People think you’re done.

You start laughing again.

You answer texts.

You make plans.

You go to work.

You clean your house.

You start talking about the future like you actually expect to be there for it.

And suddenly, from the outside, it looks like you made it.

She’s doing better.

And you are.

That’s the complicated part.

You are doing better.

But better and okay are not the same thing.

Sometimes I think we have painted such a beautiful picture of healing that we’ve made people feel like they’re failing at it.

We talk about closure.

Moving on.

Finding peace.

Becoming yourself again.

As if one day you wake up and whatever broke your heart has finally packed its bags and moved out.

That hasn’t been my experience.

My experience has been much messier.

Healing has looked like carrying the same pain differently.

It has looked like learning how to have a good day without feeling guilty about it.

It has looked like realizing I can laugh at something and still miss someone terribly five minutes later.

It has looked like having days where I feel incredibly strong and nights where something tiny knocks the wind out of me.

A song.

A smell.

A photograph.

A date on the calendar.

A sentence someone says without realizing what it touches inside me.

Sometimes healing is incredibly unimpressive from the outside.

Sometimes it’s just getting through a moment without doing the thing that used to destroy you.

That counts.

Actually, I think that counts more than we realize.

Because being better doesn’t mean nothing hurts anymore.

It means the pain no longer gets to make every decision.

That is the difference.

There was a time in my life when pain drove the car.

It chose what I thought about.

What I believed about myself.

Who I pushed away.

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What I reached for when I couldn’t cope.

Whether I thought I deserved happiness.

Whether I imagined a future at all.

Pain was not simply something I felt.

It was running the entire operation.

And when you’ve lived that way long enough, healing can feel almost unnatural.

You start making choices your pain doesn’t agree with.

You get out of bed anyway.

You eat.

You shower.

You go for the walk.

You call somebody instead of isolating.

You stop checking the phone.

You don’t send the angry text.

You say no.

You leave.

You stay sober.

You show up.

You let somebody love you.

You let yourself enjoy something.

You start building a life before you fully believe you deserve one.

That is healing too.

It isn’t always a revelation.

Sometimes it is repetition.

One better decision.

And then another.

And then another.

Until one day you realize the thing that once controlled your entire life has become something you are carrying instead.

Still heavy.

Still real.

Still capable of hurting you.

But no longer holding the steering wheel.

I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions about becoming stronger.

People imagine strength means you don’t fall apart anymore.

I fall apart.

I just know now that falling apart does not mean I am back at the beginning.

That took me a long time to understand.

A bad day does not erase your progress.

Crying does not erase your progress.

Missing someone does not erase your progress.

Getting triggered does not erase your progress.

Feeling angry again does not erase your progress.

Wanting to hide does not erase your progress.

Needing reassurance does not erase your progress.

Having a moment where you think, I thought I was past this, does not erase your progress.

You are a human being.

Healing is not a straight line because humans are not straight lines.

We remember.

We associate.

We love.

We regret.

We grieve.

Our bodies remember things our minds would rather forget.

Sometimes your heart reacts before your logic has even entered the room.

The goal was never to become a person who doesn’t feel.

I don’t want that anymore.

For a long time, I thought becoming okay meant becoming untouched.

Nothing could hurt me.

Nothing could shake me.

Nothing could get too close.

But that isn’t healing.

That’s armor.

And armor gets heavy.

Real healing has required something much harder from me.

Feeling things without immediately trying to escape them.

That’s uncomfortable.

Sometimes brutally so.

It means sitting in sadness and understanding that sadness will not kill me.

It means letting grief come through the door without handing it the keys to the house.

It means being angry without burning everything down.

It means being afraid and still taking the next step.

It means saying, This hurts like hell, and also saying, I’m still going.

Both can be true.

I think we forget that.

Two things can exist at the same time.

You can be grateful for your life and deeply disappointed by parts of it.

You can love someone and realize they aren’t good for you.

You can forgive and still need distance.

You can miss the person you used to be while knowing you can never become her again.

You can be proud of how far you’ve come and exhausted by how far you still have to go.

You can have survived something and still be affected by it.

You can be healing and hurting.

You can be doing better and still not be okay.

There is no hypocrisy in that.

There is humanity.

And maybe you need to hear this today because people around you think you’re fine now.

Maybe enough time has passed that everyone stopped asking.

Maybe you returned to work.

Maybe the divorce is finalized.

Maybe the funeral was years ago.

Maybe you finished treatment.

Maybe the kids adjusted.

Maybe you moved.

Maybe you got another job.

Maybe you met someone new.

Maybe your social media looks happier.

Maybe you’re the one everybody calls strong.

And maybe you’re thinking:

If they only knew.

If they only knew how certain dates still sit in your stomach.

How some mornings are heavier than others.

How you sometimes miss a version of your life that doesn’t exist anymore.

How much effort goes into being the person everyone now describes as “doing so well.”

I want you to know something.

You do not have to minimize what still hurts in order to honor how far you’ve come.

You don’t owe anyone a polished recovery.

You don’t need to pretend the wound disappeared just because it finally stopped bleeding everywhere.

And you certainly don’t need to feel ashamed because something you thought you had healed from suddenly hurts again.

Healing isn’t forgetting.

It’s learning what to do when you remember.

That might be the best definition I have found.

Because I remember.

Of course I remember.

There are things I will carry for the rest of my life.

I no longer see that as failure.

Some things are supposed to matter forever.

Some losses change the architecture of you.

Some experiences divide your life into before and after.

The goal is not to erase the after.

The goal is to learn how to live inside it.

And slowly — sometimes almost invisibly — you do.

One morning you realize you slept through the night.

One afternoon you catch yourself laughing and don’t immediately feel guilty afterward.

One day something happens that would have destroyed you two years ago, and instead you pause.

You breathe.

You think.

You choose differently.

Nobody throws you a parade for that.

But maybe they should.

Because those tiny moments are where lives change.

The moment between feeling and reacting.

The moment between wanting to give up and deciding to make it through tonight.

The moment between repeating an old pattern and saying,

No. Not this time.

That is where healing lives.

Not in perfection.

In the pause.

In the choice.

In the willingness to keep returning to yourself.

So yes.

I’m doing better.

There are parts of my life today that I once couldn’t imagine having.

There are things I survived that I genuinely did not think I would survive.

There are days I look at myself and think, Look at you. You’re still here.

And I am proud of that woman.

Deeply proud.

But I also know better than to disrespect what she carries by pretending none of it hurts anymore.

Some of it does.

Probably always will.

The difference is that today, pain can sit beside me without becoming me.

Grief can visit without convincing me there is nothing left to live for.

Fear can speak without automatically being obeyed.

Regret can remind me without sentencing me.

My past gets a voice.

It does not get the final vote.

That is what better looks like for me.

Maybe that’s what better looks like for you too.

Not healed beyond recognition.

Not untouched.

Not magically free from every bad day.

Just steadier.

Wiser.

More aware.

A little harder to knock down.

A little quicker to reach for your own hand when you do fall.

And increasingly unwilling to let the worst thing you have ever experienced decide what happens next.

So if someone asks how you’re doing and the only truthful answer is,

“Better.”

Let that be enough.

Better is enormous.

Better means something changed.

Better means you kept going.

Better means pain may still live somewhere inside you, but it no longer owns every room.

And maybe being okay was never supposed to mean never hurting again.

Maybe being okay means finally understanding:

This hurts.

I wish it hadn’t happened.

Some days I still struggle with it.

And I am going to live anyway.

That is not weakness.

That is healing.

And if today all you can say is,

I’m doing better, but I’m not okay yet.

I hope you give yourself credit for the part that matters most.

You’re doing better.

Keep going.

Let’s keep Rising 🩶

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This article is not an attempt to determine guilt or innocence in the Lindsay Clancy case. I am not a member of the jury, I was not present for what happened, and I am not using this space to argue what the legal outcome should be.

The children at the center of this tragedy — Cora, Dawson, and Callan — deserve to be remembered first and foremost.

My purpose in discussing this case is strictly to raise awareness about postpartum mental illness, postpartum psychosis, psychiatric treatment, medication monitoring, warning signs, and the need for stronger support systems for mothers and families.

Discussing mental illness is not the same as excusing harm. Asking questions about treatment is not the same as assigning blame. And compassion for people experiencing serious psychiatric illness does not diminish compassion for victims or their families.

This is a conversation about awareness, education, prevention, and getting people help before a crisis becomes a tragedy.

That is the purpose of this article. Nothing more.

This is not about choosing a side. It is about asking what we can do before another family reaches the point of catastrophe.

I have rewritten the beginning of this piece more times than I want to admit.

Because there are three children at the center of this story.

Cora. Dawson. Callan.

Before we talk about diagnoses, medications, doctors, attorneys, criminal responsibility, or anything else, their names deserve to be said.

They mattered.

Their lives cannot become footnotes in a conversation about mental health.

And I want to make something equally clear before I go any further:

I am not writing this to determine Lindsay Clancy’s guilt or innocence.

That is not my job.

I wasn’t inside her mind. I wasn’t inside that house. I didn’t hear weeks of testimony or examine hundreds of pieces of evidence.

As of September 4, Lindsay Clancy’s trial has ended in a mistrial after jurors were unable to unanimously determine her criminal responsibility. Her defense argued that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and that her mental-health treatment and medications contributed to her deterioration. Prosecutors argued that although she struggled with her mental health, she understood what she was doing and acted deliberately. (Reuters⁠)

Those are very different conclusions.

And I am deliberately not asking you to choose between them here.

I am asking something else.

What if we stopped waiting until something horrific happens before we took maternal mental health seriously?

Because somewhere underneath the courtroom arguments is a conversation much bigger than one defendant.

And if we allow that conversation to disappear when the headlines do, we will have missed something incredibly important.

Postpartum illness is not always what we imagine

Most people have heard the phrase postpartum depression.

We picture exhaustion.

Crying.

Feeling disconnected.

Maybe struggling to bond with a baby.

And those things absolutely can happen.

But perinatal mental illness exists on a spectrum, and at its most severe end is something many people had barely heard about before cases like this entered the national conversation:

postpartum psychosis.

It is rare — estimated to affect roughly 1 to 2 people per 1,000 births — but it is considered a psychiatric emergency. Symptoms can include hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, extreme confusion, disorganized thinking and dramatic changes in mood or behavior. Immediate psychiatric evaluation and treatment can be necessary. (PubMed⁠)

And here’s something incredibly important:

Talking about postpartum psychosis does not mean saying that mothers experiencing postpartum mental illness are dangerous.

They aren’t.

We should not create another stigma while trying to dismantle the first one.

The overwhelming majority of women struggling after childbirth will never harm their children.

This conversation is about recognizing the rare circumstances in which someone’s mental state deteriorates so severely that reality itself can become distorted — and treating that deterioration like the medical emergency it is.

And then there is the medication conversation

This is the part I believe we need to be brave enough to discuss without becoming reckless about it.

Medication saves lives.

Mental-health treatment saves lives.

People should not read a story like this and suddenly stop medication, fear psychiatric treatment, or decide doctors cannot be trusted.

That would be dangerous.

But the opposite extreme doesn’t help either.

Medication affecting the brain deserves careful prescribing, follow-up, communication between providers, and attention when someone’s symptoms are becoming worse rather than better.

During the Clancy trial, the defense focused heavily on her psychiatric treatment and medications, arguing that they contributed to her deteriorating mental state. Evidence presented during the case showed that she had received numerous psychiatric prescriptions from multiple providers in the months before the deaths. Prosecutors and their experts disputed the defense’s conclusions about psychosis and criminal responsibility. (BostonGlobe.com⁠)

I think that distinction matters.

I am not saying:

Medication caused this.

We don’t know that.

I am saying:

When someone’s mind appears to be changing rapidly, we should be paying very close attention.

If one medication is added to another, symptoms change, sleep disappears, behavior becomes unfamiliar, intrusive thoughts intensify, or someone repeatedly says, Something is wrong with me — those things should not simply disappear into separate charts at separate appointments.

Care should be connected.

Families should know what warning signs mean.

Partners should know where to call.

And a mother should not have to become her own psychiatrist while exhausted, frightened and trying to care for a newborn.

ACOG recommends screening for bipolar disorder before medication treatment for depression or anxiety when it hasn’t previously been done and calls for immediate medical attention when postpartum psychosis is suspected. (ACOG⁠)

That isn’t anti-medication.

That is pro-careful medicine.

We also need to change what we ask new mothers

We love asking:

How’s the baby?

Is the baby sleeping?

Is the baby eating?

Are you breastfeeding?

Did the baby gain weight?

But sometimes we need to look directly at the woman holding that baby and ask:

How are YOU?

And then stay long enough to hear the real answer.

Not the automatic:

“I’m tired, but I’m good.”

Not the smile someone gives because she thinks good mothers are supposed to be grateful.

Ask again.

Are you sleeping at all?

Are your thoughts frightening you?

Do you feel like yourself?

Do you feel safe?

Are you experiencing thoughts you don’t understand?

Does reality ever feel strange?

Are you afraid to tell somebody what is happening inside your head because you’re terrified they’ll think you’re a bad mother?

Because shame is incredibly good at keeping people quiet.

And silence can become dangerous.

Compassion does not erase accountability

I know this is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.

People hear compassion and assume it means excuse.

They hear mental illness and think you’re saying consequences shouldn’t exist.

They hear someone asking questions about treatment and think you’re forgetting the victims.

I am not.

We are capable of holding more than one truth at once.

Three children can deserve every ounce of our grief.

Their family can deserve compassion for an unimaginable loss.

Questions about responsibility can belong in a courtroom.

And society can still examine whether something failed long before anyone entered that courtroom.

Those ideas do not cancel each other out.

Understanding something is not the same thing as excusing it.

Sometimes understanding is how we prevent the next tragedy.

This is why I’m asking you to help

I don’t want this to become another true-crime story we obsess over until another headline replaces it.

I want something useful to come from the attention.

So I’m asking my community to help support families experiencing perinatal mental-health struggles.

Postpartum Support International provides peer support, resources, education, provider training and connections to care for pregnant, postpartum and post-loss families. It also supports education specifically around postpartum psychosis. (postpartum.net⁠)

If you have $5, give $5.

If you can’t give anything, share the resources.

If you know a new mother, check on her.

