For most of my life, I thought being easy to get along with was a good thing.

I could read a room before I’d even sat down, and I always knew when someone’s energy had shifted and when something I’d said hadn’t landed well.

But I also knew when someone was disappointed in me.

And then I’d do what people-pleasers do best:

I’d adjust, soften what I really thought, say yes when I wanted to say no, replay conversations in my head wondering if I’d said too much and make someone else’s discomfort my responsibility.

And if someone was upset with me?

Good luck because my nervous system would spiral out.

I didn’t think of any of this as fear because I honestly thought I was being considerate.

Turns out, there’s a very fine line between being considerate of other people and needing them to be okay with you so that you can be okay.

And my body knew the difference long before I did because our bodies know when we’re bracing.

I’ve spent more than 20 years working in women’s health, much of that time with patients struggling with hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s.

And while I look and feel better at 48 years old than I did at 28 years old, I also have Hashimoto’s.

So let me make something very clear before the internet runs away with this:

People-pleasing does not cause thyroid disease.

But I also don’t believe we can talk about hormones as though they live in a soundproof room somewhere below our neck.

Your body experiences your life: the swallowed no, the overcommitting, the resentment you pretend isn’t there, the conversations you rehearse twelve times before having them and the panic when someone’s voice changes.

But our bodies also experience the inability to rest because someone, somewhere, might need something from you and also the compulsive need to fix everything so nobody is disappointed.

And here’s where this gets interesting.

A new 2026 study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology experimentally exposed people to social rejection and found that women showed a higher cortisol response after rejection than after social inclusion. Men didn't show the same rejection-specific pattern.

Now, this was a small study, and it absolutely does not prove that people-pleasing causes hormone problems.

But it made me think: Maybe someone being disappointed in us doesn’t always register as some tiny social inconvenience.

Maybe for some women, rejection carries enough weight that the body responds as though something important is at stake.

Because if your system has learned: Someone being unhappy with me = threat, then keeping everybody happy isn’t simply about wanting to be liked.

It becomes: I need you to be okay so I can feel okay.

That doesn’t mean your emotions gave you Hashimoto’s.

It means the way we live matters to the body we’re living in.

And for a long time, mine was living in an environment where keeping everybody else happy felt strangely important.

I just didn’t understand why.

Until my faith forced me to look at it differently.

And this is where the thyroid conversation can get a little weird.

In emotional and mind-body interpretations of thyroid health, the thyroid, sitting right there in the throat, is often associated with voice, communication and self-expression.

So if you’re someone who has spent years swallowing the no, avoiding conflict and silencing what you really think because you’re terrified of disappointing people, you’ve probably heard the prescription:

You need to use your voice, express yourself and, inevitably, you need to speak your truth.

Which brings me to one of my least favourite phrases on planet Earth.

Please don’t tell me to “speak my truth” because I honestly can’t stand the phrase.

Because “my truth” isn’t truth but rather a perception of an experience.

I was once told, “But their perception of the experience is true to them.”

No.

Their perception is real to them, just like their feelings about it are real and sure; their experience of it matters.

But real to you and true are not interchangeable.

I can genuinely perceive that someone hates me when they don’t.

I can sincerely believe someone’s silence means they’re angry with me when they’re simply tired.

I can experience rejection where none was intended.

The fact that I genuinely experienced something a certain way tells us something important about my experience.

It doesn’t automatically tell us what is true.

Otherwise, sincerity becomes the test of truth. And two contradictory accounts could both become “true” simply because both people genuinely believe them.

And that ain’t truth because it’s perception.

And when everyone gets to have their own truth, truth becomes relative.

When truth can mean something completely different depending on who’s declaring it, the word itself starts to lose its meaning.

You have an experience, a perspective and an interpretation. But you don’t get your own truth.

Finding Jesus gave me language for something I’d already instinctively rejected (stay with me before rolling your eyes).

I don’t get to create truth, and neither do you.

And if you’re new to Christianity, I’m not saying, “Well, Jesus is my truth, so there.” That would basically be the Christian version of the exact argument I just called BS. 😂

Christianity makes a much bigger claim than that.

It claims that truth exists independently of me, my feelings, preferences, perceptions, or whether I particularly like what it requires of me.

