.

You can do it. I believe in you.

All my love,

Kylie

This past week the pain of my divorce and the breakup with my best friend visited me again. It caught me off guard because I’d gone several weeks steadily getting better—days would go by where I didn’t think of it at all. But this week it kept me awake on several nights. Even when my body was so desperately asking for rest, I laid in bed staring at the ceiling, my head swirling with words I’ll never get to say and ruminating on make-believe conversations I was not allowed to have.

Then, when sleep finally found me, my ex met me in my dreams. I dreamt of fighting her. Of making her feel how she made me feel. I dreamt of screaming at her with all of the rage and the anguish that I once held in my body. Even in my slumber, I could not escape these feelings.

I was temped to be upset with myself for not being completely healed yet, for needing to go back over this situation again. Because, truthfully, it doesn’t hurt the way it used to. Now it’s merely an agitation. Like running into that coworker you don’t like while you’re out grocery shopping—Oh great, you again.

But this time I decided to do something different. I thought, “What if this is just part of the process? What happens if I witness these emotions with curiosity rather than judgement?”

I allowed myself to accept that I’m not fully over it yet. I gave myself grace for that. I mean, why would I even think four months is enough time to get over a divorce and a friendship breakup anyways? My whole life changed! Of course it still hurts every now and again.

I thought of physical wounds. How even they have in-betweens in their healing. They don’t immediately become scars once the bleeding stops. They scab. The skin grows back slowly, layer by layer, patiently covering the once-gushing hole with new protection. And we feel this happening. It itches, sometimes outrageously. This itch can be so strong that we are tempted to scratch it. But scratching it would only cause more harm. It would reopen the wound completely, leading us back to the beginning of the healing process.

Once I realized that this is where I am—at the itchy scab part of the process—I decided to change my tactic. Instead of attempting to rush the journey, I took a step back to simply see it. Rather than replay the hurt, I replayed all of the ways that I chose growth over these last four months. One of the ways I did this was by rereading my essays from that time.

On November 17, two weeks after my husband ended things and one week after my best friend ended things, I wrote: “We cannot know the strength of our love and joy if we do not know the depths of our despair and violence.” On that same day I also wrote: “I choose faith. I choose the light. I always have, one way or another, delayed or not, and I always will. I choose to know that I am strong, that I am loved, that I deserve and can obtain and hold with wisdom the life God has planted in my heart.”

Later on November 30, exactly one month after my husband ended things, I wrote: “At the end of the day, the closure we’re really seeking lies in the moment we choose to believe ourselves. The moment we say ‘My feelings were real. My pain was real. And my healing is mine now.’”

As I reread these words of mine I began to laugh. Happy tears bubbled in the corners of my eyes and a bright, warm glow lit up in the center of my body. I almost couldn’t believe that I wrote those things because most of what I remember from that time was feeling like shit. I remember the ache so strong it chained me to my bed. I remember the tears that wouldn’t stop, even when my lips were cracked from dehydration. I remember the anger that left me seething like a caged animal.

But there it was, proof, that even in my darkest hour I was committed to finding the light again. Even when I didn’t feel like it was possible to be happy or joyful or whole, I chose to make that my reality. Reading these words of mine felt like meeting myself all over again and discovering that I truly have had the light within me all along.

And, I realized, I was unearthing my light again simply by changing my pattern now. Instead of allowing myself to ruminate, I went in search of inspiration. Of goodness. Of hope. Then I found it in myself. Just as I said I would at the beginning of it all.

I bore witness to my own journey. Not as a judge. Not to condemn. But with grace and love and gratitude. Through this, I’ve discovered that perhaps that is where the healing lies—not in rushing towards the scar, but sitting in the itch. Sitting in the discomfort and allowing it to simply be. That is strength. That is wisdom. That is faith.

If you are in this in between with me, in the itch, I invite you to observe it rather than trying to find the quickest exit. Notice that you’ve been here before and gotten through it. Ask yourself what will bring you true comfort, lasting comfort, rather than a quick scratch. Most importantly, keep going. I think we’ll look back at this phase and remember it as the fun bit.

With love and hope and gratitude,
Kylie

Dear Kylie at 18,

I love you so much. You are courageous, you are wise, and you are protected. I know that you feel lost. I know that you have so many feelings you don’t even know what they are or what to do with them, but you are okay. I promise you, you are. I know that life feels uncertain, scary, too big and too endless, but one day it will all make sense. And it will make sense because of what you’re doing right now.

You are doing everything exactly as it needs to be done. There are no mistakes, there are no crimes that you are committing that are going to fuck up our future. You are exactly where you need to be. And I know, I know, that sounds annoying when where you are is hard and lonely and confusing, but trust me. You don’t have to trust God yet, you don’t have to trust any of the people around you, just trust me. I sort of know what I’m talking about now.

In the past when I wrote you letters I know that I sent instructions and advice, but honestly you don’t need that anymore. Because you got this. You are strong, you are brave, you are intuitive and kind and intelligent. You don’t need anyone to tell you how to live your life because you already know how to. So I have no advice to give, but I do have gratitude.

Thank you, Kylie, for never giving up. Thank you for always digging deeper into yourself and into the world. Thank you for being inquisitive and brave and bold. Thank you for always searching for the truth, for always choosing to find the way out, and for always coming back to God. I could not be who I am today without you, and we’re pretty damn cool if I say so myself.

When it feels like nobody in the world loves you, remember that I love you. Forever.

Love,
Yourself at 25

Dear Future Kylie,

All I can say is THANK YOU. And also I can’t wait to meet you in real life. But mostly, THANK YOU.

You never gave up on us. You have been with us since Day 1. I know it’s been you sending me signs and whispers and shouts and nudges. I know it’s been you that won’t let me forget the vision. I know it’s been you that gave me the strength to keep going. So thank you. For never giving up on us even when things looked bleak. Thank you.

Also, you are so fucking cool. I love how voluminous your hair is, how it shines in the sun like a halo when you walk. I love how strong you are—you are sexy as fuck. I am in awe of the way that you show up for Violet, show up for business, and show up for yourself in such a balanced way. I love that you have found a way to weave together art and business, work and play. You are a true powerhouse, a badass that cannot be stopped. You are sensual, firm, wise, and fun. You do it all so well. I’m literally drooling over you right now.