If someone tells you that her thoughts are frightening her, believe that she is frightened.

If you’re the one struggling, please don’t decide that being afraid of your own mind makes you a terrible mother.

Tell someone.

Keep telling people until somebody listens.

Because awareness cannot only happen after funerals.

Education cannot only happen during murder trials.

Mental-health intervention cannot begin when police arrive.

We have to get there sooner.

If you need help

The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline provides free, confidential support 24 hours a day, seven days a week for pregnant and postpartum people and their families.

Call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262). (Maternal and Child Health Bureau⁠)

Postpartum Support International also offers support, groups, resources and connections to local help through its HelpLine and network. (Postpartum Support International⁠)

And if someone is experiencing symptoms of postpartum psychosis — including hallucinations, delusions, paranoia or severe confusion — it should be treated as an emergency. (National Institute of Mental Health⁠)

For Cora, Dawson and Callan

I don’t know what will ultimately happen in the Clancy case.

I don’t know what another jury may decide, if there is another jury.

But I know what I hope happens outside that courtroom.

I hope someone hears the words postpartum psychosis for the first time and remembers them.

I hope a husband notices his wife isn’t herself and doesn’t dismiss it as exhaustion.

I hope a mother admits the thoughts she’s been hiding.

I hope a doctor asks one more question.

I hope providers communicate with each other.

I hope someone recognizes the warning signs earlier.

I hope somebody gets help before the unthinkable happens.

Because we cannot change what happened in that house.

We cannot give three children back their futures.

But maybe — if we’re willing to have the uncomfortable conversation instead of only the sensational one — we can help protect another family.

And maybe that is one way we honor the people for whom help came too late.

Not by choosing a side.

By choosing to pay attention.

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That is one of the simplest ways I can explain the fear I carried into prison.

Maybe worse than kicked.

Jumped.

Robbed.

Beaten.

Thrown into solitary because I got caught up in something I didn’t understand.

I had heard all the stories people hear about prison. And I had one particular reason to believe I was walking into those gates with a target on my back:

My crime involved the death of a child.

My child.

I was sentenced to prison for vehicular manslaughter after taking a combination—and too much—of my prescription medication and driving.

I survived the accident.

My four-year-old daughter did not.

I’ve written about this openly before because there is no version of rebuilding my life that works if I spend it hiding from the truth.

My intention that morning was never to hurt my daughter.

But intention doesn’t erase responsibility.

I took the pills.

I took more.

I drove.

And something happened that can never be undone.

By the time I reached prison, I was already sentencing myself to something far longer than the judge had.

I didn’t think I deserved a good life.

I didn’t think I deserved happiness.

Somewhere deep inside me, I had convinced myself that if I suffered badly enough and for long enough, maybe that suffering would prove how sorry I was.

So when women in county jail warned me about state prison, I believed them.

Some were what we called transients—the women who seemed to use county like a revolving door. They knew correctional facilities in a way I absolutely did not.

They told me there would be a whole world of hurt waiting for someone with my kind of charge.

One woman who had actually been to state prison told me something different.

“You’ll be fine.”

Naturally, she was the one person I didn’t believe.

Hi, I’m Amy. Here’s the Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done.

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There is an unspoken rule in prison that you don’t ask someone what she’s in for.

Which sounds almost civilized until you realize everyone finds out anyway.

Women talk.

People know people.

Cases end up discussed.

Someone reads something.

Someone calls home.

Eventually the story makes its way around.

Reception was a strange combination of women who had done this before and women like me.

The first group knew where to stand, what to ask for and how things worked.

The rest of us had either terror written across our faces or were wearing false bravado like cheap makeup.

I figured I would get my story over with.

Rip the Band-Aid off.

So conversations would start and eventually I’d find myself saying some version of:

Hi, I’m Amy.

I drove under the influence.

I pulled out in front of another car.

Then I’d start crying.

I survived.

My daughter didn’t.

I waited for disgust.

I waited for somebody to tell me exactly what kind of monster I was.

Instead, something happened that completely confused me.

Women hugged me.

Actual hugs.

Women I didn’t know would wrap their arms around me and say:

You made a fucking mistake.

Hold your head up.

Give yourself time.

Be kind to yourself.

I almost didn’t know what to do with their compassion.

I had spent so much time believing punishment was the appropriate response to my existence that kindness felt suspicious.

There were other women who had absolutely no patience for my emotions.

I’d be crying and someone walking past would bark:

“Shut the fuck up with the crying. Nobody fucking cares.”

Or:

“You’re a number now.”

“You aren’t even a person anymore.”

“You’re state property.”

Prison wasn’t a healing retreat.

Nobody was required to care about my feelings.

And eventually, someone did come directly at me.

Ironically, it was another woman whose crime involved the death of her child.

But our cases were profoundly different.

She was serving twenty-five-to-life for deliberately and brutally harming her child before killing the child.

From my interactions with her, there also appeared to be significant mental-health issues at play.

She couldn’t understand why our sentences weren’t the same.

To her, the equation was simple:

Her child was dead.

My child was dead.

Why wasn’t I doing life?

Trying to explain intent, circumstances, addiction or legal differences wasn’t going to get us anywhere.

One day she started getting loud with me.

I had a coloring book on the table and a few shitty colored pencils.

They sound like nothing.

In prison, they were little treasures.

Something that belonged to me.

Something that could keep my mind occupied for a while.

She smacked them across the room.

And suddenly another woman stepped in.

I’ll call her Maya.

Maya had grown up around gang life.

I knew that much.

But I didn’t yet understand how deep it went.

She got between the situation and me and said:

“We don’t play that fucking game here. You don’t attack people you know nothing the fuck about.”

The other woman snapped back.

“Like you fucking know her.”

And Maya said something I will never forget.

“Yeah, I do. I had my family run her number. She’s here for what she said she’s here for. She’s hurting and healing and not fucking bothering you, so why the fuck are you so bothered by her?”

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The first letter J ever sent me was typed.

I remember noticing that.

Which probably sounds ridiculous considering where I was at the time, but prison gives you a lot of time to notice tiny things.

Handwriting felt intimate to me.

Typing felt efficient.

I remember thinking, Okay. This person cared enough to send me a letter, but apparently not enough to actually write it.

I didn’t know him.

I didn’t trust him.

And I definitely wasn’t looking for love.

At that point in my life, I had accepted a lot.

I had accepted prison.

I had accepted being alone.

I had accepted that maybe the life I once imagined simply wasn’t meant for me anymore.

I was taking college classes. I was trying to do the right things. I was making small changes and learning how to be proud of victories that belonged entirely to me.

But underneath all of that, I was still falling apart.

I didn’t believe I deserved much more than what I had.

No house.

No money.

No clear future.

Just me.

And a history I thought made me impossible to love.

Maybe someone could like me.

Maybe someone could even fall for me.

But eventually, I thought, they would hear the whole story.

They would understand how complicated my life was.

And they would decide:

She’s too much.

Too much grief.

Too much history.

Too much damage.

Too much everything.

So I had stopped believing romantic love was really meant for me.

Then this stranger sent me a typed letter.

J had known who I was before I knew he existed.

He had seen my story in the media.

Later, his sponsor called him to help with a job at the same place my brother worked. Somewhere in conversation, my name came up, and J asked my brother if it would be okay to write me.

When my sister-in-law told me, my immediate reaction was basically:

This is so fucking weird.

The last thing I wanted was some holier-than-thou recovery guy swooping into prison armed with inspirational clichés and acting like he knew how to fix me.

Then the letter came.

Parts of it sounded exactly like what I expected.

Recovery language.

Encouragement.

Things I had heard before.

I rolled my eyes.

Then I got to the end.

There was a line that said something like:

Take my hand, and I’ll walk with you on the journey.

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I don’t remember the exact wording anymore.

But I remember the feeling.

I reread that letter probably a hundred times.

Then I wrote him back.

And I reread my own letter a hundred times too.

Trust did not come easily to me anymore.

After the accident, I had learned that people sometimes ask questions because they care—and sometimes they ask because information can be useful later.

So giving J pieces of myself felt dangerous.

But I eventually reached this strange point where I thought:

What else can anybody possibly do to me?

If I gave him something real, what he did with it would tell me who he was.

So I did.

And he handled it carefully.

A few letters later, March 16 came.

I didn’t know he was visiting.

He had actually already been turned away once because he had rips in his jeans.

Which still makes me laugh.

Apparently prison dress code almost interfered with one of the most important days of my life.

After lunch, they called me for a visit.

And I panicked.

Not cute nervous.

Not butterflies.

Panic.

My heart was racing.

I couldn’t breathe properly.

I felt like I was going to throw up.

I was shaking so badly that I remember thinking he was probably going to assume I was on something.

I had become so accustomed to prison that normal human interaction felt foreign.

I felt like everybody was watching me.

The officers.

The other women.

Him.

Everyone.

I even asked an officer if I could leave first if I wanted to, because visitors normally had to leave before the incarcerated person returned to the unit.

I needed an escape route.

Just in case.

Then I walked into the visiting room.

State clothes.

No makeup.

Hair that had absolutely seen better days.

No perfume.

No carefully chosen outfit.

No ability to enhance anything.

Just me.

And then I saw him.

My first thought?

Oh my God.

He was gorgeous.

Annoyingly gorgeous.

And his eyes.

Brown doesn’t really describe them.

Honey.

Caramel.

Warm.

Swirled together somehow.

I still melt when I really look into them.

And after all that buildup, after all that panic, after wondering what this first meeting would be like…

We shook hands.

An awkward handshake.

Like two people meeting to discuss a mortgage.

Romance was apparently alive and thriving in the prison visiting room.

But then we sat down.

And something changed.

He stopped being the recovery guy.

He stopped being the stranger who had read about me.

He was just J.

Human.

Uncomplicated in the moment.

And most importantly, completely unjudgmental.

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I had already done what any incarcerated woman with a suspicious personality and a helpful sister-in-law would do:

I had him investigated.

Background check and all.

So there were things about his life I knew before he knew I knew them.

And when those conversations eventually came up?

He told me.

Openly.

He never tried to hide who he had been.

That mattered to me.

I tested him too.

I would throw out some terrible detail about myself and quietly wait for the reaction.

He would almost smirk and give me some version of:

Yeah. Me too.

Or:

I’ve done worse.

Not competitively.

More like:

Okay? You’re human. What’s your point?

That was new for me.

When the first visit ended, I watched him leave.

And I remember thinking:

Well. That was nice.

Then:

That’ll probably never happen again.

Surely he had a life waiting for him.

Surely there was no reason to keep coming back.

But he did.

The second visit was Easter.

I had already accepted I would spend the holiday inside.

The women on the unit were trying to keep morale up, so we dressed up as much as prison allowed.

I had a lavender shirt.

And bright purple lipstick.

Then my name got called.

J.

Again.

My immediate thought was:

Great. He’s going to think I’ve completely lost my mind.

Or worse, that I was somehow enjoying prison.

When really, the lipstick was just survival.

It was staying busy.

Participating.

Trying to bring some life into a place that could suck it out of you very quickly.

That visit gave us our first hug.

It was short.

Awkward.

And unbelievably comforting.

He had come back.

And then he came back again.

And again.

A few visits later, something started changing.

I was getting that ridiculous fluttery feeling.

I ignored it for as long as I could.

Then eventually I thought:

What the hell do I have to lose?

So I sent him a message through the prison system.

Something extremely smooth like:

I think I’m starting to like you. Like actually like you-like you.

The messaging system wasn’t on our tablets yet.

I had to use the kiosk.

And we only got five logins a day.

Five.

So naturally, I spent mine obsessively checking for his response.

Nothing.

I walked away.

I ruined it.

Checked again.

Nothing.

He thinks I’m insane.

Again.

Nothing.

Obviously this was too good to be true.

Then the message finally came.

He liked me too.

And I remember thinking:

No fucking way.

It didn’t feel possible.

Because somewhere underneath the excitement was still that voice saying:

You don’t deserve this.

Then came the phone calls.

My phone time was 6:45.

Prison romance is incredibly glamorous.

J had an entire life outside those walls.

Work.

Responsibilities.

People.

Freedom.

I had prison.

Some days I felt like I had absolutely nothing to tell him.

He could tell me about places he went, things he did, conversations he had.

I could say:

Breakfast happened.

Count happened.

Class happened.

Somebody fought over television privileges.

So we talked about the past.

And we talked about the future.

Mostly, we talked about possibility.

We found those tiny coincidences that feel enormous when you’re falling for someone.

No way. You too?

His mother and Grace shared the same middle name.

Little connections became huge.

Because inside prison, little things were everything.

Then there was our first kiss.

God.

It was awkward.

Messy.

Unplanned.

And one of the best feelings I had experienced in years.

Naturally, I went back to my unit convinced I had probably ruined everything.

Then he came back.

Again.

That became the theme.

Every time part of me expected him to disappear…

He didn’t.

Holding his hand eventually became one of my favorite things.

It still is.

Inside prison, almost everything was controlled.

Where we sat.

How long we had.

When we could touch.

When we had to stop.

There were eyes everywhere.

So holding hands wasn’t just holding hands.

It felt like freedom.

Choice.

Connection.

Someone touching me because they wanted to.

I’ve never told him this until recently, but even now, holding his hand grounds me.

After a long day, if our hands find each other, something inside me settles.

Because that simple gesture carries an entire history.

There was once a time when holding his hand across a prison visiting-room table was one of the greatest luxuries I had.

Somewhere along the way, we started talking about love.

Eventually, the words became real.

I love you.

Those words felt like magic.

Magic was a word we used often back then.

Because what else were we supposed to call any of this?

I was sitting in prison after convincing myself that nobody could know my entire story and still choose me.

And there was this man willingly driving to a correctional facility to sit across from me, eat terrible vending-machine food, listen to me, and come back again.

Nothing about our relationship was normal.

So the limitations became part of the intimacy.

Waiting for visits.

Waiting for messages.

Waiting for phone calls.

Waiting to hold hands.

Waiting for release.

You learn to savor something when there’s always a clock beside it.

Jason also became part of one of the biggest decisions I made inside prison.

I was still dependent on something that numbed me and controlled more of my life than I wanted to admit.

I wanted to be free of it.

I was terrified.

Jason had his own experience with getting free from substances, and he talked to me honestly about it.

He believed I could do it.

And something in me believed him.