The truth is, when I left 29 years of witchcraft last year, I wasn’t looking for a belief system that validated my version of reality. Christianity regularly confronts my version of reality, and trust me, it’s not easy.

It tells me I’m wrong sometimes and asks me to forgive when I don’t want to. It examines my own behaviour when I’d much rather examine yours or love people I disagree with.

And it also humbles me when every part of me wants to prove I’m right (and truth is, I can be pretty darn hard-headed at times).

And ultimately, Christianity makes an even more radical claim.

Jesus doesn’t say He’ll help me discover my truth.

He says: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6)

Whether someone accepts that claim is obviously a much bigger conversation.

But the distinction I’m making here is important:

Christianity didn’t give me another version of “my truth.” It asked me to submit my perceptions to something outside of myself.

And that created another question for me.

Because if I wasn’t supposed to make myself the authority, why had I spent so much of my life making other people the authority instead?

Every time I people-pleased, I stopped trusting myself

There were so many moments when I knew what I needed.

I needed rest, to say no, to disagree when something didn't sit right with me, or to do something I didn't want to do.

And then the questions would start.

What if they think you’re selfish or angry?

What if they misunderstand you or don’t like you anymore?

And suddenly what I knew about myself became less important than what somebody else might think about me.

So I’d override myself again and again…and well, again.

That’s what I mean when I talk about losing trust in ourselves.

I’m not talking about believing every thought or feeling we have is true.

That’s precisely the idea I just spent an entire section calling BS. 😂

I’m talking about losing the ability to recognize what you’re experiencing without immediately questioning it because somebody else might disapprove.

There’s a difference between examining yourself and abandoning yourself.

And every time I people-pleased, I was teaching myself something:

Their reaction is more trustworthy than my own discernment.

But Christianity eventually made me realize there was something underneath even that. Something much less flattering than “I’m just too nice.”

Because sometimes my “kindness” wasn’t kindness at all.

It was fear.

Fear of rejection, conflict, being misunderstood or fear that someone would think badly of me.

And fear has an interesting way of disguising itself as virtue.

You can call it keeping the peace, being empathetic or being the bigger person. And you can even go as far as to call it love.

But if the real reason I’m doing something is because I desperately need you to approve of me, that’s not love because there’s a transaction buried underneath it.

I’ll keep you happy so I can feel safe.

But even that still didn’t explain the whole thing because finding Jesus wasn’t teaching me to become indifferent to people. Rather, it wasn’t teaching me to stop caring whether I hurt or disappoint someone or lose even a relationship.

So if caring about people wasn’t the problem, when does caring about someone’s opinion become something else entirely?

People-pleasing is misplaced worship. It’s when your desire to be approved by others quietly outweighs your desire to please God.

And this is the part that really punched me in the face.

Paul writes in Galatians 1:10:

“For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.”

That’s considerably less fluffy than “set better boundaries.” 😂

Because Scripture doesn’t merely ask me whether other people’s opinions are stressing me out; it asks me whose approval ultimately governs my behaviour.

Because whatever has the power to make me betray my convictions, silence what needs to be said, override my limits or disobey what I believe God is asking of me has been given an enormous amount of authority.

Sometimes more authority than God Himself.

That’s the part nobody tells you when they’re teaching you boundary scripts on Instagram.

You can learn to say no, block people, cut off toxic relationships and memorize the perfect response to someone who crosses your boundaries and still be completely controlled by what people think of you.

Because people-pleasing was never really about the word yes; it was about where I was looking for safety.

Which left me with another problem.

If other people couldn’t be the source of that safety, what was?

I thought keeping everyone happy would keep me safe

This was the bargain I’d unknowingly made:

If I can keep everybody happy, nobody will reject me.

If nobody rejects me, I’m safe.

If I’m safe, I can finally relax.

See the thought pattern? Except there’s one tiny problem with that strategy:

You never actually relax.

Because your safety now depends upon something you cannot control: another human being’s perception of you.

So you monitor, adjust, explain and then over-explain, apologize, rehearse a couple times more, fix and perform.

And that’s what you’ve been calling peace?

Meanwhile, your body is still bracing.

And this is where faith has completely changed the way I understand healing.