I’m so excited to meet you and even more excited to walk the path to becoming you. You are my dream woman. I’m literally in love with you.

Thank you again for never giving up on us. And thank you for giving us something to look forward to.

Love,
Yourself at 25

Dear Present Me,

Whew. Girl. I know. I know. Take a breath. Pause. Smile. Cry. Dance. Laugh. Scream. Run. Stretch. Lie down. Breathe.

I am so fucking proud of you.

You have amazed me. You have surpassed every expectation I had of you. I just love you so much. Truly I do. Which, I know, even that is surprising. Because we actually mean it this time. We actually know what it means this time. When I say it, I feel it. Deep within myself the light comes on and it bursts through in a life so joyful and outrageous. Because we did it. We made it through the hardest thing we’ve had to go through to-date. I know it took you 4 months and that felt like forever, but you hung on and you did the damn thing.

Kylie, you are astonishing. You are wise. You are strong. You are SO FUCKING BRIGHT. Your words matter. Your story matters. Your truth matters. And finally, we understand this. Finally, we feel this. Finally, we are letting. go.

That’s what you helped me realize this week. We are finally ready to let go of every fear, every doubt, every pain. Everything that was holding us back, we no longer carry. We sat with this pain. We sat with this anger. We sat with this sadness. We analyzed it and felt it and threw it around until we got to the bottom of it. And, surprisingly, the bottom of it was us.

Our light, our presence, our wisdom, our joy, our power. It was lying there this whole time, wriggling up to meet us with the same ferocity that we had when we went searching for it. It feels otherworldly. It feels purely ethereal. It feels solid. As though we are no longer missing anything. We feel whole now. (I know we’ve been whole all along, but to feel it now after so many years is just awesome.)

Truly, Kylie, I just feel pure joy. Pure, unadulterated, unbridled joy. We’re dancing every day now. We’re singing whenever we please. We’re laughing with Violet more than ever. It just feels like the most peaceful thing in the world.

So thank you. Thank you for never giving up. Thank you for choosing faith over and over and over, even when you didn’t want to. Thank you for being brave enough to let go of the past. Just, thank you. And I love you endlessly.

Here’s to the beginning of the rest of our lives. It’s going to be a beautiful one.

Love,
Yourself

It felt like high school all over again, when I was terrified of basketball practice because I hated my coach. My stomach sank, my heart was racing, and my mind was scanning every possible excuse, hoping to find one that was strong enough to get me to drive away. But I knew I couldn’t leave. I knew I had to walk inside. I replayed the last few weeks of myself saying, “I just need to go to the gym”, “I just need to work out”, “I can move through my emotions better if I can get my heart pumping.” So I chugged the rest of my cold brew, shook my head, and opened the door. Once the fresh air hit me there was no going back.

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It was 8:30 in the morning. The air still had that softness to it—the one where the clouds haven’t risen into the sky yet and so there’s a muted glow to everything. It was cool, too, and that woke me up a bit. I put my headphones on and rummaged through Spotify to find something to hype me up while I walked in. The less I looked around, the less anxious I would be.

The gym had an open layout, so it wasn’t hard to find the stretching area. I made a B-line for it, ignoring the glances of everyone I passed. I couldn’t start looking at bodies this soon because then I’d be looking at mine. Comparing. Critiquing. No. I couldn’t do that. I didn’t care if it made me look mean. I needed to stay focused on the task at hand: just moving my body.

I knew before I got started that this workout was going to be hard. For starters, I was in luteal. That means my heart rate was going to increase at a more rapid rate and that my muscles would be weaker. Add to that the fact that I have been eating like absolute shit and I haven’t worked out in several months… yeah. I knew that I would not be able to walk in there and throw 350 pounds on a leg press the way I used to.

What I did not expect was to start shaking half way through my first set of warmup, body-weight Bulgarian squats. That was definitely a shocker.

But I went on. I grabbed the 10 pound dumbbell for my working set, grimacing and shaking my head in the process. This is not me. I am not the same. Still, I queued “TYG” by Meg and got to work. I let myself take a longer break than usual. I sucked in air as gracefully as I could. I paced around the bench I was using to keep the blood moving and my knees from locking up. The whole time I just kept thinking it’s okay, you’re okay, you are strong, you can do this, do not judge yourself.

It was after my first full set of Bulgarian squats—where I had to stop playing Meg and put on my meditation music instead—that I understood: I am not the girl I used to be.

In all other areas of my life I have been growing these last 15 months. Since I’ve become a mother my life has changed tremendously. My brain has rewired itself, my heart has doubled in size, and I have moved from girlhood to a more mature version of myself—a woman who knows who she is, who stands firm on her boundaries, who no longer people pleases, and who prioritizes rest and joy. I am more myself than I have ever been, and somehow at the same time I am completely unrecognizable.

The further into my workout I got, the more I began to realize that lifting is a muscle I’m going to have to rebuild from the ground up. Not just regaining my strength, but also recreating the habit and the lifestyle. Pre-baby, part of my identity—dare I say the majority of my identity—was centered around my body. My athleticism, my rituals and exercise routines, my diet, my menstrual cycle. I had all of it tracked and scheduled down to the minute. I cycle-synced my workouts before it was cool. I healed my PCOS holistically by changing my diet and exercise routines. My life literally revolved around my body (and not in an ED/unhealthy type of way, I simply have high standards of care for myself.)

Most everyone in my life was astonished by the devotion I had regarding my body. They couldn’t fathom having such a strong sense of their senses. I was truly one with my body. I was so in-tune with her that I knew I was pregnant at 3 weeks—a week before I took the test—because I felt a small, pebble-like lump in my abdomen when I was receiving a massage. When I found out I was pregnant, one of my biggest grievances was that my body would change and that it would take a long time to get back to my standard.

Now here I am, almost 16 months postpartum, 2 weeks off of breastfeeding, finally getting back into the gym. My exercise routines have been literally non-existent, I have not been eating well, and I’ve just been tired as fuck. (Also, nonchalantly, I moved across the world and back in a 6 month time frame, went through a divorce after moving across the world, and now am a single mom living with my mother. So that don’t judge yourself line I repeated while exercising really was my lifeline.)