Not because he promised it would be easy.

Because I could see what freedom looked like on him.

And I wanted it.

I wanted to know what it felt like to experience life completely present.

I wanted to someday experience intimacy sober.

Unaltered.

Nothing between me and what I was feeling.

So I made the decision.

And I withdrew inside prison.

There was one night when my skin felt like it was crawling.

I was sweating and freezing.

I had no energy, but sitting still felt impossible.

My head felt like worms were moving underneath my skin.

Everything in my body wanted relief.

And I kept telling myself:

This will end.

It will be worth it.

I’m strong enough.

And:

One person believes I can.

So I will.

I want to be clear about this.

J did not save me.

I saved myself.

I signed the paperwork.

I made the decision.

I endured the withdrawal.

I did the work.

But there is a tremendous difference between somebody doing the work for you and somebody standing close enough that you remember why you’re doing it.

He was a phone call away.

There was another visit coming.

Someone believed I could make it to the other side.

Sometimes that matters more than people realize.

Then December 11, 2024 came.

Release day.

I woke up thinking:

It’s here.

And somehow also:

There’s no way this is actually happening.

There was paperwork. Cleaning. Waiting.

So much waiting.

Eventually, I started walking from my unit toward the basement where release processing happened.

And suddenly I realized something.

It was the same walk I had taken every week to see J.

Over and over, I had walked that hallway toward the visiting room knowing that eventually I would turn around and go back inside.

But this time?

I was walking out.

To him.

My heart felt like it might give out.

I had a tiny bag of paperwork.

That was basically everything I owned.

Then I saw him.

I ran to him.

Wrapped my arms around him.

And said:

“We did it. We made it.”

Because he had been there for half my sentence.

I can’t tell you what those months were like for him.

That part belongs to him.

But for me, standing there in his arms wasn’t an ending.

It was the beginning.

We went back to the sober house where he was living.

He had bought basic things for me.

Clothes.

Hygiene products.

Stuff most people don’t think twice about owning.

All I wanted was a shower.

Then J came into the bathroom.

Started getting undressed.

And I remember thinking:

Oh.

Okay.

Apparently we’re taking a shower together.

And somehow, it didn’t feel strange.

It felt normal.

After everything, normal felt like magic.

Later, we finally got to experience all the intimacy we had waited for.

I won’t make something that personal into spectacle.

But I will say this:

For the first time, I experienced it completely sober.

Completely present.

Every touch.

Every second.

Nothing dulled.

Nothing chemically altered.

And I wasn’t afraid.

I felt safe.

That is still one of the most intimate things I can say about that night.

I felt safe.

The next morning, I had to report to parole.

J came with me.

We spent the day together.

And I kept thinking:

Is this really my life?

Am I actually free?

Is this seriously my first twenty-four hours outside?

It was.

And I wouldn’t change it.

Those first weeks are some of my favorite memories.

His business is seasonal, so we had time before work became busy.

We went to meetings.

We binged Netflix.

We just existed beside each other.

And after everything I had experienced, ordinary felt extraordinary.

One of my favorite memories is barely a memory at all.

I would lie with my head tucked into his chest.

His arms around me.

I’d listen to his heartbeat.

Feel him breathe.

Nothing was happening.

There was no adventure.

No huge romantic moment.

No dramatic declaration.

And somehow, it felt like everything.

After years of chaos, grief, addiction, courtrooms, incarceration, and constantly bracing for whatever was coming next…

I could simply lie there.

With someone I loved.

And listen to him breathe.

I think that was one of the first times I understood what home could feel like.

Coming home also meant experiencing grief differently.

Grace had already been gone for years.

I had already mourned her in more ways than I can count.

But when I walked back into my parents’ house and saw some of her things sitting exactly where I had left them, it felt like losing her all over again.

Nothing had changed.

Except me.

I had been sentenced.

I had gone to prison.

I had changed.

I had gotten sober.

I had fallen in love.

And there were pieces of her life still sitting where they had always been.

The weight of that was enormous.

J stood beside me through it.

He hugged me.

He talked to me.

He encouraged me.

He didn’t try to fix grief that could never be fixed.

He was there.

Sometimes that is the greatest thing one person can do for another.

There are things about J I admire that have nothing to do with what he did for me.

He is incredibly talented at his craft.

I now work beside him and learn from him, and I get to see how his brain works.

If he doesn’t know something, he researches it.

If there’s a problem, he finds a solution.

He will dig into some tiny detail until he understands everything about it.

Anything he has, he built.

He has spent most of his life relying on himself.

There’s a toughness in that.

A determination.

A refusal to give up.

And somehow, whenever music is playing, he whistles.

I notice it constantly.

Those are the little things I love.

The things that would mean absolutely nothing to anybody else.

But when you love someone, those are the things that become theirs.

Sometimes I think about the woman he first met.

She was terrified.

She believed her past had made her too much.

She had almost stopped believing there could be anything beautiful waiting for her outside those walls.

Then someone wrote her a letter.

He sat across from her in a prison visiting room.

He saw the parts she was afraid to show.

And he came back.

Then he came back again.

And again.

He gave me something to imagine on the other side.

He didn’t carry me there.

He didn’t rescue me.

He simply walked beside me while I figured out how to save myself.

And maybe that’s one of the most beautiful kinds of love there is.

If I could go back knowing everything I know now, I would still walk into that visiting room.

I would still shake his hand awkwardly.

I would still wear the ridiculous purple lipstick on Easter.

I would still waste all five kiosk logins waiting for his response.

I would still have the messy first kiss.

I would still hold his hand across that table.

I would still walk through withdrawal knowing someone believed in me.

I would still walk that hallway toward freedom.

And I would still run into his arms and say:

We did it. We made it.

Because somewhere between a typed letter and a prison visiting room, that stranger became one of the most important people in my life.

And maybe the line at the end of his first letter knew something we didn’t yet.

Take my hand.

Eventually, I literally did.

Across a prison visiting-room table.

Then walking into freedom.

And I’m still reaching for it now.

The woman he met in prison thought love meant nothing.

The woman I am today knows love means everything.

Especially the smallest things.

A hand.

A hug.

A heartbeat underneath your ear.

A person who keeps coming back when you’re convinced they’re going to leave.

The things that cost absolutely nothing.

Only presence.

Only intention.

Only effort.

Maybe that’s where the magic has been all along.

Buy Me A Coffee- It’s Cheap 🙏🏼☕️

Before I went to prison, I was terrified of gang members.

There. I said it.

I had the same images in my head that a lot of people probably do.

Violence.

Retaliation.

Codes I didn’t understand.

People you didn’t look at too long, speak to wrong, or accidentally piss off.

And considering the reason I was going to prison, I was already convinced I was walking into those gates with a target painted across my back.

I had been sentenced to prison for vehicular manslaughter.

I had taken a combination—and an excess—of my prescription medication and driven.

I survived the accident.

My four-year-old daughter did not.

I’ve written those sentences in different forms more times than I can count now, and they still hurt.

My intention that morning was never to hurt my child.

But intention doesn’t erase responsibility.

I took the pills.

I took more.

And I drove.

Those facts belonged to me.

So when I started hearing all the things people tell you about prison—what happens to people with certain charges, who gets targeted, who gets tested—I believed every horrible possibility.

And maybe part of me thought I deserved it anyway.

That was the frame of mind I entered prison with.

Punishment on top of punishment.

I had already decided that if I suffered enough, maybe somewhere in that suffering there would be redemption.

Maybe if life hurt badly enough forever, it would prove how sorry I was.

That isn’t accountability, by the way.

I understand that now.

But back then?

I couldn’t tell the difference.

There is an unofficial rule inside that you don’t walk around asking people what they’re in for.

You learn quickly that it doesn’t matter.

People find out.

Stories travel.

Court paperwork gets seen.

Someone knows somebody who knows somebody.

Eventually, most secrets aren’t very secret.

I decided fairly early that I wasn’t going to construct some elaborate story around mine.

I didn’t walk around introducing myself with my charge.

But when conversations became real, I told the truth.

Sometimes painfully.

Sometimes awkwardly.

Sometimes saying everything surrounding the sentence I was terrified to actually say.

And one afternoon, somebody called me on it.

Almost immediately.

Most of the unit was gone at programs that day.

I didn’t want to sit alone in my cell.

Being alone with my thoughts was still one of the most dangerous places for me to be.

There was a woman cooking in the tiny kitchen area—if you could even call it a kitchen. Maybe eight feet by five feet, a hot plate, prison ingredients being turned into something resembling an actual meal through the kind of creativity incarcerated women become ridiculously good at.

I didn’t really know her.

But I knew of her.

Everybody did.

She was serving twenty-five years.

I wandered over and basically admitted the truth:

I didn’t want to be alone.

She let me sit.

Then she started asking questions.

And within minutes, this woman I barely knew noticed something about me that people on the outside had allowed me to do for years.

I wasn’t lying exactly.

I was doing something more subtle.

I was talking around the truth.

Softening sentences.

Explaining before anybody accused me.

Trying to control how every word landed.

Trying to make sure nobody misunderstood me.

Trying to make people like me while simultaneously pretending I didn’t give a shit whether they did.

She stopped me.

And gave me one of the simplest lessons I’ve ever received about becoming the woman I wanted to be.

Say what you mean. Mean what you say.

Stop twisting yourself into sentences designed around what everybody else might think.

If you want honest people around you, start by being one.

If you want integrity in your life, it has to show up in your conversations too.

She saw straight through me.

And here’s the part I probably wouldn’t have believed before prison:

She was a gang member.

She didn’t introduce herself that way.

There was no dramatic announcement.

She wasn’t walking around advertising anything.

But she didn’t exactly deny who she was either.

She lived by a code I didn’t understand.

And I need to be very careful here, because I am not going to pretend that a period of incarceration made me an expert on gangs.

It didn’t.

I don’t know the inner workings.

I don’t know every rule.

I don’t know everything these women had done before I met them, everything they were expected to do, or everything they had endured to get there.

I can only tell you what I saw.

And what I saw challenged the hell out of me.

Because humans are terribly inconvenient when you’re trying to put them into neat little boxes.

Good person.

Bad person.

Criminal.

Victim.

Gang member.

Mother.

Addict.

Murderer.

Innocent.

Dangerous.

Safe.

We love categories because categories allow us to stop thinking.

Prison destroyed a lot of that for me.

The woman sitting across from me that afternoon could teach me about honesty, integrity, loyalty and self-respect.

And that same woman could make choices based on a code that I absolutely did not agree with.

Both things were true.

I saw that contradiction play out in spectacular fashion on the Fourth of July.

Prison holidays are strange.

You’re still incarcerated.

You’re still surrounded by concrete, gates, officers, counts and rules.

But every once in a while, somebody throws you a tiny reminder that the outside world is celebrating something.

Sometimes it’s an enhanced meal.

And when your daily food comes from an institutional kitchen, an enhanced meal is a very big deal.

That Fourth of July was brutally hot.

The kind of heat where your clothes stick to you and everyone is irritated before anything even happens.

Industrial fans were blowing through the mess hall because there was no air conditioning.

We were waiting for food we normally didn’t get.

And then everything exploded.

The woman from the kitchen had gotten into a physical confrontation with another incarcerated woman—someone significantly bigger than she was.

From what I understood at the time, she believed she had been expected to do it because of her gang affiliation.

Again, that’s the extent to which I can speak about it.

I wasn’t part of that world.

I wasn’t privy to its decisions.

I just watched what happened next.

Officers rushed in.

Pepper spray came from seemingly every direction.

Not one canister.

A lot of them.

And remember those enormous industrial fans?

They were still running.

So now pepper spray wasn’t staying anywhere near the people fighting.

It was becoming our Fourth of July air freshener.

People started coughing.

Eyes were burning.

People were scrambling.

Some were vomiting.

Staff who weren’t even directly involved were getting hit with it.

Food was contaminated.

The entire mess hall turned into complete chaos.

Then came lockdown.

And the enhanced meal everyone had been waiting for?

Gone.

Nobody ate it.

I should have been furious with her.

Maybe part of me was.

But mostly, I remember feeling sad.

Not because I thought what happened was okay.

It wasn’t.

Not because I suddenly believed gang violence was noble.

I didn’t.

I was sad because I had seen another part of her.

I had sat in that kitchen with the woman who told me to stop hiding inside my sentences.

I knew the woman who understood loyalty almost to a fault.

I knew someone capable of encouraging another human being who was convinced her entire life should be punishment.

And then I watched that same woman participate in something destructive because she believed loyalty required something else from her.

That’s complicated.

People don’t like complicated.

Complicated doesn’t fit nicely into a headline.

But human beings rarely do.

The People I Expected to Hate Me

Here is the part of this story that matters most to me.

Some of the women associated with gangs were among the first women in prison who stood up for me.

Me.

The woman who walked into prison carrying a charge involving the death of her own child.

Think about that for a second.

I had already judged myself more viciously than almost anyone possibly could.

I was prepared for everyone else to do the same.

There were absolutely women who didn’t like my charge.

There were women who probably didn’t like me.

There were also women who enjoyed occupying a kind of moral high ground inside prison, which is fascinating when you think about it.

Human beings will apparently build social ladders anywhere.

Even behind razor wire.

Someone would find somebody whose crime they considered worse than theirs and suddenly get to feel righteous for five minutes.

At least I’m not her.

You see versions of that everywhere, actually.

Prison just strips away the polite packaging.

But when someone came after me simply because they wanted somebody beneath them?

Some of the women I had originally been most afraid of were the first ones saying, essentially:

Enough.

Leave her alone.

They didn’t tell me what I did was okay.

That’s an important distinction.

They weren’t absolving me.

They weren’t pretending my daughter wasn’t dead.

They weren’t rewriting my story.

They were saying that I was still a person.

And at that point in my life, that idea was revolutionary to me.

You did something terrible and you are still a human being.

I couldn’t hold those two truths at the same time yet.

They could.

The Gang Member, The Mother, The Daughter, The Woman

Here’s something else prison taught me:

Very few people arrive anywhere as only one thing.

A gang member can also be somebody’s mother.

Somebody’s daughter.

Someone who braids another woman’s hair before court.

Someone who saves part of her commissary because her bunkie has nothing.

Someone who makes you laugh until your stomach hurts.

Someone who has been hurt.

Someone who has hurt people.