Not because Jesus gave me another nervous-system hack, because He is the ultimate nervous system regulator and the more we cultivate a relationship with Him versus just waiting for a crisis to pray, the more that becomes clear as day.

But that still didn’t mean the answer was to swing violently in the other direction and make myself the authority instead.

Jesus didn’t teach me to make myself the new authority.

The answer to people-pleasing isn’t: Screw everybody! I’m choosing me! Walks away with a hair flip!

That’s honestly just putting a different person on the throne.

And it certainly isn’t “speaking my truth.”

Jesus didn’t teach me that whatever Melissa thinks or feels must therefore be true because He taught me to bring what I think, feel, fear and desire before God.

Sometimes that means realizing I was wrong, apologizing, serving someone when I'd rather not, or choosing humility over being right. And sometimes?

It means saying the thing I know somebody isn’t going to like.

It also means saying no without writing a 700-word dissertation explaining why.

It means allowing someone to misunderstand me, letting them be disappointed, and refusing to manage another adult's emotions for them.

Because I’m slowly learning something that would have terrified the old me:

Someone can be unhappy with me, and I can still be okay.

And once I understood that, I saw something else about my people-pleasing that I really didn’t want to see:

People-pleasing was also a form of control

This one hurt.

Because I’d always thought boundaries were primarily about protecting myself from other people. But I’ve started to realize that healthy boundaries also require me to relinquish my attempt to control them.

Think about it.

People-pleasing is often an attempt to regulate yourself by regulating everybody else’s opinion of you.

If I’m constantly adjusting myself so you’ll respond the way I want you to, I’m still trying to control an outcome.

I want you to like and understand me and not be angry with me. And I want you to think I’m good. So I manipulate myself in an attempt to manage your response.

And then I call it being nice? Ooof…

Surrender clearly looks very different.

I will act with love, integrity and obedience to God, and your reaction belongs to you.

That’s freedom.

And I think my body needs that freedom too.

Not because setting boundaries is going to magically heal someone’s thyroid or because every woman with Hashimoto’s secretly needs to confront her mother.

And definitely not because your thyroid is storing all the words you haven’t spoken somewhere in your throat.

But because I no longer want to ask my body to spend its life preparing for the consequences of everybody else’s disappointment.

I don’t want “keeping the peace” to require a war inside myself.

So no, I won’t be speaking “my truth”

I don’t need my own truth because I need enough humility to accept that sometimes I’m wrong.

I need enough discernment to pay attention to what’s happening inside me and the courage to stop abandoning myself simply because someone might not like what I say.

And lastly, I need enough faith to remember that my safety was never supposed to come from being universally approved of in the first place.

People-pleasing looked like kindness for a very long time, and sometimes it even looked like love.

Maybe healing isn’t always about learning to speak louder because maybe sometimes it’s becoming secure enough in God that you no longer need to twist yourself into whatever shape keeps everybody else comfortable.

You don't need to speak your truth.

You don't have one.

Neither do I.

There is truth, and for the first time in a long time, I'm not the one deciding what it is. That's terrifying. It's also the most rest I've had in years.

So who's still sitting on the throne in your life?

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Playing your own God is dangerous.

Manifestation asks you to be your own source of power and provision. Not as a mindset hack, but I’m talking about the actual mechanics of it. It literally convinces you to believe you’re the source of your own reality. And that isn’t neutral because it’s replacing God with yourself, one vision board at a time. I believe that’s dangerous, not just spiritually, but for your mental health.

A little backstory here…

I spent 29 years in witchcraft, and I’m not talking about the kind of witchcraft women often use as a feminist label to “F the Patriarchy!” because they’ve read a couple of books from Lisa Lister. Rather, I was heavily involved in Wicca, a modern, nature-based pagan religion. I celebrated sabbats and esbats; I built a book of shadows over decades, and I routinely pulled advanced tarot spreads like the Tree of Life…and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I was no stranger to manifestation, and I received a lot of what I manifested. So anytime I state my opinion on the subject, I’ll often be asked, “So do you just think it’s all just BS?”

No, in fact, I don’t.

My tarot readings were accurate and, in many cases, they did mitigate risk.
I also believe that you can manifest a lot of what you desire. But when we play God, we turn ourselves into idols.