Tangent aside, I think it’s safe to say that I had a small identity crisis post-workout this week. But I also learned something valuable: the girl I was before was still striving for a certain look within her body. She wanted the smallest waist and the biggest ass. Yes, she was taking care of her hormones better than most women, but what she wanted more than anything was to be small. Now though? Now I want to be strong. I want to be fierce. I want to finally be the powerhouse that I have always felt myself to be.

Now, I am showing up for my health and my health alone. I am showing up because I want to have the energy and the fitness to play sports with my daughter. I want to be able to carry her even when she’s a big girl. I want to live a long time, and I want to be able to take care of myself for all that time. I want my daughter to never have to struggle with health the way I did growing up. No stigmas, no endless dieting, no worrying about if she’s the right size or not—just movement as medicine, food as nutrition. I want it to be normal for her, not something she has to put effort into practicing.

Getting back in the gym this week taught me a lot. It’s shown me how I’ve grown and how I’ve digressed, it’s highlighted the need for a different motivation, and it’s reminded me of a slogan from Adrienne, the host of Yoga With Adrienne on YouTube: “find what feels good.”

Movement is medicine. The body needs it. Our minds need it. Our hearts need it. There are countless studies that show the link between exercise and mental health, and it’s just an undeniable fact that exercise—in its many forms—is a necessary part of living a healthy life.

But exercise doesn’t have to be grueling if you don’t want it to be.

Personally, I enjoy and need a high-intensity, grueling workout. As a teenager I despised that type of exercise, but now my body just genuinely craves it. However, because I’m aware of how exercise impacts my menstrual cycle, I have learned to take it easy while I’m in luteal or bleeding. I have found what feels good. Some days I need to lift heavy, some days I need to run, some days all I can do is yin yoga, other days maybe an at-home Pilates. But always, I show up. (Or I used to.)

Now I am building that habit back up. And though it feels like I’m starting from scratch, I know that I’m not. I have the knowledge and the resources (which I did actually lack for a bit, cue don’t judge yourself) to pour into myself the way I once did. And this time, my motivation is so much stronger because it’s not just about me looking hot in a bikini, it’s about living a lifestyle I am proud to pass on to my daughter.

I am practicing using the power of love rather than the power of anger.

It may have been hard to sit on the toilet the morning after that first workout, but that gym session reignited my passion for fitness, wellness, movement, and health. I can feel that I am coming back home to myself. I am excited to keep showing up, and I am grateful to have a body that is able to show up.

It only gets better from here.

Thank you for reading this kinda long blurb of my mind. I get the feeling that this is a topic that I will be discussing more consistently (perhaps in a “Meditations From the…” series…?) so if you stick around, I will improve.

With love and gratitude,
Kylie Rose

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I posted a note on Substack over a month after noticing the changes, and it is my highest-connected-with post on my account with 250 likes and counting. Apparently other Substack users have joined the exodus and notice similar shifts, or are at least becoming aware of the ways that other platforms are harming their attention spans, mental health, and quality of life.

So I am compiling a list of the changes I have seen in my life since leaving all other social media platforms. I was not exaggerating when I said it has saved my life. Let me tell you why.

1. I could hear myself think again.

Instagram and TikTok were my most-used apps because I got lost in time swiping through videos. I would watch workout content, mom content, recipe content, healing content, and the occasional comedic video. All good things, right? All things that seemingly benefitted my life. They taught me things, they gave me something to aspire to, they showed me that life would not be the way it was forever.

But they also showed me what I was missing.

As someone that was experiencing deep grief from two world-shattering losses at once, it became too painful to watch other people live out my dreams. Instead of feeling hopeful or optimistic or inspired I began to feel jealous, insecure, and hopeless. I could not separate the ruins of my life from the in-frame perfection I was being shown.

These negative emotions piled on top of my already heavy grief, anger, and sadness and kept me stuck there. Rather than taking time to process my pain, I was distracting myself and adding more emotions on top of it all.

When I finally deleted these apps, I stopped filling my time with other people’s lives and began facing my own.

For once, I was able to see, hear, and feel what was happening within my own mind and heart and body. I could finally understand what it was I needed in order to get through my circumstances rather than sitting idly by, hoping that a miracle would drop in and pull me out of my misery. I stopped comparing myself, my needs, my process, and my journey to other people.

This gave me agency over myself. Where once my mind was filled with the voices of other people telling me what I needed, I now have enough quiet to hear my own intuition. I am no longer trying to fit someone else’s routine to my life. I have a routine that is tailored to mine.

2. I stopped performing joy and started living it.

Back when I had Instagram, I mainly posted on my stories. I was too much of a perfectionist to post actual photos to my feed. But still, my mind was consumed with getting “the perfect shot.”

If I was on a walk, I would stop to take photos of flowers or other cool things not because I wanted to remember them, but because I wanted to post the most aesthetically pleasing frame. I wanted to show other people “look! I’m cool! I see beauty too!”

This was always the case for me regarding social media, but it got more intense after my breakups. I became focused and committed to proving to other people that I was still cool, still okay, and totally unbothered when, in reality, I was utterly broken, lost, and shattered.

The urge to look put together and unfazed became an obsession. I began performing my healing. Every time I sat to journal, read, walk, or dance it became something I had to document—in the most visually appealing way—even though I always wound up too scared to post it in the end.

This mental mode resulted in gratitude being sucked out of my life. If my physical world did not look aesthetic enough to my camera I would spiral into a criticism of my life. It would remind me of everything that had gone wrong, everything I lost control of, everything I lacked. Instead of seeing the small beauties that surrounded me, I could see only the ugliness. This mindset, of course, was transmuted towards myself and made it harder for me to love myself enough to heal.

When I deleted my socials, I stopped taking as many photos and videos. Every now and then I’ll stop to document something that is truly meaningful (a sunset, my daughter’s laugh), but most days now I admire the beauty without needing to capture it. I sit in the present moment with the beauty around me and appreciate it for what it is. I do not need it to look perfect on camera. I do not need other people to tell me it is beautiful. I simply feel gratitude for the blessing of being in the right spot at the right moment to experience it.

3. I learned how to actually rest.

Before I left other platforms, I would spend my downtime scrolling. Watching. Listening. My mind became a cacophony of other people’s opinions, other people’s pains, other people’s evils. After a long day living my own life I somehow thought that sitting down to listen to other people’s lives would bring me some calm. Lol.