Someone who has made terrible decisions.

Someone who was born into a family where affiliation wasn’t some distant concept they discovered as an adult.

Someone who wanted protection.

Someone who wanted belonging.

Someone who wanted power.

Someone who believed she had no power.

Someone who made a choice.

Someone who felt there wasn’t much of one.

Sometimes several of those things can exist inside the same person.

I heard different stories from different women.

And I won’t pretend every story was innocent.

Some women absolutely chose things.

Some continued choosing them.

Some were proud of decisions I couldn’t understand.

Some frightened me.

Some frustrated me.

Some made choices I couldn’t support.

Humanizing someone does not require pretending everything they do is acceptable.

I think we’ve lost that distinction somewhere.

We seem to believe we have two options:

Condemn someone completely.

Or excuse them completely.

There is another option.

Understand that a human being is more complicated than the worst thing attached to her name.

That doesn’t eliminate consequences.

Believe me.

I believe in consequences.

I lived them.

Understanding somebody isn’t the same thing as endorsing everything they’ve done.

Compassion isn’t acquittal.

Nuance isn’t approval.

And humanity isn’t something we should only extend to people whose mistakes make us comfortable.

They Gave Me Something I Couldn’t Give Myself

I think that’s ultimately why those women affected me so deeply.

At that point in my life, I wasn’t looking for a future.

I was serving a prison sentence, yes.

But the longer sentence was the one I’d imposed on myself.

No happiness.

No forgiveness.

No meaningful life.

No becoming anything better.

Because if I ever laughed again, loved again, succeeded again, or experienced joy again, some part of me thought that would mean I wasn’t sorry enough.

And these women—some of whom society would have warned me about before I ever stepped inside—were among the first people to challenge that.

Not with motivational speeches.

Prison isn’t a Hallmark movie.

Sometimes it was a sentence while somebody stirred ramen on a hot plate.

Sometimes it was someone telling another woman to back off.

Sometimes it was a look that said, Enough with the self-pity. Get up.

Sometimes it was laughter.

Sometimes brutal honesty.

Sometimes hearing:

You fucked up.

Now what are you going to do with the rest of your life?

That question changed everything.

Because there is accountability in that question.

Not escape.

Not denial.

Not pretending the past didn’t happen.

Now what?

What will you build?

Who will you become?

What are you going to do with the fact that you survived?

Maybe We Should Be More Careful With Labels

I still don’t romanticize gangs.

I won’t.

There is violence connected to that world.

There are victims.

There are consequences that ripple through families and communities.

There are people who make choices that destroy other people’s lives.

I would be doing a disservice to everyone involved if I wrote some sentimental story pretending otherwise.

But I also won’t pretend that every woman I met who had a gang affiliation was some movie villain incapable of tenderness, wisdom, fear, loyalty, humor, grief or love.

Because I met them.

I ate beside them.

Worked beside them.

Sweated through those miserable prison summers beside them.

I heard about their children.

Their mothers.

Their regrets.

Their anger.

Their plans.

Their incredibly stupid decisions.

Their surprisingly beautiful ones.

And some of them saw something in me before I was willing to see it myself.

A future.

That may be one of the strangest gifts prison gave me.

The people I had been taught to fear were sometimes the people most capable of recognizing what society had forgotten:

That a person can have done something terrible without becoming only that terrible thing.

I needed someone to teach me that.

Because if I couldn’t believe I was more than the morning my daughter died, there was no point in surviving it.

Maybe that woman in the tiny prison kitchen never realized what she handed me.

She probably thought she was just calling me on my bullshit.

But years later, I still hear her.

Say what you mean.

Mean what you say.

So here’s what I mean:

I met women in prison whose choices I didn’t understand.

I met women who belonged to gangs.

I met women who had committed serious crimes.

I met women capable of violence.

And I met teachers.

Protectors.

Mothers.

Comedians.

Painfully loyal friends.

Women who had been failed.

Women who had failed other people.

Women who were trying.

Women who weren’t ready to try yet.

People.

That’s the word we forget.

People.

And some of those people looked at the most broken version of me—the version convinced she deserved nothing except punishment—and told me there could still be something after ruin.

They didn’t erase what I had done.

They didn’t need to.

They simply refused to believe it was the only thing I could ever be.

Eventually,

I stopped believing that too.

For the person reading this:

Maybe your label isn’t “inmate.”

Maybe it isn’t “gang member.”

Maybe yours is divorced.

Addict.

Failure.

Bad mother.

Felon.

Bankrupt.

Grieving.

Difficult.

Damaged.

The thing people whisper about.

The mistake everybody remembers.

Whatever it is, be careful about letting one chapter become your entire identity.

Accountability asks you to face what you’ve done.

Growth asks something harder:

Who are you going to become now?

Those are two very different questions.

And sometimes the person who reminds you that you still have a future will come from the last place you ever expected to find hope.

Mine happened to be a prison kitchen.

There are parts of this story I still haven’t told.

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The conversations that happened after the doors locked. The women who quietly protected me. The things I learned about loyalty inside prison that made me question what loyalty even means on the outside.

And there were moments when the women I had once been afraid of became the women I felt safest sitting beside.

That story is coming soon.

For paid subscribers, I’m going a little deeper into the women behind the labels—and the moments I still think about years later.

Please Donate 🩶 It Helps Tremendously

People say it to me more often than I know how to respond to.

“I wish I were as strong as you.”

I know what they mean.

I know it comes from love.

From admiration.

From someone looking at the pieces of my life I’ve shared and thinking, I don’t know how you survived that.

And I appreciate it. I really do.

But sometimes those words make something inside me quietly collapse.

Because my immediate thought is:

No. You really don’t.

You don’t want this kind of strength.

You don’t want to learn how much a human being can lose and still somehow wake up the next morning.

You don’t want to discover what your body does when the worst thing you could ever imagine actually happens.

You don’t want to know what it feels like to live through a day you would give absolutely anything to erase.

You don’t want to learn how to breathe while grieving your child.

You don’t want to lose your freedom.

You don’t want to watch your life become something you barely recognize.

You don’t want addiction making decisions while some tiny part of you is still inside screaming, What the hell are you doing?

You don’t want courtrooms.

You don’t want prison walls.

You don’t want nights when the shame is louder than every other thought in your head.

You don’t want to wonder whether the people you love would be better off without you.

You don’t want to stand on the edge of your own life and have to decide, sometimes minute by minute, whether you are going to stay.

Please don’t misunderstand me.

I’m proud of the woman I’ve become.

Deeply proud.

Subscribe now

There are days I look at myself and genuinely cannot believe I made it here.

But I would never hand someone the road I had to walk just so they could become strong.

Because strength like this was expensive.

It cost me things I can never get back.

That’s the part we don’t always talk about when we praise resilience.

We love the comeback story.

We love the woman who rises.

We love the person standing on the other side saying, Look. I survived.

But sometimes we forget there was a version of that person lying on the floor first.

Sometimes strength isn’t something you choose.

Sometimes it is what happens when every other option disappears.

You get up because somebody needs you.

You keep breathing because your body keeps doing it.

You make it through the next hour because thinking about the next year feels impossible.

You survive Tuesday.

Then Wednesday.

Then somehow another week passes.

People see the woman standing now.

They don’t always see how many versions of her had to die along the way.

And maybe that’s why the words hit me strangely.

Because when someone tells me they wish they were as strong as me, part of me wants to grab their face gently and say:

I hope you never have to find out how strong you are.

I hope life is kind to you.

I hope your children are safe.

I hope you never sit beside a hospital bed begging for a different ending.

I hope you never have to carry a grief so heavy that simply existing feels like work.

I hope you never lose years of your life to substances, shame, consequences, or cages.

I hope you never have to rebuild your identity from ashes.

I hope you never understand certain parts of my writing because experience taught you what they mean.

That isn’t me diminishing my strength.

It’s me understanding its price.

And strangely enough, that is also exactly why I write.

Not because I want someone to look at me and think,

Wow. Look what she survived.

I write because maybe somebody reading this is standing somewhere I once stood.

Maybe not in the exact same circumstances.

Maybe their cliff looks different.

Maybe it’s addiction.

Maybe it’s grief.

Maybe it’s divorce.

Maybe it’s abuse.

Maybe it’s shame.

Maybe it’s financial devastation.

Maybe it’s loneliness so deep they don’t know how to explain it to anyone.

Maybe they made a terrible decision and now believe the worst thing they ever did is the only thing they’ll ever be.

Maybe they’re sitting in their car crying before walking into the house because they don’t want anyone to know they’re falling apart.

Maybe everyone thinks they’re functioning just fine.

Maybe they are one bad night away from giving up.

That person is who I think about when I hit publish.

Because I know the cliff.

I know what it feels like to get dangerously close to the edge of your own existence.

And if sharing the ugliest, most uncomfortable, most humiliating pieces of my story means I can reach someone before they get there—

then give me your hand.

Seriously.

Take it.

You do not have to learn every lesson the hardest possible way.

You do not need your life completely destroyed before you decide something has to change.

You do not have to hit the absolute bottom just because somebody else did.

You are allowed to stop halfway down.

You are allowed to say, This is getting bad.

You are allowed to ask for help before everything collapses.

You are allowed to walk away.

You are allowed to admit the relationship is hurting you.

You are allowed to admit the substance has more control than you thought.

You are allowed to admit you’re angry.

You’re grieving.

You’re scared.

You’re exhausted.

You’re not okay.

You are allowed to change direction while there is still road left.

That is what I want my story to be used for.

Not as a measuring stick for suffering.

Not as tragedy porn.

Not as proof that somebody somewhere always has it worse.

And definitely not as some inspirational poster about how trauma makes you stronger.

Sometimes trauma just fucking hurts.

Sometimes it takes years from you.

Sometimes it changes your nervous system, your relationships, your sleep, your confidence, your family, your future.

Sometimes surviving something does not make you grateful it happened.

I am not grateful for the worst things that happened in my life.

I am grateful that I am still here to decide what I do with them.

There is a difference.

I can hate what happened and still love who I am becoming.

I can wish desperately that parts of my story were different while still believing there is purpose in telling the truth about them.

I can carry grief and still build a beautiful life.

I can take responsibility for the destruction I caused without sentencing myself to misery forever.

I can miss the people and pieces of myself I lost while still reaching toward whatever comes next.

That, to me, is strength.

Not never falling apart.

God, I have fallen apart.

Strength is discovering that falling apart does not necessarily mean the story is over.

Sometimes it means something has to be rebuilt differently.

So when you tell me I’m strong, I’ll probably still smile.

I’ll probably say thank you.

Because I know what you’re trying to give me.

But somewhere inside, I will always think:

I hope you never need my kind of strength.

And if one day you do—

if life finds you anyway,

if the phone call comes,

if the bottom falls out,

if you make the mistake you never thought you would make,

if your entire identity shatters,

if you wake up wondering how you’re supposed to survive what just happened—

come find me.

Come find people who have lived.

Come find the ones with scars.

Come find the people who will sit beside you without pretending there’s an easy answer.

We will not tell you to “just be strong.”

We’ll tell you the truth.

You can cry.

You can crawl.

You can be furious.

You can hate every second of this.

You can have absolutely no idea what comes next.

Just don’t let go yet.

Because sometimes the person you become after everything falls apart is someone you cannot possibly imagine while you are still standing in the wreckage.

I know.

I’ve met her.

And she is the reason I keep writing.

Not so you’ll wish you were strong like me.

But so maybe, when your own life gets unbearably heavy, you’ll remember you don’t have to carry it alone.

I’ll grab your hand before you reach the cliff.

And if you’re already standing there—

give me your hand anyway.

We’ll walk backward together.

Let’s keep Rising 🖤

Please Donate. It Helps Tremendously 🩶

The morning of the accident, I was being a mom.

And I was also counting pills.

There it is.

Maybe the hardest sentence I will ever write.

Because there are versions of my story that would be easier to tell. Versions where I could focus entirely on addiction. On grief. On trauma. On everything that happened afterward. Versions where I could explain the ways I was struggling and hurting and unraveling.

All of those things are true.

But this is true too:

Before I did the things mothers do, I had to take pills.

And somewhere in my mind—maybe in the back of it, maybe if I’m being completely honest, right there in the fucking front—I always knew what I had.

How much medication was left in each bottle.

How much was in each box.

What I had already taken.

What I still had.

What I would need.

It wasn’t an afterthought.

It was the thought.

And admitting that makes something inside me recoil even now.

Because I loved my children.

God, did I love my children.

I was a mother. I took care of them. I worried about them. I did normal mom things. I kissed them and fed them and got frustrated and cleaned messes and worried about things that probably didn’t matter and thought about their futures.

And addiction existed right alongside all of it.

That’s the part people don’t always understand.

You don’t necessarily stop loving people when you’re addicted.

Sometimes you love them desperately while continuing to put something else ahead of them.

Sometimes both things are happening inside the same person at the same time.

That morning, I put things first that should never have come before my children.

I can spend the rest of my life finding prettier language for that sentence.

I don’t want to anymore.

Because something I’ve learned about accountability is that eventually you have to stop editing the truth until you can tolerate looking at it.

I made choices.

Those choices had consequences.

And one of those consequences is something I would rip my own heart out to change if I could.

But I can’t.

Grace is still gone.

And for a very long time, I believed that meant I wasn’t allowed to come back either.

After Grace died, I didn’t think I deserved a good life.

I didn’t even really think of this as a conscious decision at first.

It felt obvious.

Of course I should suffer.

Of course I shouldn’t be happy.

Of course I shouldn’t get to move forward.

Look at what happened.

Look at what I did.

Somewhere along the way, suffering became proof.

If I hurt enough, maybe that proved how much I loved her.

If I hated myself enough, maybe that proved how sorry I was.

If I denied myself anything beautiful, maybe the universe would understand that I knew the magnitude of what had happened.

I had a prison sentence coming.

But the truth is, I wasn’t terribly concerned with what a judge was going to give me.

I had already sentenced myself.

Mine didn’t have an end date.

Mine was life.

No happiness.

No peace.

No future.

No feeling proud of myself.

No looking in a mirror and liking the woman staring back.

Certainly no laughing too loudly.

And absolutely no smiling like I had somehow forgotten what I had done.

Then something happened in prison that scared the shit out of me.

I got happy.