Idols are very attractive at first. They will never promise you something without taking something away. The Devil designs it this way. So in this case, you’re powerful beyond measure! You can manifest your dream life on a yacht and wave money to the camera (or whatever your vision is), but I also believe it comes at a price.

There will be a time when bad things happen, because newsflash: suffering is inevitable in this lifetime.

But because you’ve been conditioned to believe that you are the source of your own power, the one thing they didn’t tell you is that you have not learned to suffer well.

So you’ll run back into your meditation, listening to Dr. Joe Dispenza’s demonic voice in an effort to change your frequency so that you can attract bigger, better things. But the reality is, sometimes, you don’t get what you want when you want it, and sometimes, you don’t get it at all.

I believe this leads an already overwhelmed group of women down a path of fight-or-flight as their new religion, women who are already managing the finances, arranging appointments, running kids to sports practice, and making dinner, while they sit there wondering where they possibly went wrong.

I know I’ll get pushback about this. But Dr. Joe Dispenza (a chiropractor by the way) created his entire framework promoting meditation as a way to get out of their survival physiology, past their analytical mind and calm the stress response so that they can access an elevated emotional state to manifest from. Nervous system regulation isn’t incidental to his teaching; it’s the mechanism he sells.

And sure, there are benefits to meditation, and of course his method has success stories. Idols always do. Handing you a spiritual practice that says the outcome of your life is entirely up to your own frequency doesn't relieve that weight because it just adds to it. Now, if your bill doesn't get paid, or your relationship doesn't work out, or the diagnosis doesn't improve, that’s not just bad luck; it’s a personal failure. You weren’t aligned enough or positive enough.

And that exposes one of the fundamental problems with manifestation theology: If you’re supposedly creating your reality through your beliefs, vibration, subconscious programming, alignment, or whatever you want to call it, then suffering doesn’t just hurt; it becomes an indictment of you.

So what does that instill? You weren’t enough.

Here’s the thing though, that’s not a new lie. In the wilderness, the Devil showed Jesus every kingdom of the world and all their splendour and offered him the whole thing, the power, the provision, all of it, in exchange for one thing: worship. Jesus said no. Not because power and provision are evil, but because they were never the Devil’s to hand out in the first place, and the price of taking them was always going to be your worship, not your worth.

That’s the exact trade manifestation is offering you: power beyond measure, provision on demand, as long as you’re willing to believe you’re the source of it. It’s literally the same offer, but it comes with a vision board instead of a mountaintop.

I already know what some of you are thinking, “So what, we have no agency over our own lives?”

We do have power over our circumstances. If you eat well and train, your body will reap the benefits. Just like if you eat McDonald’s and choose to be sedentary, you’ll be more predisposed to poor metabolic outcomes.

We have free will because God created us with the genuine ability to choose to love, reject or walk away. Without free will, love wouldn’t really be love, would it? The tricky part is that God knowing what we will choose isn’t the same thing as God forcing us to choose it. His foreknowledge doesn’t erase our agency.

This is why faith does something manifestation never could. Christianity doesn't promise you a life without suffering; it gives you a way to suffer without being destroyed by it. It doesn't ask you to control the outcome; it asks you to trust the One who already knows it.

I’ve spent months sitting with one question: if I lost everything, like, eating-cat-food-under-a-bridge everything, could I trust that Jesus would actually be enough?

I'd heard some version of it a hundred times: that at least Jesus would be with me in my suffering, that He'd give it meaning eventually. Then sitting in my seat at chapel, I heard it again and just thought, “So what? What does that even mean, that He'll be with me in my suffering?” I wanted to know what the actual benefit was.

It took me months, but I get it now. Sometimes you don’t get meaning. Job never got a reason, and he stayed anyway. What suffering with God actually does is different: if you stay with him instead of running to a vice or a false idol, you learn to suffer well. That’s endurance, character and formation. But ya, it still hurts, and you still might not get the why.

That's not a consolation prize. That's the actual peace you were trying to manifest the whole time.

So tell me, where have you been trying to be your own source of power and provision? Comment below; I actually read every single one.