I would exit the apps feeling no less anxious, tired, or sad. I did not receive relaxation, connection, or joy. Instead, my mind was just spinning around a bunch of useless junk that kept me distracted and still yearning for peace.

Without social media, now I sit and listen to the birds with my breakfast. I notice the way the wind changes from the morning to the afternoon. I am fully present with my daughter instead of half-heartedly playing with her because I’m distracted by a video that’s still looping in my mind. I read before bed now instead of scroll.

I’ve discovered that rest is much more restful when it is pure—especially as a creative person. As human beings we are not meant to be under a constant state of inhalation and consuming. We are meant to live in and to create the world around us.

Now, rest means many things. Sometimes it means yoga and meditation. Other times it means going for a walk, taking a bath, reading a book, learning some new hobby (I’ve attempted my hand at sewing), or doing absolutely nothing. I have actually taken to lying on the ground and staring at the sky. It genuinely does wonders for my entire being. I can feel my body release tension, I can commune with my heart and her needs, and I can guide my mind towards gratitude rather than lack.

Learning what true rest looks and feels like has given me true peace.

4. I actually talk to my friends now.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I used to take several weeks to respond to text messages. I’ve always had long-distance friendships, so that type of relationship with texting is not entirely out of the norm, but at the end of my days I would stare at the red bubble on my text app that held an outrageous number and wonder why the hell I haven’t even touched those messages.

It wouldn’t take me long to remember that I spent my free moments scrolling instead of actually connecting.

Not only did my time go to scrolling, but by the time I was done scrolling I would feel too buzzed out to want to engage in real socialization. Faking connection with strangers online became easier than real connection with my genuine friends.

Now, though, I actually respond. My nervous system can breathe better because there are no longer red bubbles screaming at me to check my 35 unread texts. I feel loved by my friends more consistently, and it heals my heart to be able to love on my friends right back.

I enjoy hearing about their lives—their new babies, their husbands, their jobs, their selling of houses and their getting their dream apartments.

Without social media, where my social life was built on illusions, I now have a social life with the friends I love that are scattered across the globe. I don’t feel alone anymore. I feel seen, heard, loved, and protected. And I get to be loving right back. It’s a positive circuit rather than a negative spiral.

I prefaced this by saying that I deleted my apps because of breakups, which is true, but I noticed the need to distance myself long before I actually did. I took baby steps before I left for good, so it wasn’t exactly cold turkey.

A year ago I deactivated the account I’d had since freshman year of high school and started a new one because I didn’t want all of those people from my past. It was an attempt to signal the new person I was becoming. That did drastically improve the dopamine hits I got from seeing new notification, but it didn’t last long.

Months later, I put a daily limit on the apps. I locked myself out after an hour. This too worked for only a small amount of time. Post-breakups I went from “remind me in 15 minutes” to “forget it for the day” to just removing the limit altogether.

The breakups became my last straw—they showed me how deep my dependence and attachment was to these spaces that did not bring me anything good.

Now I can earnestly say that I have no desire to return to other socials. Every now and then I’ll get a pang of curiosity (and in the first few weeks I did redownload the apps for a few hours at a time) but the longer I am gone the less I want them back. Now it all feels like performance to me. And while I understand that not everyone producing content or simply posting their own lives is performing, I don’t want to do the work of sifting through all the bullshit just to find the tiny specks of goodness. It’s too great a risk.

I have begun creating a life that is purely mine. I live in the present. I can feel my intuition. I am making choices that are mine and mine alone. Now that I’ve tasted that life, I will not willingly throw it away.

If you are contemplating leaving, as so many people in the comments of my note have said, I pray this post encourages you to at least try. If you have already left, I’d love to know if any of these points resonate with you or if you’ve experienced something that isn’t on my list!

With Love,
Kylie

Anger. Resentment. Bitterness.

I have never known myself to be without anger. For as long as I can remember I was taught that anger—and the violence that stemmed from it—was a sign of strength and power. As I got older, the anger I was taught to have morphed into its own entity within me. Every pain got transformed into rage. Every slight or injustice against me buried itself in my heart as fury. Over the years, it became a black rock of resentment in my heart.

Resentment settled in my chest and flared up often. It came out in road rage. It showed up as a lack of patience towards those I loved. Its biggest slight was that it created no space for forgiveness or gratitude—it actively pushed those sentiments out. Anger and resentment told me they were protecting me, but I’ve come to understand that they’ve been holding me back this entire time.

Anger has been my secret enemy. A double agent whispering sweet promises of justice and revenge in my ear but only delivering fruitless dashes towards my dreams.

All this time I’ve thought that my anger was passion. I’ve looked to it for inspiration. I’ve called on it to carry me through hard moments. It has helped me in the sense that it gave me a way out of a despair that threatened to swallow me whole. It was my guiding light out of the biggest heartbreak of my life.

But, like every other emotion, it is so fleeting.

I often wondered why my power only flickers. It comes in white-hot but dissipates in mere moments. It leaves me feeling depleted rather than empowered. This push and pull dynamic with my own strength created so much self-doubt that I stopped even trying to make plans. I stopped daring to dream and wish and hope. What was the point in reaching if it only ever left me feeling further behind?

And then I found myself asking who am I without anger?

Who am I when I choose forgiveness?
Who am I when I release the ego-driven “need” for revenge?
Who am I when I stop thinking about the satisfaction I will feel at seeing my enemy suffer?
Who am I when I stop having enemies, both externally and internally?

Most importantly: Who am I when I get my power from love instead of anger?

Love is not like anger for love is not an emotion. Love is a state of being. Love is an eternal flame. It is an infinite well of power that comes straight from God Herself. It seems only reasonable to draw power from that pure source instead of a finite thing like human emotion.

Up until now I was unable to release my grip on anger because it had etched itself into my identity. I was an aggressive defender on the court when I played basketball. I was the badass who boxed. I was the strong gym girl that lifted heavy weights and ran sprints. I was the fiery person who did not hesitate to act when I witnessed injustice. All of these things I attributed to my relationship with anger because, in those moments, it was anger that spurred me on. It was anger that gave me the spark and the energy to fight, to kick, to push, to run, to speak out. I held onto this anger because I feared that my strength would leave with it.