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Buy Me A Coffee ☕️

I think there’s something I should tell you if you’re going to keep reading my words.

I am not writing to you from the other side.

I haven’t reached some magical place where everything that hurt me suddenly makes sense. My life is not tied neatly into a bow. I don’t wake up every morning overflowing with gratitude, drink my coffee while watching the sunrise, and whisper affirmations about how beautifully everything worked out.

Sometimes I wake up worried about money.

Sometimes I miss my daughter so badly that the fact that the world kept turning after she died still feels offensive.

Sometimes I look at choices I made years ago and wish I could reach backward through time, grab that version of myself by the shoulders, and scream at her to stop.

Sometimes motherhood makes me question whether I’m doing enough.

Sometimes relationships hurt.

Sometimes I am exhausted from trying to rebuild a life I once helped destroy.

Sometimes I am incredibly proud of myself.

And sometimes those things happen on the exact same day. Within the same hour.

That is probably the most honest introduction to me I could ever give you.

I’m Amy.

I’m a mother.

I’m a woman who has loved deeply enough to understand what it feels like when love becomes grief.

I’m someone who struggled with addiction badly enough that it helped dismantle almost everything around me.

I’m someone who went to prison.

I’m someone who walked back into the world sober and had to figure out who the hell I was without the things I had spent years using to avoid myself.

I have made choices I am ashamed of.

I have hurt people.

I have been hurt.

I have lost things I would give absolutely anything to have back.

And somehow, despite all of it, I am still here.

Not untouched.

Not perfectly healed.

Not carrying some miraculous explanation for why terrible things happen.

Just here.

And maybe that is the reason I write.

Because somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that our stories only become valuable once they have beautiful endings.

I Used to Think I Had to Become Someone Else First

For a long time, shame convinced me that I needed to disappear until I became more acceptable.

I thought maybe someday I would be healed enough.

Successful enough.

Financially stable enough.

Forgiven enough.

Put-together enough.

Maybe then I could talk about what happened.

Maybe then I could say, Look. See? Everything worked out.

But life doesn’t really work like that.

Healing has been much less glamorous.

It has looked like making the better choice while still wanting to make the old one.

It has looked like apologizing.

It has looked like taking responsibility without deciding that my worst actions are the only things I deserve to be remembered for.

It has looked like crying in places nobody could see me and then getting up because there were still things that needed to be done.

It has looked like learning how to live with grief instead of waiting for grief to leave.

It has looked like loving the people who are still here while desperately missing someone who isn’t.

It has looked like trying again when trying again feels embarrassing.

And perhaps most importantly, it has looked like accepting that becoming better does not mean becoming someone completely different.

I am still me.

I’m just finally getting to know her.

That Is What I Want This Place to Be

I don’t want Rising Through Ruin to become another corner of the internet where everybody pretends they have figured out the secret to life.

God knows we have enough of those.

I don’t want to stand above anyone and tell them how they should heal.

I want to sit beside you.

I want to talk about the things people whisper about.

Grief.

Addiction.

Prison.

Motherhood.

Regret.

Relationships.

Money.

Shame.

Starting over.

The strange loneliness of becoming someone new while still carrying everything your old life taught you.

I want to write about what happens after the horrible thing happens.

After the funeral.

After the breakup.

After the arrest.

After the relapse.

After the diagnosis.

After somebody leaves.

After you disappoint yourself.

After everybody else goes home and you’re left staring at a life you barely recognize thinking:

Okay. What the hell do I do now?

Because that part matters too.

Maybe especially that part.

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And Maybe Your Ruin Looks Nothing Like Mine

You don’t have to have lost a child.

You don’t have to have battled addiction.

You don’t have to have gone to prison.

Your life does not have to look anything like mine for you to understand what it feels like to lose yourself.

Maybe your ruin was a divorce you never expected.

Maybe somebody betrayed you.

Maybe you lost a parent.

Maybe your children grew up and suddenly the house became unbearably quiet.

Maybe you gave twenty years to a job that replaced you in twenty minutes.

Maybe you woke up one morning beside someone you loved and realized you had become strangers.

Maybe you spent years taking care of everyone else and suddenly realized you had no idea what you wanted anymore.

Maybe nobody even knows you’re struggling.

Sometimes ruin doesn’t arrive with sirens.

Sometimes it happens quietly.

One compromise.

One disappointment.

One swallowed feeling.

One I’m fine at a time.

Until eventually you look around and think:

How did I get here?

I know that question.

I have asked it more times than I can count.

But I’ve learned there is another question that matters much more.

Where do I go from here?

Because you cannot always change what brought you here.

I cannot undo my past.

I cannot rewrite 2022.

I cannot take back every bad decision.

I cannot reclaim every year, relationship, opportunity, or moment I lost.

And believing I needed to somehow make the past disappear almost destroyed my ability to live in the present.

So these days, I am trying something different.

I am asking:

What can I build with what remains?

And there is always something remaining.

Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

A breath.

A morning.

A choice.

A person who still loves you.

A tiny piece of hope you haven’t managed to kill yet.

Start there.

You Are Allowed to Begin Before You Feel Ready

This may be the biggest thing I want you to take from anything I ever write here:

You do not have to wait until you become fearless.

You do not have to wait until you forgive yourself completely.

You do not have to wait until everyone understands you.

You do not have to wait until your finances are perfect, your relationship is perfect, your family is healed, your grief is lighter, or your confidence finally arrives.

You can begin while your hands are shaking.

You can change while parts of you still miss the old life.

You can love yourself and still have things you desperately want to improve.

You can be proud of yourself and disappointed in yourself at the same time.

You can carry grief and joy in the same body.

You can have a past you regret and a future you are excited to meet.

Human beings are complicated like that.

Thank God.

Because if people were only allowed to move forward once everything behind them had been resolved, most of us would never move at all.

I Don’t Know Exactly Where This Story Ends

And I think that’s what makes writing it now so important.

You are not reading the autobiography of someone who conquered every demon and rode beautifully into the sunset.

You’re watching someone build.

In real time.

Some days beautifully.

Some days clumsily.

Some days with confidence.

Some days wondering what the hell she is doing.

But building nonetheless.

And if you are doing the same thing — if there is some part of your life you are quietly trying to rebuild — I hope you know you belong here.

You don’t need an extraordinary story.

You don’t need to have survived something unimaginable.

You don’t need the perfect words.

You don’t even need to know what comes next.

Maybe today your job is simply not to give up on yourself.

Maybe today you make the phone call.

Send the application.

Set the boundary.

Apologize.

Ask for help.

Take the walk.

Write the first sentence.

Tell the truth.

Or maybe today you simply survive the day without making tomorrow harder.

That counts too.

Please don’t underestimate the small decisions that slowly return a person to themselves.

My life wasn’t destroyed in one single decision.

And it isn’t being rebuilt in one either.

It is being rebuilt in thousands of tiny ones.

So is yours.

This Is My Intention

I want this little community to feel like the place you come when life gets too real for inspirational quotes that fit nicely inside a square.

I want you to laugh here sometimes.

Cry here sometimes.

Cringe with me.

Disagree with me.

Tell me your story.

Recognize yourself inside mine.

And most of all, leave feeling a little less alone than you did before you arrived.

I cannot promise you that everything works out exactly the way you hoped.

My own life has taught me better than to make promises like that.

But I can tell you this:

A life can break in ways you never believed you could survive…

and there can still be life after it.

Beautiful life.

Messy life.

Ordinary Tuesday-afternoon life.

Laugh-until-your-stomach-hurts life.

Try-again life.

Love-again life.

I-can’t-believe-I’m-still-here life.

And maybe rising through ruin was never supposed to mean walking away without scars.

Maybe it means standing in the middle of everything that tried to bury you and deciding:

There is still something here worth building.

That’s what I’m doing.

And if you’re here rebuilding too, I’m really glad you found me.

We’ll figure out the rest together.

Keep rising.

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Buy Me A Coffee 🩶

There was a time when I trusted myself.

Or at least I thought I did.

I trusted my decisions. My instincts. My ability to figure things out.

Then I watched some of my own choices dismantle my life piece by piece.

And there is a certain type of damage that happens when the person you stop trusting isn’t your partner, your parent, your friend, or somebody who betrayed you.

It’s you.

We talk a lot about forgiving ourselves.

Loving ourselves.

Giving ourselves grace.

Healing.

Moving forward.

All important things.

But what about trusting yourself again?

What happens when you’ve ignored your own gut so many times that you don’t know if you can believe it anymore?

What happens when you’ve made promises to yourself and broken them?

When you’ve said never again and somehow found yourself there again?

When you’ve stayed.

Gone back.

Ignored the warning signs.

Made the wrong decision even while some quiet part of you knew better.

What happens when you finally have to look at the wreckage and admit:

I played a part in this.

That was one of the hardest parts of rebuilding my life.

Not surviving what happened to me.

Surviving what I knew about myself afterward.

Accountability Can Be an Ugly Place

There are things that happened in my life that I did not choose.

There are things people did to me.

There are things I would give anything to change.

And there are also decisions that belong entirely to me.

Both can be true.

I had an addiction.

I made dangerous choices.

I ignored things inside myself that were screaming for my attention.

I spent years trying to escape feelings instead of dealing with them.

Eventually, the consequences became bigger than anything I could run from.

I lost my daughter.

I lost my freedom.

I lost my marriage.

I lost my home.

I lost time with my living daughter.

I walked into prison carrying grief, guilt, addiction, shame and the knowledge that no matter how badly I wanted a different ending, there was no rewriting what had already happened.

That kind of accountability can become dangerous if you’re not careful.

Because there is a difference between saying:

I did something wrong.

and saying:

I am something wrong.

For a long time, I blurred those two sentences together.

I thought remorse meant I was supposed to suffer forever.

If I laughed, maybe I wasn’t sorry enough.

If I enjoyed something, maybe I had forgotten.

If I built a good life someday, maybe that meant I hadn’t truly understood the devastation behind me.

There is a strange belief some of us carry that misery is proof of accountability.

So we punish ourselves.

And punish ourselves.

And punish ourselves.

Eventually I had to confront something uncomfortable:

Destroying the rest of my life would not change the part that was already gone.

It would simply destroy more.

There were still people here who loved me.

There was still a daughter here who needed her mother.

And whether I believed I deserved a future or not, I had one.

The only question was what I was going to do with it.

I Didn’t Trust Myself Anymore

This was the part I didn’t know how to explain at first.

I wanted to change.

I wanted desperately to become someone different.

But I didn’t believe myself.

Why would I?

I’d promised myself things before.

Tomorrow I’ll stop.

Tomorrow I’ll fix this.

Tomorrow I’ll be better.

Tomorrow I’ll get my shit together.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

Eventually tomorrow becomes a word you don’t trust anymore.

Maybe you know exactly what I mean.

Maybe yours wasn’t addiction.

Maybe it was the relationship you kept going back to.

The boundary you swore you’d enforce.

The money you promised yourself you’d stop spending.

The dream you kept postponing.

The application you never submitted.

The bottle you kept opening.

The person you kept answering.

The apology you avoided.

The doctor you kept meaning to call.

The life you kept saying you’d start once everything settled down.

We can break promises to ourselves so many times that eventually our own words stop meaning much.

So I had to stop promising myself a completely different life.

I started much smaller.

I Started Giving Myself Evidence

Trust isn’t rebuilt with a speech.

If somebody betrays you, they can’t simply sit you down and say, “Trust me now.”

You watch.

You look for evidence.

Do their actions match their words?

Do they tell the truth?

Do they show up?

Do they take responsibility?

Do they change the behavior?

Do they remain consistent when nobody is congratulating them?

One day I realized I needed to rebuild trust with myself the exact same way.

Not through affirmations I didn’t believe yet.

Through evidence.

Stay sober today.

Done.

Tell the truth when lying would be easier.

Done.

Sit with an uncomfortable feeling without escaping it.

Done.

Show up when I said I would.

Done.

Admit when I’m wrong.

Done.

Ask for help instead of pretending I’m fine.

Done.

Get through one bad day without blowing up the rest of my life.

Done.

None of this looked impressive from the outside.

There was no dramatic transformation.

Sometimes rebuilding myself looked painfully boring.

Getting out of bed.

Going to work.

Keeping an appointment.

Sitting through an uncomfortable conversation.

Walking away instead of reacting.

Feeling grief instead of trying to erase it.

Learning that discomfort wasn’t an emergency.

Learning that loneliness wouldn’t kill me.

Learning that an emotion could come into my body, rip through me, make me cry, shake, rage, ache…

and eventually leave.

That might sound simple.

For someone who spent years trying not to feel, it was revolutionary.

Every time I survived something without abandoning myself, I gained another tiny piece of evidence:

Maybe I can trust her.

I Still Screw Up

I want to be careful here because I never want my writing to sound like I’ve reached some magical finish line.

I haven’t.

I still overthink.

I still get scared.

I still react emotionally sometimes.

I still want reassurance.

I still question myself.

I still have moments where an old wound gets louder than the present moment.

Sometimes I have to stop and ask myself:

Is this actually happening, or am I terrified that it’s going to happen?

Those are two very different things.

And sometimes I don’t love the answer.

Growth hasn’t made me perfectly calm.

It has made me more aware.

And awareness gives me something I didn’t have when I was living entirely on reaction:

a choice.

That’s one of the greatest lessons recovery has given me.

You don’t have to become somebody who never gets angry, scared, jealous, hurt, triggered, overwhelmed or lost.

That’s not healing.

That’s being a robot.

Healing is feeling those things and learning that they don’t automatically get to decide what you do next.

You can be furious and still choose not to send the text.

You can be afraid and still show up.

You can be heartbroken and still eat dinner.

You can feel rejected and still refuse to beg someone to choose you.

You can be grieving and still laugh when something is funny.

You can hate what you’ve done and still choose to do something better today.

A feeling is real.

It is not always an instruction.

That distinction has saved me from myself more times than I can count.

Maybe You’ve Lost Trust in Yourself Too

You don’t have to share my story to understand this.

Maybe you’ve never been addicted.

Maybe you’ve never been incarcerated.

Maybe you’ve never experienced the kind of loss that split my life into a before and an after.

But I would bet you’ve had a moment when you looked at your own life and thought:

How the hell did I get here?

Maybe you stayed too long.

Maybe you ignored what you knew.