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For years, I thought the opposite of faith was fear. You know the phrase: faith over fear. I’m pretty sure I even had the mug at one point. Maybe you had one too. And after becoming a Christian, I kept seeing it everywhere.

Then I came across Mark 9:24.

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

But here’s the thing: the opposite of faith isn’t fear. It’s actually unbelief.

When I studied what it meant to be fearful or faithful, I came to the conclusion that fear is simply the battlefield where faith is exercised. It isn’t evidence that your faith is failing because it’s often the very place where it’s growing. Fear and faith can actually co-exist at the same time.

I feel like I may have singlehandedly crashed an entire merch industry with that, but I digress…

Then I discovered something that’ll probably give me a vulnerability hangover after writing this article: my deepest fear wasn’t failure. It was never being enough.

Looking back, I can see how that one fear quietly shaped literally every decision I made. It made me hustle harder, tie my worth to my business, make every launch feel like a verdict on my value, and believe that if I could just achieve one more thing, I would finally arrive. If any of that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. I don’t think I’m the only woman who’s built a business, a body, or a life around trying to outrun that feeling.

For me, that looked like buying a piece of land and planning my dream home. I became obsessed, not because I wanted a beautiful house, but because somewhere deep inside me, I believed building that house would finally prove I was successful.

(My version of success was clearly very different than what it is now.)

The irony is that the fear became so overwhelming I ended up in therapy. I remember thinking, “What if I build this house and I still don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel?” That question haunted me, because deep down, I think I already knew the answer.

Therapy unpacked far more than a house, of course. It exposed the fear that had quietly been running my life: the fear of not being enough.

Looking back, I can see that fear everywhere: It fueled my burnout, wrecked my hormones more than once, gave me an accessory of thyroid nodules I never wanted and convinced me that rest had to be earned. It also led me deeper into the New Age, shuffling my tarot cards like they were an emotional EpiPen.

Fear isn’t just a feeling. It’s literally a full-body event. Every time we live in a state of chronic fear, our adrenals are the ones paying the bill, pumping out cortisol like we’re being chased by something, even when the only thing chasing us is an overdue bill, a hard conversation we’re avoiding, or a story we’re telling ourselves about not being enough. In Chinese medicine, fear is said to deplete the kidneys specifically, which is also where our deepest reserves of vitality are said to live, and I honestly don’t think that’s a coincidence. I watched it play out in my own body. Despite eating all the right things and taking all the supplements, my energy tanked, my thyroid antibodies shot through the roof, and my digestion suffered.

At one point, I was literally spending two full hours every single day doing Joe Dispenza meditations. Why? Because I was terrified that if I wasn’t in the “right frequency,” I’d somehow sabotage the future I was trying so desperately to create. I believed I could genuinely manipulate my reality. In other words, I was trying to play God.

If things didn’t happen the way I wanted, I assumed it was because I wasn’t aligned, wasn’t thinking positively, or wasn’t visualizing well enough. Frankly, I just wasn’t enough.

The burden was crushing.

Looking back, I don’t think I was trying to manifest my dream life because what I was actually doing was trying to eliminate uncertainty. I thought if I could control the outcome, I’d finally feel safe.

And here’s the irony: the more I chased certainty, the more anxious I became. I thought manifestation was giving me peace, but it wasn’t because it was feeding my need for control.

Looking back, I don’t think I was chasing abundance because I was chasing certainty. And certainty had quietly become at least one of my idols.

If control has ever felt like the only thing standing between you and disaster, I don’t think you’re broken. I think you’re just tired of feeling unsafe.

Ironically, it was my therapist Elizabeth who first encouraged me to explore faith and pick up a Bible (she’s Buddhist by the way). Wrap your head around that one. God has quite the sense of humour, I guess.

Through my time in therapy, something happened that I never expected: we put the land up for sale. And it wasn’t because we had to, but because I finally realized I no longer wanted what it represented.

That was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made because I wasn’t just letting go of land; I was letting go of an identity, one built on fear. It was an identity that believed I had to build something extraordinary before I was worthy, one that constantly whispered that if I didn’t do this, I would never measure up.

The crazy part? By the time I put the land on the market, I realized I didn’t actually want the house anymore. I wanted the woman I thought I’d become once I’d built it.

That’s who I had actually been idolizing. Not the house.