But somehow, even when I consciously clung to this anger, I felt as though I were contradicting myself. I felt that I was being insincere. I felt that it was a facade. And I do have one amazing example of strength that came from love over anger. It was when I gave birth.

I brought my baby girl into this world on my knees in a birthing pool. I labored in my own home for 8 hours and got to the birthing center only 30 minutes before she entered this realm. No epidural, no interventions. Just myself, the water, and the encouragement from my midwives and my then-husband. I became one with my breath. My attention focused solely on the sensations in my back, my hips, my lungs, and on the other body I could feel moving through me. I was not thinking of the past or the future. I could feel nothing besides the present moment.

It was love that carried me through—love for my daughter and the desire to bring her safely into my arms and love for myself. Those hours tested my courage, my devotion to love, and my confidence. And I came out victorious. I did not attempt to quit. I did not withdraw or retreat. I breathed, and I stayed the course. Not with anger in my heart, but with a love so full that it drowned out everything else.

If I can do that, I can do anything. And if that is the memory that I look towards when I need to remember my own strength, I am not looking to remember anger or bitterness. I am looking to remember my God-given strength. I am looking for Love.

Life has been more challenging than I ever could have imagined since I brought my daughter into this world. My anger has served me well. It has been my lifeline in many moments.

But now I am creating a new life.

Now, I am creating an authentic life. I am creating a full life. I am creating a sustainable life. I am creating a peaceful life. Anger has its time and place, but it is no longer my grounding force. It’s time that I lean into the infinite properties of Love. Only then will I become the woman I hold in my heart and mind.

To my Anger,

Thank you for what you have done for me. I am grateful for the glimpses of power that you have shown me. I am grateful for the strength that you gave me to move out of pain and into action. Thank you for being a guide that shows me what I truly care about, what my boundaries are, and what I stand for. Without you, dear Anger, I certainly would not be as wise or as composed as I am today. I thank you for the service that you have been in my life, and now I release you. I release the need to cling to you. I release the notion that you are the source of my power, for I now know that you are but a fraction of the true power I hold. You may go with love, and when you return I shall hold you with reverence. I shall hear what you are telling me and then release you again.

With Love,
Kylie

I’ve been missing my ex-husband heavily this week. Not him, really, but the life we were supposed to have. The happily ever after. I miss the illusion of a happy couple that we played so well.

Mostly, I miss the thought of having my family together.

Next week we will begin co-parenting. I will be separated from my daughter for 3 days. In all 15 months of her life, she and I have never spent a night apart.

I found a poem I wrote about a month after we split, and in the grief of the impending split from my daughter this one seemed fitting.

Without further ado, I present How Could You?

There’s a question that runs through my mind

Every time I close my eyes

I see it circling inside, the answer begging me to find

When I think of all the days you swore I was the ultimate

When I remember all the ways you said our love was infinite

I wonder

How could you

How could you forget all the love that we made

How could you forget all the dues that I paid,

just so we could stay

How could you forget all the self that I laid

Down at your feet

my heart was in your shade

When I think of the times we had only each other

When I remember the times it was me who was your cover

I wonder

How could you

How could you betray the trust that I gave

How could you take away the joy that we paved

How could you create such rapid decay

How could you behave as though I drove you away

I wonder

How could you

How could you

How could you

Don’t misunderstand me, she made sure to tell me I was beautiful, in between the fat jokes from my family and the confused stares of the public when they saw us together. In the early 2000s in my very rural, very white hometown, a white woman with a non-white child was still heavily stigmatized. To add to the list of my mother’s perceived slights against polite society, she was a single mother. My first-generation Colombian-American father left her when she was 5 months pregnant.

When he left, he didn’t just leave a heartbroken woman. He also severed the ties I rightfully have to my Hispanic roots.

Gone was the opportunity to know my grandparents, the ones who so bravely came to America for a better life for their descendants. I will never know their story. I don’t even know their names. Nor do I know the tongue of my ancestors.

As a child, this racial identity gap did not mean anything to me because I knew nothing of it. I did not learn of my Latin blood until I was 9, and it was only because that’s when I started asking where my father was. In the confession of my paternity there were no conversations beyond the simple statement, “your father is Colombian.”

Despite not having any lived experience with my Colombian roots, there were differences between me and my white family that went beyond our appearances.

For starters, I am a very passionate person. I feel things deeply and largely, and I express these emotions in the ways they deserve to be expressed. Talking with my hands came naturally, but in the rural whiteness of my upbringing this passion very quickly got mislabeled as aggression. As I grew into my teenage years and began vocalizing the more passionate side of myself without fear, my mom would lament, “I don’t know why you’re so aggressive, you didn’t get that from me.”

I also showed a natural proclivity for the arts. Dancing lights my soul on fire, though this skill and passion was never nurtured. Singing, too, is something I love. And writing. And painting. But art, to the whites, was nonsensical. Pointless. An unrealistic avenue to pursue. Instead, I was pushed towards trades. The logical thing because, to them, life was simply meant to be endured. Not lived.

The older I got the more separate I became. The divide was widened when, in middle school, I moved to a large suburb of Austin and began meeting other brown and Black kids. This suburb was the first place where I saw a society that had more than one or two Black people. To my child self that knew nothing of the world at that point besides cowboys (literally, my mom’s brother rides a horse and wrangles cows for a living) this suburb felt like a melting pot with all of its Black, Asian, and Hispanic people from all over Central and Latin America.

That was also the first time I was taught the truth about American History. That place was where I saw and truly understood the racism that is sewed into the hear of America.

This lit a fire in me that I could not contain.

I began vocalizing these learnings to my family because at 13 I still had that sweet, naive hope that I could enlighten them. We went back and forth for years, and, finally, in 2016 (you know the year) the ideological divide was set in stone.

I did not belong to them anymore. I didn’t belong anywhere.

At that age, I still hadn’t admitted to myself that I wasn’t white. It wasn’t until I turned 18 and moved to Brooklyn that I began to see the non-white features I had. this enlightenment was thanks to a Haitian man that came into the coffee shop I was working at one day. He and I became friends, and one day he asked me, “so, what are you?”

I was so confused. I had never been asked that before. I thought maybe I should be offended, but instead I asked for clarification, and he said, “well you’re not just white, right?”