Maybe you settled.

Maybe you hurt someone.

Maybe you hurt yourself.

Maybe you let fear make decisions for you.

Maybe you’ve spent years shrinking yourself to keep everyone else comfortable.

Maybe you keep waiting for motivation before you begin.

Maybe you’ve made the same mistake enough times that you’re embarrassed to tell anyone you’re trying again.

Try again anyway.

But this time, don’t start with a giant declaration.

Don’t announce that Monday you’re becoming an entirely new human being who works out six days a week, drinks a gallon of water, journals every morning, deletes every toxic person, saves half her paycheck and wakes up at 5 a.m. glowing with gratitude.

You’ll be exhausted by Tuesday.

Start with one promise.

A tiny one.

And keep it.

The One-Promise Practice

This is what I want you to take from this piece.

For the next seven days, make yourself one small promise each morning.

Not ten.

One.

It needs to be small enough that there is almost no legitimate reason you can’t do it.

Maybe yours is:

I will take a ten-minute walk.

I will drink water before my second cup of coffee.

I will not check their social media today.

I will make the phone call I’ve been avoiding.

I will spend fifteen minutes writing.

I will go to the meeting.

I will wash my hair.

I will apply for one job.

I will clean one drawer.

I will say no without explaining myself for twenty minutes.

I will tell somebody the truth.

I will rest for one hour without feeling guilty about it.

Then do it.

At night, don’t immediately focus on everything you didn’t accomplish.

Acknowledge the promise you kept.

Say it out loud if you have to:

I told myself I would do something today, and I did it.

Then tomorrow, give yourself another piece of evidence.

This isn’t really about the walk.

Or the drawer.

Or the application.

It’s about teaching your brain that when you say something to yourself, your words mean something.

Tiny promises become consistency.

Consistency becomes evidence.

Evidence becomes confidence.

Confidence becomes trust.

And suddenly you’re no longer standing around waiting to feel like a different person.

You’re becoming one.

Stop Making Your Future Pay Forever for Your Past

This has been one of the hardest things for me to accept.

There are parts of my past I cannot repair.

I cannot bargain with January 2022.

I cannot write something beautiful enough to change what happened.

I cannot apologize enough to turn back time.

There are consequences I will carry for the rest of my life.

I understand that.

But accepting consequences and sentencing yourself to lifelong misery are not the same thing.

I used to think becoming happy again would somehow disrespect what I lost.

Now I believe the opposite.

What a terrible waste it would be to survive everything I’ve survived only to spend the rest of my life refusing to live.

My older daughter deserves a mother who keeps going.

Grace deserves to have her name carried by somebody willing to make something meaningful from the years she never got.

The people who love me deserve the version of me who kept fighting to get here.

And this part took me the longest to say:

I deserve to see who I can become too.

Maybe you need permission to say that yourself.

You are allowed to regret something and still build a beautiful life.

You are allowed to take accountability and still forgive yourself.

You are allowed to wish you’d chosen differently and choose differently now.

You are allowed to be deeply sorry and deeply alive at the same time.

You don’t honor your worst chapter by refusing to write another one.

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The Woman I Trust Today

I trust myself now.

Not because I think I’ll never make another bad decision.

I will.

Not because I think nothing terrible will ever happen again.

Life cured me of that illusion a long time ago.

I trust myself because now I know what I can survive.

When life hurts, I don’t have to disappear.

When I’m afraid, I can stay.

When I’m grieving, I can feel it.

When I’m wrong, I can admit it.

When I need help, I can ask for it.

When somebody doesn’t choose me, I don’t have to stop choosing myself.

When something ends, I can rebuild.

When a day goes badly, I don’t have to turn it into a bad life.

And when everything looks ruined?

I’ve been there before.

Turns out I’m pretty damn good at growing things in ruins.

Before You Leave

I want you to answer one question.

Not for me.

For you.

What is one promise you can make to yourself today that you know you can keep?

Write it down.

Put it in the comments if you want the accountability.

Whisper it to yourself if you’re not ready to tell anyone.

But keep it.

Then tomorrow?

Make another.

You don’t have to change your whole life this Saturday.

You just have to show yourself that you haven’t given up on it.

Maybe the person you’ve been desperately waiting for to come save you isn’t coming.

Maybe that’s okay.

Because perhaps the person you’re becoming is learning how to reach back and save the version of you who once believed she couldn’t do this.

I’m still becoming her.

Maybe you are too.

That’s why I built Rising Through Ruin.

Not because I have all the answers.

Not because I’ve lived perfectly.

Quite the fucking opposite.

I built this space because I know what it is to stand in the aftermath of your own life and wonder whether anything beautiful can possibly grow there again.

It can.

We don’t pretend the ruins never happened here.

We tell the truth about them.

We learn from them.

We sit beside each other in them.

And then, one stubborn little promise at a time,

we rise.

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There are versions of me I don’t recognize anymore.

There’s the woman who could swallow pills knowing exactly what they were doing to her life and still reach for more.

There’s the mother who woke up one morning with two daughters and, within days, had to learn how to exist in a world where only one of them was coming home.

There’s the woman sitting in a courtroom listening to people discuss the worst thing she had ever done as if she weren’t sitting ten feet away.

There’s the inmate standing behind a prison gate with her entire life reduced to what could fit inside a locker.

And then there’s me now.

Which sounds like it should be the triumphant part.

The comeback.

The inspirational ending where I tell you I survived all of it and everything finally made sense.

Except that isn’t what happened.

I survived.

And then I discovered something nobody really warns you about:

Survival and living are two completely different skills.

For a long time, survival was the only thing I knew how to do.

Wake up.

Get through today.

Don’t use.

Don’t completely fall apart.

Don’t let the grief swallow you.

Make it through the visit.

Make it through the court date.

Make it through the night.

Make it through prison.

Make it through release.

Make it through another birthday without her.

Make it through another ordinary Tuesday when, for absolutely no logical reason, you suddenly remember what your four-year-old’s laugh sounded like and your entire body remembers a life that no longer exists.

Survival gives you very small goals.

Sometimes the goal is simply: still be here tomorrow.

And there were years when that was enough.

But eventually tomorrow keeps coming.

And nobody tells you what the hell you’re supposed to do with it.

But I’ll tell you my experiences and how life has been going…

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There’s a lot of advice about controlling your anger.

Don’t react too quickly.

Don’t send the text.

Don’t say the thing you can’t take back.

Walk away.

Protect your peace.

And all of that is true.

But lately I’ve been thinking about the person standing on the other side of that anger.

The person getting snapped at.

The person being blamed.

The person watching someone’s disappointment turn into a tone, a look, a comment, an accusation.

The person who actually did try.

Because sometimes you can do your absolute fucking best and still end up standing in front of someone who is disappointed in you.

And that hurts in a completely different way.

Especially when you already carry a complicated relationship with failure.

I do.

I have fucked up before.

Spectacularly.

I have made choices that changed the trajectory of my entire life. I have hurt people. I have disappointed people. I have made mistakes I cannot undo, apologize out of existence, or somehow work hard enough to erase.

I know this.

Nobody has to remind me.

Trust me.

There are parts of my life I will carry until the day I die.

But something strange happens when you have a past like mine.

You start feeling like everybody else begins life standing at the starting line, while you’re somewhere ten miles behind it trying desperately to catch up.

So you work harder.

You show up.

You try to be useful.

You try to be dependable.

You say yes when you’re exhausted.

You take on one more thing.

You swallow how you feel because you don’t want to be difficult.

You try to prove that you’re responsible now.

Trustworthy now.

Different now.

You try to prove that the woman standing in front of them today is not the woman who made those decisions years ago.

I carry a lot. There is a lot I haven’t spoken a word of to anyone on this planet.

And somewhere along the way, you start believing that maybe if you work hard enough, love hard enough, give enough, sacrifice enough, and show up enough, eventually everybody will see it.

They’ll see you.

That’s the part I’ve been struggling with lately.

Because I am trying.

Jesus Christ, am I trying.

I don’t sit around thinking, Eh, somebody else will handle it.

I don’t knowingly half-ass something and then shrug when it falls apart.

When I care about something, I put everything I have into it.

Sometimes probably too much.

And lately I’ve found myself getting increasingly angry when that effort goes unnoticed.

Not because I need a parade.

Not because I think I deserve applause every time I do something I’m supposed to do.

But because there is something incredibly defeating about pouring yourself into something only to have someone immediately point toward the cup that is still half empty.

You didn’t do this.

You forgot that.

You should have done more.

Why didn’t you think of this?

Why isn’t this finished?

Why didn’t you know?

And inside I’m screaming:

DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HARD I AM TRYING?

Do you see what I did do?

Do you see what it took for me to get here?

Do you see how fucking scared I am sometimes?

Do you see how much of this I am figuring out as I go?

Do you see the amount of energy it takes to rebuild a life after you have demolished one?

Do you see me?

Because I’m human.

I’m not a machine.

I get overwhelmed.

I forget things.

I make mistakes.

I misunderstand.

Sometimes I think I’m doing the right thing and find out later that I wasn’t.

Sometimes circumstances change.

Sometimes there aren’t enough hours in a day.

Sometimes my best isn’t going to look like somebody else’s best.

And sometimes I am going to disappoint people.

My heart is there. My intention is to be better, try my best, and make the best choices at a given moment.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t care.

That’s the part I wish people understood.

A mistake does not automatically mean indifference.

Something being unfinished does not mean laziness.

Needing help does not mean manipulation.

Being overwhelmed does not mean I’m taking advantage of someone.

And having a past does not mean every mistake I make today is evidence that I haven’t changed.

That one has been hard for me.

Because sometimes I feel like people are waiting for me to prove their old version of me right.

Like somewhere underneath everything I’ve rebuilt there must still be the fuck-up.

The addict.

The irresponsible one.

The woman who made terrible choices.

The woman who couldn’t get her shit together.

Maybe if I forget something, there she is.

Maybe if I’m overwhelmed, there she is.

Maybe if I don’t accomplish everything someone expected from me, there she is.

See?

We knew she hadn’t really changed.

And I am tired.

I’m tired of feeling like I’m constantly interviewing for the position of being considered a decent human being.

I’m tired of believing that because I once caused pain, I have to quietly absorb everyone else’s forever.

I’m tired of thinking my past means I have to tolerate being spoken to however someone wants to speak to me.

Accountability doesn’t mean becoming someone else’s punching bag.

Growth doesn’t mean spending the rest of your life begging people to acknowledge it.

And redemption cannot require perfection.

Because if perfection is the requirement, none of us are getting out alive.

I understand that trust can take time.

I understand that people who knew an older version of me may need consistency before they believe what I already know about myself.

That’s fair.

But there is a difference between someone needing time to trust you and someone refusing to allow you to become anything other than who you used to be.

And I’m finally learning that I cannot force anyone to update their version of me.

I can’t make someone notice my effort.

I can’t make someone appreciate what I give.

I can’t convince someone who has already decided what my intentions are.

I can’t spend another decade standing in front of people saying,

“But look how hard I’m trying.”

At some point, I have to know.

And I do.

I know how hard I’ve fought to get here.

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I know what it took to rebuild my life after grief, addiction, incarceration, loss, consequences and the wreckage I once believed I would never climb out of.

I know what it feels like to start again when starting again isn’t inspirational at all.

It’s terrifying.

I know what it feels like to look around and realize that nobody is coming to magically put your life back together for you.

So you start picking up pieces.

One.

By.

One.

And I’ve been picking them up.

Some days beautifully.

Some days badly.

Some days crying.

Some days angry.

Some days exhausted.

But I’ve been fucking picking them up.

That’s what matters.

And maybe this is where anger comes back into the conversation.

Because lately I’ve felt mine growing.

Not the explosive kind.

Something quieter.

The anger that comes from feeling unseen.

The anger that comes from giving and giving and wondering when somebody will notice you’re running on empty.

The anger that comes from being reminded of everything you did wrong while wondering whether anyone notices everything you’re doing right.

The anger that whispers:

Why am I trying so fucking hard if nobody sees it anyway?

And I have to be careful with that anger.

Because I don’t want somebody else’s inability to see me turn me into someone I don’t recognize.

I don’t want resentment stealing the peace I fought this hard to find.

I don’t want to spend my nights constructing arguments in my head for people who aren’t listening.

I don’t want to become bitter.

I don’t want to become cruel.

Mine is continuing to live differently.

Maybe that’s the real lesson.

You can take accountability without accepting permanent punishment.

You can acknowledge who you were without allowing people to use that person against you forever.

You can understand someone’s disappointment without becoming the dumping ground for their anger.

You can apologize when you’re wrong without apologizing for your existence.

You can say:

I could have handled that better.

I missed something.

I made a mistake.

I’m sorry.

And still say:

You don’t get to treat me like shit.

Both things can be true.

I’m not perfect.

I don’t expect to become perfect.

I will probably screw things up again.

I’ll forget something.

I’ll make the wrong call.

I’ll disappoint somebody.

I’ll have days where the only thing I manage to accomplish is getting through the fucking day.

But one thing nobody gets to tell me anymore is that I haven’t tried.

I know I have.

Desperately.

I know how much I’ve poured out.

I know how many times I’ve shown up while scared.

How many times I’ve shown up exhausted.

How many times I’ve wanted to quit and didn’t.

How many times I’ve had to figure shit out mostly on my own.

And maybe there was a time when I needed everyone else to acknowledge that before I could believe it myself.

I don’t anymore.

Would it feel good to hear?

Absolutely.

I’m human.

Of course it would.

I want appreciation.

I want somebody to notice.

I want someone to occasionally look at me and say:

“I see how hard you’re trying.”

I think most of us do.

But I’m beginning to understand that I cannot make my peace dependent on receiving it.

Because some people may never see me beyond my past.

Some people will always remember the chapter where I fell apart and completely ignore the hundreds of pages I’ve written since.

Some people may benefit from me believing I still owe the world something.

Some people simply aren’t capable of seeing what I need them to see.

And maybe the greatest act of peace isn’t convincing them.

Maybe it’s finally saying:

Okay.

You can believe whatever you want about me.

I know who I am.

I know what I’ve survived.

I know what I’ve changed.

I know what I’m building.

I know where I still need work.

And I know that I am trying.

If you can’t see it, I don’t have to spend the rest of my life standing in front of you proving it.

I’m scared sometimes.