Looking back, it’s no surprise God warns us about idols. They don’t always look like golden calves. Sometimes they look like a future version of ourselves that we believe will finally be enough.

Eventually, Arik and I bought an existing home that cost us a third of what it would have cost us to build (especially since lumber prices went absolutely feral in 2020).

Ironically, it had so many of the things we’d already designed into our custom house plans, including a rock wall. When we walked through it, I remember thinking, only God could write a story like this.

But here’s what I’ve realized. The greatest gift wasn’t the house. The greatest gift was that by then, I no longer needed the house to prove my worth.

For years I told myself I wanted peace, but looking back, I don’t think I wanted peace at all. I wanted certainty, certainty that I’d succeed, that people would respect me, that I’d finally feel secure in who I was.

But certainty is not something Jesus ever promised. He promised Himself.

Psalm 23 has become one of my favourite passages, especially now that I live in a mountain valley. “I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.”

David doesn’t say the valley disappears or that fear disappears. He says the Shepherd is with him. That’s the promise: not certainty, but presence.

Fear still visits me. I still have moments where I don’t know what’s coming next and dreams that don’t unfold the way I hoped they would. But I no longer believe fear means my faith is weak (and frankly, I’m so tired of that narrative that gets implied online). So when fear still visits you too, remember this: your faith isn’t weak either.

Listen, I’ve done the breathwork, somatic exercises and girl, I’ve tapped on every meridian point there is. Don’t get me wrong, those tools have real value; our nervous systems need care. But regulation alone was never going to fix what was actually broken in me. You can calm your body all the way down and still feel completely alone in the dark. What I needed wasn’t just a calmer nervous system but to stop trying to be my own Saviour.

Because I’ve learned that peace isn’t the absence of fear, and these days, when fear does come knocking, I don’t try to outrun it anymore. I just bring it to the Shepherd.

So now my question to you is this: What do you fear that has been ruling your world? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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For most of my adult life, I told myself I was just “someone who loves helping people.”

After twenty years in functional nutrition and Chinese medicine, helping women navigate thyroid issues, hormones, and chronic health conditions in Thyroid Alchemy became who I was, not just a job. Helping people felt like a calling, and honestly, I still believe it is.

But somewhere along the way, helping quietly turned into carrying, and those are not the same thing, no matter how much they look alike from the outside.

I became the person who always had the answer: the one who wanted to fix it and the one who thought, “If I could just explain it one more time, this time it’ll click. This time they’ll make the change and actually get better.”

Looking back, I can see some of this was probably what psychologists call the fawn response, which is a trauma response where you learn to stay safe by becoming helpful, agreeable, and indispensable. Whether that’s your story or not, I think a lot of us end up believing our value comes from being needed. And once that belief moves in, it stops being psychology because it becomes our identity.

There was a whole season where saying yes to someone else basically meant saying no to myself, automatically, zero debate. I’d overextend, pour out and hand over my own peace like it was mine to give away. And for clarity, I didn’t do this because anyone asked me to, but because somewhere in there I’d started believing that helping enough people made me more valuable.

Here’s what actually caught me off guard, though: It wasn’t that I loved helping people but rather how absolutely irritated I got when they didn’t do anything with the help I’d given them. I sat with that one for a long time wondering, why did it bother me so much?

The Friend Who Showed Up Without a Notebook

I remember trying to help a friend with his business years ago. By then I’d already poured years into building mine; blood, sweat, tears, sleepless nights, money stress, mistakes, you know, the whole résumé. I knew exactly what it had cost me to learn what I was now handing him for free.

He showed up to sit down with me without a notebook, a pen and without any intention of writing a single thing down.

I was so irritated.

At first I told myself it was because he wasn’t taking me seriously. But that wasn’t the whole story, and deep down I knew it.

Over the last year, God has been slowly peeling back something in my own heart. Part of me assumed everyone wanted growth as badly as I did. Part of me believed everyone would value what I valued. But underneath all that was something deeper still.

From Offering to Owning

I had quietly slid from offering into owning.

I wasn’t just sharing wisdom anymore because I’d gotten emotionally invested in what someone else did with it. And when they didn’t do what I thought they should, I got frustrated. It wasn’t because I’d actually lost anything, but because somewhere inside I’d picked up responsibility for an outcome that was never mine to carry in the first place.