I was genuinely shocked. Nobody I had ever met had noticed that about me, or if they did they never said anything. I told him my father is Colombian and asked how he could tell that I wasn’t just white. He said most non-white people can always tell.

Thus the seed was planted for me to begin accepting my ancestry.

As the years passed, I began to notice that I was naturally drawn to brown and Black people. My closest friends in adulthood consist of a Lebanese woman and Black and Hispanic men and women. My first boyfriend was Dominican, and after him I pretty much stopped looking at white men altogether. At 22, I met a Black man and at 23 I had a child with him.

It was my relationship with the father of my child—and also becoming a mom—that ultimately led me to embracing my Latina self. For the first time in my life I was steeped in a culture that was not white, and my knowledge went from being out of books to first-hand. He also affirmed that I am not white like the members of the family that I was raised by and encouraged me to embrace my Latina self with a sternness that could not be argued with.

It came naturally to both of us to talk about race and the role that it plays in society, and it became necessary to have these conversations once we decided we were having a baby. We knew we didn’t want her around my family too much, especially once she got older. We knew that we would proudly teach her Black culture. But this led me to question what I wanted her to get from me.

Growing up mixed, she is bound to have questions about identity and about where she fits. I knew from the moment I got pregnant that I wanted her to be able to say, proudly, that she is Afro-Latina. But of course, this would require me to show her how to be Latina. Which means I must learn for myself what it means to be Latina.

For years I struggled with accepting this adjective. Latina. It’s such a strong word, steeped in so many colors. Having grown up with white privilege and being completely removed from the Colombian culture, I didn’t feel that I had earned the right to call myself Latina. Would I be accepted by the people, or would I be denied because of a past I had no say in?

But now, for reasons beyond my control, I have wound up back in my hometown, living with my grandparents.

It has never been more apparent that I am not like these people. That I am not white.

The whites that I come from have no culture. Rather, their culture is the absence of culture. Their identities are rooted in nothingness. Their songs are all about drunken men chasing women and angry women getting revenge on the men. Their dances lack rhythm and soul. And they have absolutely no sense of community. They do not look after one another but instead criticize, judge, and fight with one another constantly.

Their souls are the souls of colonizers that have nothing left to colonize. Their identities are stuck in the past because, to them, the past was better than the present. The white status quo is dying, and it’s evident in the way that the whites are decaying. Their minds are frail and stuck playing a tune of ignorance and hypocrisy.

I do not belong to them.

So, I denounce them.

I am no longer white. I am Latina. I am a second-generation Colombian-American woman. Though I do not yet know the tongue of my lineage, I am learning it, and in doing so I am awakening an entire half of myself that has been lying dormant. She has been begging to be unleashed for years now, and finally I am ready to own her.

Finally I am ready to own myself.

For these first 25 years of my life I have always questioned who I am. I have never felt fully myself anywhere in the world. But this feels right. Decolonizing my Self feels right. Unleashing the Latin blood in my veins is what my life has been waiting for.

Now, I can live.

Soy Latina. ¡Soy Colombiana!

Con amor,
Kylie

As I laid in bed with my 14 month old attached to my breast, I searched my heart for why I have such trouble talking about this part of my life. The answer came in a whisper; I’m afraid to speak because I am ashamed of my truth.

My truth is, being a mother is something I do out of duty, not desire.

I didn’t actually want to become a mother. But I am now.

My heart has cracked wide open. I love her with my entire being. Body, mind, and soul. I want only the best for her, and I worry every day that I am failing her. Her smile makes my heart smile. Her laughter puts an end to every suffering in the world. Her beauty and her kindness and her wit are things to be cherished, protected, and nurtured.

And still, somehow, I find myself wondering what life would look like if I didn’t have her. I marvel with jealousy at a life of freedom that I can no longer have. I get lost in daydreams of who I might be if I were not saddled with the responsibility of raising this beautiful, innocent being.

In my mind I see a Me that is a mother and a Me that is my true Self. These two versions do not intersect. In my psyche they are two completely separate entities. They move independently from one another. It’s as if I am holding two halves of myself, but they don’t fit together.

Naturally, this leads me to believe I am the worst mother in the world. I am selfish. I am ungrateful. I know there are mothers right now who would give anything to hold their baby’s hand or hear their laugh one more time. I know what a miracle it is to have a healthy, happy, vibrant child. So something must be wrong with me. Something must be broken. How could I earnestly desire a Me that is without her if I love her as deeply as I believe I do?

Now I remember my own mother and the two mothers that came before them. They are the reason that I didn’t stoke the desire to have children since I myself was a child, as so many other women do.

For three generations before me, my fore-mothers had children before they were truly ready. My great-grandmother was a child bride, married at 15—to a man almost 30—and giving birth less than a year later. She had my grandmother at 20, my grandmother had my mother at 20, and my mother had me at 20.

My mother became a single mom when she was only 5 months pregnant. My father left a $20 bill on the kitchen counter and ran off to Chicago (which she only found out a year later when he was arrested and jailed for not paying child support.)

Since I was a girl, before I ever hit age 8, my mother instilled in me the harsh realities of having a child.

“It makes your life so much harder.”

“You will graduate, go to college, get a job, and only then will you begin dating.”

“Do not have kids before you are married. You have to break the pattern. You will not have a child at 20.”

When we heard of other girls getting pregnant early or unmarried, she would always shake her head and say, “she just ruined her life.”

On top of her teachings, which at my young age I interpreted to mean that I was a burden to her, she and I did not have a good relationship. (Even still we are not on solid ground.) I remember being 19 and telling my first boyfriend that I didn’t want to have kids because I didn’t want to become like my mother.

Luckily, by the grace of God, I did not have my daughter when I was 20. But 23 wasn’t much of an improvement. At 23 and unwed I was still too young, too broke, and with too many dreams that I hadn’t even begun to chase.

But I was in love.

I was in love with a boy—whom I thought was a man—that was unlike any other male I’d ever met. He was kind, emotionally sensitive, artistic, and he deeply respected women in a way I’d never personally seen in a man. When I got pregnant I broke into tears. I cried and shook my head and said “I don’t think I can do this.”

But he believed in us. He believed in me. Even when I myself did not have faith that it would be worthwhile, he had enough faith for the both of us. So, after several weeks and two almost-abortions, I chose to have the baby. He had asked me, “do you want to be associated with death or with life?” That pretty much sealed the deal.