I’m overwhelmed sometimes.

I’m angry sometimes.

I have feelings.

I have limits.

I am still learning.

But I’m here.

I’m sober.

I’m rebuilding.

I’m showing up.

I’m writing.

I’m working.

I’m loving people.

I’m trying to make something meaningful out of a life I once nearly destroyed.

And no, I don’t always get it right.

But I am no longer going to confuse somebody else’s disappointment with proof that I’m a disappointment.

There is a difference.

A huge fucking difference.

So if you’re reading this and you’re exhausted from trying to prove you’ve changed, maybe you need to hear this too:

Your growth does not become less real because someone refuses to acknowledge it.

Your effort still counts when nobody applauds it.

Your past may explain why someone struggles to trust you, but it does not give anyone unlimited permission to disrespect you.

Keep taking accountability.

Keep apologizing when you’re wrong.

Keep doing the work.

Keep becoming someone you respect.

But stop handing other people the authority to decide whether your transformation counts.

They don’t get that job.

Neither do the worst things you’ve ever done.

You do.

And as for me?

I’m going to keep going.

Not because everyone believes in me.

Not because everyone understands me.

Not because I’ve finally proven enough.

I’m going to keep going because after everything I’ve lived through, I finally believe myself when I say:

I know how hard I’ve tried.

And for the first time, I’m beginning to understand that maybe I don’t need everybody else to know it too.

For the person who feels unseen

If you’re exhausted from trying to prove that you’ve changed, remember this: you do not have to perform your growth for everyone.

Own your mistakes. Apologize when you’re wrong. Keep working on yourself. But stop confusing accountability with endless punishment.

Pay attention to the people who only notice what you missed and never acknowledge what you carry. Pay attention to how you feel after certain conversations. Pay attention to whether you are constantly explaining yourself to people who have already decided who you are.

You are allowed to say, I did my best with what I had.

You are allowed to be imperfect.

You are allowed to need help.

Keep showing up because you know who you are becoming—not because you need everyone else to finally approve of you.

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There is a humiliating part of becoming a better person that nobody really talks about:

You can change your entire life and still walk into a room where someone only sees the worst thing you ever did.

You can get sober.

You can tell the truth.

You can take responsibility.

You can serve your consequences.

You can apologize.

You can spend years becoming someone you barely recognize compared to who you once were.

And there will still be people who look at you and think,

Yeah, but I remember.

And the hardest part?

They’re allowed to.

God, I hated learning that.

Because when you finally start doing the work—really doing it—there is this tiny, almost embarrassing part of you that expects the world to notice.

Look.

I’m doing it now.

Look how different I am.

Look how hard I’m trying.

Look how many times I chose the right thing when nobody was watching.

Look how much it hurts to sit inside the consequences of things I did when I was a completely different version of myself.

Surely that has to count for something.

And it does.

But sometimes it doesn’t count to the people you want it to count to.

That is where change gets lonely.

⸻

I know something about destroying trust.

Not theoretically.

Not because I read a self-help book about it.

I know what it feels like to be the reason people stopped believing me.

There was a version of me who could make a promise and break it.

A version of me who loved people deeply and still hurt them.

A version of me who knew something was wrong and continued anyway.

Addiction did not erase my love for the people around me.

That almost would have been easier to understand.

I loved them.

And I still made choices that devastated them.

Both things were true.

Eventually my life collapsed in the loudest possible ways.

I lost my daughter.

I lost my freedom.

I went to prison.

I lost pieces of motherhood I once assumed would always belong to me.

I lost trust.

I lost the luxury of saying, But you know me.

Because people did know me.

They knew the version who had given them reasons to be afraid.

Reasons to question.

Reasons to watch closely.

Reasons not to believe a promise simply because it came out of my mouth.

And then something incredibly inconvenient happened.

I changed.

Not overnight.

Not beautifully.

Not in one cinematic moment where inspirational music played and suddenly I understood the meaning of life.

I changed slowly.

Painfully.

In tiny decisions nobody saw.

I got sober.

I sat with feelings I had spent years trying not to feel.

I started telling myself the truth.

I began looking directly at things I desperately wanted to look away from.

I learned that taking responsibility for your life is very different from hating yourself for it.

There was only one problem.

My growth did not erase anyone else’s memory.

⸻

That might be one of the cruelest realities of rebuilding.

You know how hard you’ve worked because you were there for every second of it.

Other people weren’t.

They didn’t see the moment when you could have lied and didn’t.

They didn’t see you sitting alone with an emotion you once would have escaped from.

They didn’t see the argument where you almost became your old self and then swallowed the reaction and chose differently.

They didn’t see every temptation.

Every uncomfortable apology.

Every moment you had to remind yourself:

We don’t live like that anymore.

They just see you.

And sometimes they’re waiting.

Waiting for the old person to come back.

Waiting for the lie.

Waiting for the explosion.

Waiting for the relapse.

Waiting for you to prove that they were right not to trust you.

And if you’ve truly changed, that can make you furious.

How long do I have to pay for this?

I have thought that.

More than once.

Probably more than I would like to admit.

There are moments when I want to scream:

Do you have any idea how hard I have worked to become this woman?

And maybe they don’t.

But another question eventually started haunting me:

Do I have any idea how hard it was to love the woman I used to be?

Oof.

That one changes things.

Because suddenly I wasn’t only looking at my effort.

I was looking at their experience.

Maybe they needed evidence.

Maybe they needed time.

Maybe their nervous system hadn’t caught up with my transformation.

Maybe they had heard “I’m going to change” before.

Maybe my intentions felt brand new to me and painfully familiar to them.

That realization didn’t make everything fair.

It made it understandable.

And sometimes understanding is the only bridge you get.

There is a strange arrogance that can sneak into healing.

Nobody warns you about that either.

We start working on ourselves and eventually think:

Okay. I’m better now. Can everyone please treat me accordingly?

Unfortunately, growth doesn’t work like updating your profile picture.

There is no notification sent to everyone you’ve ever hurt:

Amy has completed significant character development. Please refresh your opinion.

I wish.

Wouldn’t that be convenient?

Instead, you have to live it.

For a while.

Then live it some more.

And sometimes live it while someone still doubts you.

That part matters.

Because if I’m only kind when people acknowledge how kind I’ve become, I haven’t changed very much.

If I’m only honest when people reward me for honesty, that isn’t character.

If my sobriety depends on everyone forgiving me, I’m placing my recovery in hands that don’t belong on the steering wheel.

If becoming a better mother requires someone repeatedly telling me I’m a better mother, then I’m still looking outside myself for proof of who I am.

Eventually I had to understand:

My job is not to convince everyone I’ve changed.

My job is to keep changing.

That’s it.

Some people will notice.

Some will notice slowly.

Some will never trust me completely again.

Some relationships may never become what they once were.

Some consequences don’t disappear simply because I finally learned the lesson attached to them.

That hurts.

But accountability isn’t supposed to be a transaction.

I don’t get to say:

I suffered enough, therefore you owe me forgiveness.

I don’t get to say:

I apologized, therefore you owe me trust.

I don’t get to say:

I’m sober now, therefore everyone has to stop being afraid.

Trust doesn’t grow because I demand it.

It grows because I become predictable.

And predictable sounds so boring until you’ve lived through chaos.

Then predictable is fucking beautiful.

I’ll call when I say I’ll call.

I’ll show up when I say I’ll show up.

I’ll tell you the truth even when the truth makes me look bad.

I’ll do the next right thing even when nobody gives me credit for it.

Again.

And again.

And again.

That’s how you rebuild a life.

Not with speeches.

With Wednesdays.

With ordinary decisions.

With being the same safe person on a boring Wednesday that you promised to be during an emotional conversation on Sunday night.

⸻

And maybe your story looks nothing like mine.

Maybe you’ve never had an addiction.

Maybe you’ve never seen the inside of a prison.

Maybe you’ve never blown your life apart so spectacularly that there was no pretending everything was fine anymore.

But I would bet there is a version of you that somebody still remembers.

Maybe you were selfish.

Maybe you cheated.

Maybe you disappeared when someone needed you.

Maybe you were angry.

Maybe you drank too much.

Maybe you were unreliable.

Maybe you stayed in something toxic until you became toxic too.

Maybe you were a terrible friend.

Maybe you were so deep in your own pain that you couldn’t see anyone else’s.

Maybe you simply weren’t ready to be the person somebody needed you to be.

And now you are different.

You know it.

But they don’t yet.

Or worse—

they don’t care.

Here’s what I want you to know:

You are still allowed to keep going.

You do not need unanimous approval to become someone new.

You don’t need every person from your past to revise their opinion.

You don’t need to chase people down carrying evidence of your transformation.

See? Look at me. Look what I’ve done. Please tell me I’m different now.

I’ve wanted to do that.

Sometimes I still do.

But I’m learning something much quieter.

There comes a point when you stop auditioning for forgiveness.

You stop begging people to notice your growth.

You stop needing everyone else to agree with the person you know you’re becoming.

And you simply live differently.

Not because somebody is watching.

Because you are.

⸻

I used to think redemption would feel dramatic.

Like one giant moment where the past loosened its grip and everyone understood that I wasn’t that person anymore.

It hasn’t been like that.

Redemption has been painfully ordinary.

It is waking up sober.

It is working.

It is mothering with the pieces of motherhood I have today instead of only grieving what I lost.

It is loving people without demanding that they forget the reasons they once protected themselves from me.

It is admitting when I’m wrong.

It is catching an old behavior before it becomes an old pattern.

It is building a life slowly enough that sometimes I get impatient with the construction.

And it is realizing that the woman I am today doesn’t have to destroy the woman I used to be to prove she exists.

She came from her.

That’s important too.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life running from my worst chapters.

They’re mine.

I wrote them.

Some of them make me cringe.

Some still break my heart.

Some changed other people’s lives forever.

I cannot edit them out.

But I can decide what comes next.

Maybe that’s what real change actually is.

Not convincing everyone that the old you is dead.

Not pretending the past didn’t happen.

Not getting some magical clean slate.

It’s waking up every morning with the same history—

and choosing not to repeat it.

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So if you’re in this strange place right now, where you’re changing faster than other people’s perception of you, I know how lonely it can feel.

Keep going.

Not to prove them wrong.

That’s another trap.

Keep going because one day you will look around at your life and realize something incredible:

You no longer need to explain who you are.

Your life is explaining it for you.

The people who are meant to recognize your growth will eventually have enough evidence.

The people who can’t?

You may have to love them from a distance and let them keep the version of you they knew.

Because you cannot spend your entire future standing trial for your past.

You served the sentence.

You learned the lesson.

You made the apology.

You changed the behavior.

Now comes the part nobody applauds enough:

You keep becoming anyway.

And maybe that is the most convincing apology any of us will ever make.

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Let’s talk about the messy middle.

Not rock bottom.

Not the beautiful comeback.

Not the before-and-after picture where everyone applauds because you lost the weight, got sober, left the relationship, survived the thing, rebuilt the business, walked out of prison, or finally stopped crying on the bathroom floor.

I mean the part nobody really prepares you for.

The part where life is objectively better… and you’re still not okay.

The emergency is over.

The smoke has cleared.

You’re standing in the wreckage looking around thinking:

Okay. So who the fuck am I now?

Because I know who I was.

I know the woman who was drowning.

I know the woman who lost her four-year-old daughter and could not understand how the sun had the audacity to rise the next morning.

I know the woman who used pills because feeling nothing seemed easier than feeling everything.

I know the woman who made catastrophic decisions while knowing, somewhere underneath all of the denial and chemicals and desperation, that she was making them.

I know the woman whose choices ultimately landed her in prison.

I know inmate numbers, steel doors, strip searches, count times, fluorescent lights, bad food, mold, bugs, waiting for officers to decide when you can move from one place to another.

I know what it feels like to lose freedom.

I know what it feels like to lose trust.

I know what it feels like to lose your child.

I know what it feels like to lose yourself.

What I didn’t know how to do was become someone else.

And maybe that’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

Because surviving is one skill.

Living afterward is another.

⸻

Sometimes I look at the trajectory of my life and think I really went for it with the midlife crisis.

Some people buy a sports car.

Somebody gets bangs.

Maybe they book an impulsive trip to Italy, get a questionable tattoo and start drinking green juice.

Mine came with addiction, child loss, a criminal case, divorce, prison, sobriety, rebuilding motherhood, losing my driver’s license, starting over financially and having absolutely no fucking clue who I was when it was all over.

Zero stars.

Do not recommend.

And yet…

Here I am.

That sounds triumphant.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes I am genuinely blown away by the life I have managed to build out of circumstances I once thought would kill me.

But other days?

Here I am looks a lot less inspirational.

Here I am looks like doing the math in my head before spending money.

Here I am looks like relying on other people for rides because I still can’t drive.

Here I am looks like trying to rebuild a career when my résumé doesn’t exactly have a neat little explanation for where I disappeared to.

Here I am looks like sharing custody of my surviving daughter and wondering whether I have done enough to repair all the years when grief, addiction and consequences took pieces of me away from her.

Here I am looks like being sober and discovering that sobriety doesn’t magically give you a personality.

It just removes the thing you were using to avoid yourself.

And then there you are.

Hi.

Nice to meet you.

Apparently we’ve got some shit to work through.

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The weirdest part about rebuilding your life is realizing you can’t rebuild the old one.

For a long time, I think some part of me believed recovery meant getting everything back.

Get sober.

Get out of prison.

Repair relationships.

Become a good mother again.

Earn trust.

Work.

Make money.

Build something.

Prove myself.

Prove myself.

Prove myself.

Maybe if I accomplished enough, apologized enough, worked hard enough, loved hard enough and behaved well enough, I could somehow crawl backward through time and arrive at the life I had before everything exploded.

But there is no going back.

That woman doesn’t exist anymore.

Neither does that life.

And as painful as that truth is, I think accepting it has been one of the most important parts of healing.

Because I spent years asking:

How do I get myself back?

When maybe the better question was:

Who do I want to become from here?

Those are very different questions.

One asks you to resurrect something.

The other gives you permission to create something.

⸻

I lost Gracey when she was four years old.

There is no version of my life where that becomes okay.

There is no amount of personal growth that ties a pretty bow around burying your child.

I don’t believe everything happens for a reason.

Sometimes terrible things happen.