What This Was Doing to My Nervous System

As a health practitioner, I can tell you the body was not built to live like that. When your mind believes it’s responsible for everyone else’s outcomes, healing, decisions and growth, your nervous system doesn’t get the memo that it’s allowed to rest.

For example, I recently had a patient tell me she slept better than she had in years the one week her husband and kids were out of town, but the second they walked back in the door, her sleep tanked. Her body literally clocked back in like it never actually clocked out.

To be clear, I’m not saying that these are the sole reasons that our hormones struggle. I mean, it’s a huge driving force, but honestly, health is never that tidy. Hormones get pushed around by nutrition, sleep, stress, thyroid function, blood sugar, inflammation, and a dozen other things. But I can say this with total confidence: living in a constant state of over-responsibility kept my body stuck in a prolonged stress response. And that never once helped my healing.

Peter Thought He Knew Better Too

A few weeks ago I was flipping back through Matthew and stopped at a passage I’ve read a hundred times. Jesus tells the disciples He has to go to Jerusalem, that He’ll suffer, die, and that He’ll be raised again.

Peter pulls Him aside immediately. “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to You.” (Matthew 16:22)

For years I assumed Peter’s mistake was just that he couldn’t stomach watching someone he loved suffer. But that’s not the whole story either. Peter genuinely thought he knew the better path. Jesus had just laid out the Father’s plan, and Peter basically said, “No thanks, Lord, I’ve got a better one.”

He wasn’t rebelling because he genuinely was trying to help. I mean, he loved Jesus and wanted to protect Him. But in doing that, without even realizing it, he put his own wisdom above God’s.

Which is exactly why Jesus’ answer is so jarring: “Get behind Me, Satan! You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” (Matthew 16:23)

Reading that, I couldn’t dodge the question. How many times have I done the exact same thing? Not with Jesus, of course, but with the people around me. Every time I got convinced someone needed to take my advice, or decided that I knew the path they should walk. Which made me wonder: every time I got frustrated because they didn’t do what I thought was best, was I actually trusting God? Or was I quietly deciding my plan for their life beat His?

I mean, that’s kind of a sobering thought, right?

Because I would never say out loud, “I know better than God.” But neither would Peter. But our actions certainly rat out the assumptions our mouths would never admit to.

It’s Not Your Job to Save People

One day, after landing right back in that familiar frustration over advice I’d freely given and someone hadn’t taken, I prayed, and not because I wanted to change them but to understand why I kept reacting like this.

The answer came fast, and it didn’t tiptoe:

Because it’s not your job to save people, Melissa. It’s Mine.

Ooof…that hit me in the nuggets.

I’ve thought about that sentence almost every day since.

Notice what God didn’t say…

He didn’t say stop helping Melissa, or stop serving. He didn’t say stop teaching Melissa either. But He most certainly clocked me in, getting me to understand where my job ends.

My job is to love, serve, teach, encourage and pray. My job is not to control what someone does with any of that.

Plant, Water…and Let Go.

Paul said it better than I ever could: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” (1 Corinthians 3:6)

There’s real freedom in that sentence: Plant, water and let go. God never told Paul to make the seed grow, and He certainly never told me to make people change.

I see this everywhere once you know to look for it: Moms trying to rescue their grown kids, wives carrying their husbands’ emotional weight like it’s a joint checking account, daughters trying to fix their parents and practitioners white-knuckling it, desperate for their clients to heal.

Don’t get me wrong, helping people is beautiful. I mean, bearing one another’s burdens is straight-up biblical. But carrying responsibility for someone else’s choices? That’s not our lane. There’s only one Saviour, and every time I try to audition for the role, even with the best of intentions, I end up hauling around weight I was never built to carry.

I Haven’t Mastered This.

Let me be clear, I haven’t mastered this, not even close. I still catch the old pull and still notice the urge to over-function, rescue, convince, and carry. What’s different now is I catch it faster. The gap between the old pattern and turning back has gotten shorter.

And honestly, I believe that shortening that gap from past reactions to present responses should be the goal. That’s what growth actually looks like. It isn’t about pretending you’ve conquered the thing, but getting quicker to spot it and quicker to hand it back over.