Despite how I make this sound—that I did it just for him—I knew myself. I knew that I would ask myself for the rest of my life, “What would she have been like? What am I missing out on? What would life look like if I hadn’t had an abortion?” I am a fuck around and find out kind of person, and at that age I didn’t have the wisdom to know that sometimes I don’t have to find out.

So I kept the baby, which I knew would be a girl, for him and for the sake of my own curiosity.

The first time I fought for myself and my decision was when I told my mom I was expecting. She asked, choking on tears, “why would you do that?” To which I responded, “I’m not happy about it either yet, but this decision is hard enough as it is. If you can’t be supportive, I will remove you from my life.”

Throughout my pregnancy I wrestled with the weight of it. I got laid off when I was 5 months pregnant, and we made the decision for me to get a part-time remote job to ease my mental load. I had a lot of emotional preparation that I needed to do, and do it I did.

Every day I meditated on the shift that my life took and would continue to take. I journaled morning and night. I cried. I prayed. I sat. Even in moments when I was not consciously pondering and preparing, my subconscious was working. I was honest about the challenge and about how, even at the 8 month mark, I was still not bursting with joy.

I accepted the reality of what motherhood would bring, but I did so out of necessity. To lessen the suffering. I did not allow myself to fall into despair because one thing I knew with absolute certainty was that I would not allow my daughter to feel how I felt.

I was determined, from the very moment that I knew I was keeping her, to provide her with a mother that would cherish, guide, protect, and love her unconditionally. I committed to providing her with a mother that exhibited qualities she would admire instead of wanting to be opposite from.

It is from that place that my identity gap was born.

My desire was, and still is, to be an example to her. To show, not only tell, her that dreams can be achieved. That peace is not only attainable, but something we already have. And to provide her with every possible resource she would ever need. To ensure that she never knew lack, never felt worried for me, never felt that her presence was a burden.

But how can I provide her those things if I myself am living out the opposite of my dream? How could I provide her that which I am not?

When I had her, my instincts rushed in seamlessly almost without notice. My shift was instantaneous. A new dream was birthed right alongside her. I desired nothing but to be with her. To be a present and hands-on mother. To homeschool, to make all of her meals from scratch, to never have to leave her with strangers just so I could make a buck.

And now I am a single mom. My husband ended our marriage just 10 days before she turned 1. I am living out my actual nightmare. On the outside, my life looks almost identical to my mother’s.

It seems that I must now trade one dream for another.

I do not know how to be the mother I desire to be and also the woman I desire to be.

She is 15 months old tomorrow, and still we have never spent a night apart. I have never spent more than 15 hours away from her. I have never had to hire a babysitter because she always had her father, her aunt, or a grandparent. I have not worked since she was born. But I also have not been taking care of myself to the caliber that I know I need to thrive.

I am still sleep deprived. I have not exercised consistently, which is something I need for physical health and mental health. I have not been eating properly, for a multitude of reasons. And since my marriage ended I have not had the opportunity to meditate, pray, or journal in consistent intervals.

On top of this, now I must find work.

It is clear that life is calling me towards my Self. It is clear that I must take care of myself now more than ever, but this means that my days will no longer be dedicated solely to mothering. There will come a time where she will begin daycare, she will stop spending all of her nights with me, and I will no longer be there to comfort her in the way that only I can.

I have spent every single day of the last 24 months feeling and watching her grow. My life force energy has gone to her and her alone. I have been blessed with being present for seeing her little teeth poke through her gums and grow larger each day. I watched her take her first steps, heard her say her first words and her first laugh. I have been there for everything. But now life is taking me away. Soon, I will begin co-parenting and there will be entire days and nights where I won’t hold her, kiss her, squeeze her.

Though this fills me with a sadness that I have never known, I recognize that, when the time comes, I will be grateful for the relief. I know the solitude and the silence and the rest and the adult-only fun will bring me back to myself.

Perhaps the identity gap is not really about identity but instead about grief.

It is a heartbreaking reality to face—that I must sacrifice time with my daughter in order to find myself again.

It is a strange sort of paradox to recognize that in order to provide her with the life she deserves, I must loosen my grip of her. That I, as the person who grew her bones from my bones, must get further and further away from her.

This brings me to a quote on parenthood from the movie Jay Kelly, “We are only successful once we’ve made ourselves irrelevant.”

This I do not know how to reconcile.

But I will, somehow, because I must. For both of our sakes, I will keep searching. Keep learning. Keep growing. She deserves it, and so do I.

Oh, motherhood, how you have wrecked me in the best and worst ways.

With love and grief and everything in between,
Kylie

I seem to be clinging to her though. Because underneath the bitterness is a rage that has simmered so long it’s turned to stone.

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I’ve been the quiet good girl all my life. I’ve let people walk all over me, bully me, yell at me, manipulate me. I even let a woman destroy the family that I built for myself. Even when I began to practice speaking up for myself when boundaries were crossed, I was too weak to stand firm enough to remove people for crossing said boundaries.

Always, I would let others convince me that I was the problem. That I just needed to open my mind or my heart, that my concerns weren’t real and that I was acting out of some unconscious fear. I let myself be fooled into not trusting my intuition. I placed the perspective of other people above my own because I was afraid to rock the boat, to be abandoned, or to be labeled dangerous, mean, or unlovable.

But being the quiet good girl, the people-pleaser, ended up getting me exactly what I feared. I was manipulated, I was labeled unsafe, I was abandoned. Despite my hardest efforts, my worst fears still became my reality.

So it’s death to the good girl. I’m killing her. I’m letting my rage have its time and its moment. She’s been silenced for far too long.

Recently some friends told me that I was strong for not crashing out at the woman that manipulated and gaslit me, and though they meant it as a compliment I took it in with regret.

Why didn’t I do more to make it known that she was the problem? Why didn’t I fight harder for myself? For my family?

I was afraid.

I was afraid of becoming my mother.

I grew up seeing what unhealthy and unmanaged anger looked like. It came out in explosive fights, mean language, and passive aggressiveness. So I learned to bite my tongue. I learned to mold the anger into a ball as though it were clay and bury it in the depths of my heart. Anytime anger visits me my body rumbles and shakes, my heart races, my breath speeds up. It’s such a strong physical emotion for me, almost as though I can feel a fire in my chest. But I was never taught how to dispel it properly or in a healthy way, so I morphed it into ruminating thoughts, anxiety, and bitterness.