Sometimes we make terrible choices.

Sometimes consequences are permanent.

Sometimes grief doesn’t turn into gratitude.

Sometimes grief is just grief.

But I have learned that something does not have to be good for something good to eventually grow beside it.

That’s different.

I didn’t lose my daughter so I could become a better person.

I would trade every lesson I have learned to have her here.

Every single one.

But she isn’t here.

And eventually I had to decide what I was going to do with the life that still was.

That decision didn’t happen once.

It happens constantly.

There were times after Gracey’s death when everything became Grace.

Every conversation.

Every thought.

Every room.

Every photograph.

Every memory.

Every future I imagined.

Her absence was so enormous that it swallowed the people who were still standing in front of me.

Including my surviving daughter.

That is an incredibly painful thing for me to admit.

But if I am going to write about rebuilding honestly, then I can’t only tell you the parts that make me look brave.

Grief can make you selfish without you realizing you are being selfish.

Pain can narrow your vision until you can only see the wound.

I loved my living daughter desperately.

I just wasn’t always capable of showing up like the mother she needed because I was trying to survive something I didn’t know how to survive.

Today, part of finding myself means learning how to live with both truths.

I was devastated.

And people needed me.

I was sick.

And my choices hurt people.

I was grieving.

And I still had responsibilities.

I deserve compassion.

And I am still accountable.

Those things can exist together.

That might be one of adulthood’s hardest lessons.

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Then came sobriety.

There is something almost funny about getting sober after spending years trying not to feel.

Suddenly every emotion shows up demanding back pay.

Fear.

Shame.

Anger.

Grief.

Regret.

Loneliness.

Embarrassment.

Hope—which might actually be one of the scarier ones because hope gives you something to lose again.

I had spent so much time altering myself that I genuinely didn’t know who I was without something in my system.

What do I like?

What do I want?

How do I handle conflict?

What kind of mother am I?

What kind of partner?

What kind of friend?

What do I do when someone hurts me and I can’t numb it?

What do I do when I’m anxious?

What do I do when I’m bored?

What do I do when I hate myself?

What do I do with a random Tuesday evening when there is no crisis to solve?

Those questions sound small compared to prison and death and addiction.

They aren’t.

They’re the messy middle.

Because chaos gives you an identity.

You become the addict.

The grieving mother.

The defendant.

The incarcerated woman.

The woman everyone worries about.

The disaster.

The tragedy.

The cautionary tale.

And then one day you’re not actively destroying your life anymore.

Congratulations.

Now what?

⸻

Prison actually made some parts easier.

That probably sounds insane.

But prison provides structure.

You wake up when you’re told.

Eat when you’re told.

Move when you’re told.

Stand for count.

Work.

Go back.

Wait.

Repeat.

Your world becomes very small.

Then one day a gate opens.

And everyone thinks freedom is the ending.

It isn’t.

Freedom is the beginning.

I walked back into a world stone-cold sober.

That terrified me more than I knew how to explain.

Because I wasn’t coming home to the life I had left.

The world had changed.

My family had changed.

My relationships had changed.

My daughter had changed.

And I had changed.

I just didn’t know into what.

There was no officer telling me what came next.

No count time.

No schedule posted on the wall explaining how to rebuild your reputation.

No orientation packet titled:

SO YOU BLEW UP YOUR ENTIRE LIFE: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO BECOMING A FUNCTIONING HUMAN AGAIN.

Would’ve been helpful.

Instead, you start small.

Painfully small.

You show up when you say you’re going to show up.

You answer the phone.

You tell the truth.

You go to work.

You stay sober.

You keep promises.

When you screw up, you admit it.

When someone doesn’t trust you yet, you try to understand why instead of screaming about how much you’ve changed.

You learn that rebuilding trust is incredibly boring.

There are no dramatic speeches.

It’s mostly repetition.

I’m here.

I’m still here.

I’m still doing it.

I’m still telling the truth.

I’m still sober.

I’m still showing up.

I’m still here.

⸻

And somewhere inside all of that repetition, something strange happens.

You begin meeting yourself.

Not finding yourself.

Meeting yourself.

I like that phrase better because I don’t think there’s some fully formed version of us hiding underneath everything waiting to be discovered.

I think we build ourselves.

Choice by choice.

Boundary by boundary.

Mistake by mistake.

Tuesday by Tuesday.

You discover that maybe you actually like quiet mornings.

Maybe you love writing.

Maybe you care deeply about people feeling less alone.

Maybe you’re funny.

Maybe you swear too much.

Maybe you love deeply and sometimes too intensely.

Maybe you need affection.

Maybe you need reassurance.

Maybe you love being a mother.

Maybe you’re ambitious.

Maybe you want financial independence.

Maybe you want a home that feels like yours.

Maybe you want work that means something.

Maybe you want to tell the truth about prison because somebody sitting in a county jail somewhere needs to know their life isn’t automatically over.

Maybe you want to write about addiction because somebody is currently sitting alone thinking they’re too far gone.

Maybe you want to talk about grief because another mother just entered the club nobody wants membership in and she needs someone to tell her that surviving the first year doesn’t mean she loved her child any less.

You start collecting these little pieces.

Oh. That’s me.

That matters to me.

I don’t want that anymore.

I do want this.

That’s identity.

Not some lightning bolt.

Not a vision board.

Not waking up one morning completely healed.

Tiny recognitions.

Over and over.

⸻

I think we put too much pressure on ourselves to know exactly who we’re becoming.

Especially after a huge life change.

People ask:

What are you doing now?

What’s the plan?

What’s next?

Where are you going to live?

What are you going to do for work?

Are you dating?

Are you happy?

Have you forgiven yourself?

Have you moved on?

Have you healed?

Jesus Christ.

I just figured out how to make it through Wednesday without emotionally combusting.

Can we give me a minute?

Maybe the messy middle isn’t supposed to be rushed.

Maybe this is where the important stuff happens.

Rock bottom is obvious.

Everything hurts.

The comeback is obvious too.

Everyone can see the milestones.

But the middle is quiet.

It’s turning down something that the old you would’ve accepted.

It’s apologizing without defending yourself.

It’s noticing yourself getting reactive and choosing differently.

It’s going home instead of going off the rails.

It’s saving twenty dollars.

It’s going to work exhausted.

It’s parenting through guilt instead of allowing guilt to convince you that you’re incapable of parenting.

It’s allowing someone to love you without constantly testing whether they’re going to leave.

It’s realizing you don’t have to punish yourself forever to prove you’re sorry.

That one has been hard for me.

Because when your actions contributed to irreversible consequences, forgiveness can feel almost offensive.

Who am I to forgive myself?

But eventually I realized something.

Self-hatred does not resurrect anyone.

It doesn’t heal my daughter.

It doesn’t undo my choices.

It doesn’t give anyone back the years that were lost.

It just destroys another life.

Mine.

And I have already destroyed enough.

So now my responsibility isn’t to suffer forever.

My responsibility is to live differently.

There is a difference.

⸻

If you’re in your own messy middle right now, maybe you keep asking:

How do I find myself?

Here’s what I’m learning.

Stop trying to figure out who you are all at once.

Start with who you aren’t anymore.

Sometimes that’s enough.

I am not going back to that.

I don’t want relationships that make me disappear.

I don’t want substances deciding how I feel.

I don’t want chaos just because chaos feels familiar.

I don’t want to hurt people because I’m hurting.

I don’t want to make decisions that tomorrow’s version of me has to survive.

I don’t want to abandon myself anymore.

Those are answers.

Then ask smaller questions.

What makes me feel peaceful?

Who makes me feel safe?

What behavior leaves me feeling ashamed afterward?

What makes me proud of myself when nobody knows I did it?

What do I keep tolerating that I secretly resent?

What kind of person do I want my child to remember?

What would I do differently if I stopped believing my worst mistake was the most interesting thing about me?

That last one.

Sit with that one.

Because for a long time, I think I believed the worst thing that ever happened in my life had become my entire identity.

It hasn’t.

It is part of me.

A massive part.

It changed the architecture of my entire life.

But there are still rooms being built.

⸻

I am still in the messy middle.

That’s probably the most important thing I can tell you.

I haven’t arrived.

I don’t have the triumphant ending for this essay where I tell you I wake up every morning glowing with purpose while drinking lemon water and journaling about abundance.

Sometimes I wake up anxious.

Sometimes I worry about money.

Sometimes I hate relying on other people.

Sometimes motherhood breaks my heart.

Sometimes grief hits me sideways and suddenly I’m back in a hospital room inside my own head.

Sometimes I miss Gracey so badly that language becomes useless.

Sometimes I look at everything I lost because of my addiction and choices and I have to work very hard not to disappear underneath the weight of it.

Sometimes I still question whether I am doing enough.

Sometimes I still don’t know who I am.

But I know more than I used to.

I know I am a mother.

I know I am a writer.

I know I am sober.

I know I am someone who survived prison but refuses to make prison the end of her story.

I know I love hard.

I know I can be messy.

I know I can be reactive.

I know I am learning.

I know I care about people.

I know I want my surviving daughter to see that making catastrophic mistakes does not mean you stop becoming.

I know I want Gracey’s life to be spoken about with love, not reduced to the worst day of mine.

I know I want to build financial stability.

I know I want independence.

I know I want peace more than chaos now.

And perhaps most importantly:

I know I don’t want to be the woman I used to be.

For today, that is enough direction.

⸻

Maybe you’re there too.

Maybe your life isn’t terrible anymore.

But it isn’t exactly beautiful either.

Maybe you got divorced and don’t know who you are without the marriage.

Maybe your kids grew up.

Maybe you lost someone.

Maybe you got sober.

Maybe you changed careers.

Maybe you left prison.

Maybe you survived cancer.

Maybe the friendship ended.

Maybe your body changed.

Maybe you finally got the thing you thought would fix everything and discovered that you still came with you.

Welcome to the middle.

It’s uncomfortable here.

But I don’t think it’s empty.

I think it’s sacred.

Because this is the place where nobody is forcing you to change anymore.

The crisis isn’t making the decisions.

The drugs aren’t.

The judge isn’t.

The prison isn’t.

The grief isn’t.

The relationship isn’t.

The expectations aren’t.

You are.

And maybe that’s what rebuilding actually is.

Not becoming some shiny, perfected version of yourself.

Not erasing your history.

Not pretending you don’t still hurt.

It’s standing in the middle of a life you barely recognize and saying:

I don’t completely know who I am yet.

But I know I don’t want to live like that anymore.

I know what I value.

I know what I refuse to lose again.

I know what I’m willing to work for.

I know who I want to show up for.

And tomorrow, I’ll make another decision from there.

Then another.

Then another.

Until one day you look around and realize:

You didn’t find yourself.

You built her.

And maybe she isn’t finished.

Maybe she never will be.

Maybe that’s the whole point.

Because I spent enough of my life believing there was a final version of me I needed to become before I was allowed to feel proud.

There isn’t.

There is only this woman.

Still grieving.

Still loving.

Still rebuilding.

Still screwing things up sometimes.

Still learning.

Still mothering.

Still writing.

Still sober.

Still becoming.

Still here.

And after everything—

still here is one hell of a place to begin.

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There are truths about yourself that are difficult to admit because once you put words around them, you can’t hide from them anymore.

This is one of mine.

I lost my four-year-old daughter.

And for a long time afterward, everything became about the daughter who died.

Everything.

The air in the room.

The date on the calendar.

A song in the grocery store.

A little girl with curls.

A yellow shirt.

A birthday.

A hospital.

A memory.

A photograph.

A sound.

A smell.

A sentence someone said without realizing it would split me open.

Grace was everywhere.

And somehow, in the enormity of losing one child, there were moments when I stopped seeing the child who was still here.

That sentence hurts to write.

It should.

Because I love my living daughter more than I could ever explain, and admitting that my grief sometimes overshadowed her feels like confessing something mothers are not supposed to say out loud.

But I think we need to say these things out loud.

Because pretending we handled our worst moments beautifully doesn’t help anybody.

I didn’t.

I was devastated.

I was drowning.

I was grieving my child while trying to comprehend a life that no longer resembled the one I had been living.

There was the trauma itself.

There was guilt.

There were consequences.

There was fear.

There was addiction tangled into all of it.

There were legal battles.

There was the destruction of the future I thought my family was going to have.

There was waking up every morning and having those few seconds before your brain remembers.

Then it remembers.

She’s gone.

And the entire weight of reality lands on your chest again.

I was so consumed by surviving the loss of one daughter that I didn’t always understand what the other one was surviving.

She had lost her sister, too.

And then, in so many ways, she lost pieces of her mother.

That is the part that breaks me differently now.

Because children don’t understand grief the way adults do.

They don’t look at their mother falling apart and think:

She is experiencing a complicated trauma response to an unimaginable loss.

They just know Mom is different.

Mom is crying.

Mom isn’t listening.

Mom is somewhere else even when she’s sitting right there.

Mom keeps talking about the person who isn’t here.

Mom is tired.

Mom is angry.

Mom is sad.

Mom is disappearing.

And maybe you have never lost a child.

God, I hope you never do.

But I would bet you have disappeared before.

Maybe your marriage ended and suddenly every conversation became about the person who left.

Maybe someone betrayed you.

Maybe your parent died.

Maybe you lost your job.

Maybe depression hollowed you out.

Maybe money became so tight that every waking thought became a calculation.

Maybe you became a caregiver.

Maybe you were sick.

Maybe someone you loved became sick.

Maybe your relationship was falling apart and you became so focused on saving it that you stopped noticing the friendships you were neglecting.

Maybe you were trying so desperately to survive your own life that you forgot other people were living beside you.

This is what pain can do.

It narrows your vision.

When a house is on fire, you don’t notice the flowers growing outside.

You notice the flames.

You smell the smoke.

You search for the exit.

You survive.

And sometimes survival is all we are capable of for a while.

I want to be very clear about that.

This is not a piece about grieving more quietly so other people are comfortable.

It is not about smiling through tragedy.

It is not about suppressing anger, sadness, fear, devastation or exhaustion.

It is not another version of:

Other people have it worse.

Fuck that.

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Pain does not need to audition for permission to hurt.

Feel it.

Cry until your face hurts.

Scream in the car.

Go to therapy.

Sit on the floor.

Tell someone you aren’t okay.

Cancel something.

Sleep.

Grieve.