Breaking my anger into those three parts has made it manageable. Palatable. Not to myself, but to others. Bitterness isn’t evident in my day to day. It’s something I can smile over and shove to the back of my mind until I have time to throw it into my journal. But, since the root of my bitterness is unresolved anger, journaling doesn’t help me expel the energy from my body. It only temporarily quiets my mind. It only makes me easier for other people to handle.

But fuck that. Fuck that and fuck the people that made me believe my anger was unwelcome. Fuck my family for treating me like I didn’t deserve to be angry. Fuck the “friends” that tried to tell me to “just get over it”. Fuck my ex for being too weak to hold all of me. And fuck that bitch that told me I was a problem.

Fuck them all.

I’ve stayed quiet long enough. And it’s gotten me nowhere.

I can feel that my true power lies just beneath the anger I have been hoarding for years. When I think of my anger, I see a white-hot ball of light. I feel this light in my chest. I feel a scream that’s been lodged in my throat since I was a child, and it’s only gotten louder throughout my life.

Just last week in my journaling I asked myself why I was afraid to grab my power. I saw in my mind the strongest, most beautiful version of myself floating and reaching out towards a sparkling, golden spear. But every time I got close enough to touch it, I retreated again.

Now I see.

To embrace my power I must embrace the anger that lies embedded in my heart and my body. I must let out the scream. I must allow the rage to burn me completely, purifying my soul so that I am no longer afraid. Only then will the bitterness leave me. Only then will I be able to obtain the life I so vividly hold in my mind’s eye.

I am bitter because I’ve been wronged. I am bitter because I was manipulated, scapegoated, belittled, taken advantage of, and abandoned during the most vulnerable time of my life.

But at least I’m no longer afraid.

I’m no longer afraid of being a villain, for I know my true heart and intention. I am not afraid of being left, abused, or misunderstood because I’ve lived through it all and, somehow, I’m still standing.

Now I’m holding my bitterness with patience, for I know she will leave me the second I get a chance to rage out loud. This is what accepting myself really looks like. I am validating my entire self, the light and the dark, without regard for how anyone views me.

Death to the quiet good girl. She didn’t actually do me any good.

With anger and love,
Kylie

Brunch has always been an event that my heart holds with excitement and adoration. Coming together with the women that I admire, respect, and love has only ever brought me joy and healing. This past weekend I was able to sit down with my friends to see their faces, hear their laughs, and share my heart in person for the first time in 6 months, and it truly was a sacred time.

I hadn’t seen these girls since I moved out of the country. It was the book club group that I’d started a year and a half before I left, and they have such a special place in my heart because they were with me throughout my entire pregnancy. That group was the only reason I ever left the house for myself while I was pregnant. They always gave me something to look forward to and something to talk about that wasn’t the baby. They didn’t know it at the time, but they carried me through that depressive season of my life. And now, they are helping me through the grief of divorce and friendship betrayal.

I was the last one to arrive to the restaurant, and my heart soared when I saw all of their beautiful smiles. My light returned when we embraced in our loving hugs. Just being in their presence lightened the weight that rested on my shoulders.

Sometimes brunch is pure joy and laughter that leaves us laughing all the way to our cars. Other times it’s spilling the tiny details of things we’ve missed from each other’s lives lately. This time it was the latter.

They had known about my divorce, but they didn’t know about the breakup with my friend that happened at the same time, and they didn’t know any of the shocking details that led to those events. They made it known that I didn’t have to go into detail if I didn’t want to, but I really really needed to. Besides, that’s what brunch is for right?

So on I went. I took a deep breath and launched into the story. I broke it into parts—beginning, middle, middle, middle, end, all the way to the present, to how I am coping and working to mend my heart.

Somewhere along the way I started to get anxious that I was talking too much, being selfish, and dumping too many things onto them. That’s when the first healing affirmation was handed to me. Nat reached out to touch my arm and said, “There are four people here, I think we can handle it.” I paused while I took that in. I had to breathe for a moment to fully accept it.

I had forgotten what it looked and felt like to truly be held. To be genuinely cared for. I smiled, thanked her, and then laughs broke out wildly when Lauren said I was stronger than her because she would’ve crashed out already. Though that sentiment was said in jest, it healed me a little bit too. I hadn’t seen myself as strong. I hadn’t seen myself as someone who was carrying this well. My ex-husband and ex-friend gaslit me for months, making it seem like my every response to the pain was unjustified, or worse, that I deserved what was happening.

The server came by with another mimosa carafe, and they urged me to go on. By this point they were hungry for the rest of the story. I went on with my retelling of the book-worthy events, and all along the way there were affirming words, thoughtful insights, and absurd jokes.

That is the sacredness of brunch. It comes from our ability—our nature—to hear and hold the mess of our lives and to find lightness in it. Brunch is a time where we join with the intention of having true connection. We don’t always know what that will look like, but we know it will always be worthwhile.

Once I was done with my spiel, more healing was offered to me. They affirmed that I was, in fact, gaslit. Something that I often questioned precisely because it worked. They showered me with words of encouragement, and they spoke life into me. They said they admired and were in awe of the strength that I have to have gotten this far in my healing already. They said they were proud of me.

For the first time in my life, I allowed myself to accept those words. I let them wash over me, and I began to feel—not think—that maybe they were right.

This brunch was the first time I felt pure joy in months. And not only was it pure, but I was able to actually sit in it. Gratitude and peace washed over me. My heart opened up, and I was able to see that I truly can get through this. I mean, there I was, laughing about it all. And all thanks to these beautiful, kind souls that I am blessed to call my friends.

And then it was their turn, of course. They all had 6 months worth of life to fill me in on. I got to hear about their trials and their triumphs, their jobs and the more mundane parts of their lives. We celebrated new relationships, new jobs, better health, new apartments. We laughed and embraced and consoled. We embodied “eat, drink, and be merry.”

Despite the hardships we each faced, despite the annoyances of life, brunch offered us a space to breathe into it all. To accept life as it is and to remember that time and togetherness will heal us all.

I am grateful for the sacred brunch I just experienced, and I eagerly look forward to the next.

All my love,
Kylie