And funny enough, the less I’ve tried to be everyone else’s saviour, the more room I’ve made for Jesus to be mine.

For those who don’t already know me, my day job is Thyroid Alchemy, where I spend most of my time on labs, physiology, nutrition, the actual science of healing thyroid and hormone issues. But I’ve always been just as fascinated by what’s underneath the physiology: the beliefs, the burdens, the identities we’re quietly hauling around that shape how we actually live. This Substack is where that part finally gets its own space.

(If you want more of the labs-and-physiology side of what I do, you can find me on Instagram @thyroidalchemy.)

Because sometimes healing isn’t about changing what’s on your plate. Sometimes it’s about finally putting down a burden God never asked you to carry.

So now my question to you is this: Who (and maybe what) have you been trying to save?

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Last week I wrote about comparison and asked a simple question here on Substack: what do you compare yourself to?

One woman replied, “Other people’s capacity.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about that answer because the second I heard it, I felt it to my core. Comparison doesn’t just make us question what we have, but rather it makes us question what we’re capable of.

I’ve lived through seasons where simply getting through the workday felt like climbing a mountain. Years ago I was living in an apartment with mould, my Hashimoto’s was flaring, and I was trying to build a business that depended on me showing up every single day.

There were mornings when my face was so swollen I had to ice it before getting on camera. Most people watching had no idea how much I was struggling behind the scenes. Then I’d teach the women who were counting on me, even though I felt anything but okay.

At times, I definitely felt like a fraud, but now, looking back, it actually reminds me of Paul. He didn’t wait until life was easy before serving others. Much of his ministry happened while he was beaten, imprisoned, weary, and carrying what he called a “thorn in the flesh.” He didn’t minister because he had endless strength. He ministered in the middle of his weakness.

That doesn’t mean we ignore our bodies or glorify burnout - quite the opposite. I still believe we’re called to steward our health well. But it does mean we don’t have to wait until everything is perfect before God can use us.

Then I’d open social media, and there they were: women running businesses, raising children, working out, meal prepping, volunteering, waking up before sunrise with perfectly curated morning routines, and somehow still finding the energy to do more. Meanwhile, I was celebrating if I made it through the afternoon without needing to lie down.

I wasn’t comparing houses or careers (although I sure as heck compared their success with mine). The most debilitating comparison I’d often suffer from was comparing capacity. Why did everything seem to come so easily to everyone else? Why did I feel like I was carrying twice the weight with half the strength?

If you’ve ever lived with Hashimoto’s, hypothyroidism, iron deficiency, perimenopause, chronic illness, burnout, or deep grief, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about.

As I’ve sat with that reader’s comment this week, I’ve realized something else. There are seasons when our capacity is genuinely reduced. Illness, fluctuating hormones, trauma and grief are very real. Those seasons deserve compassion, not shame.

But if I’m honest, there were also times when I quietly spent the little energy I did have on things that never gave anything back. I scrolled instead of resting. I tried to control outcomes that were never mine to control. I said yes because I didn’t want to disappoint people. I believed that if I just worked a little harder, optimized a little more, or finally figured my body out, life would begin.

For years I believed that if I could just do more, I would become more. The more capable I was, the more valuable I felt. The more productive I was, the more secure I felt. I don’t think I realized how much of my identity had become wrapped up in my capacity.

Then I found myself thinking about one of Jesus’ parables in Matthew 20. Some workers had been in the vineyard since early morning. Others arrived just an hour before the day ended. Yet when it came time to be paid, everyone received the same wage. The workers who had laboured all day were furious, and not because they’d been cheated. Rather, they were furious because they couldn’t stop looking sideways, and they just couldn’t enjoy the generosity of the landowner because they were too busy measuring what everyone else had received.

I wonder how often we do the same thing. I mean, think about it. We measure other people’s energy, resilience, emotional capacity, and lastly (and this was a big one for me) their productivity. Then, almost without realizing it, we begin believing our value rises and falls with how much we can carry.

I don’t know about you, but just the sound of that is exhausting.

But Jesus dismantles that way of thinking. The Kingdom of God has never measured our worth by our output, and neither should we. (I know, easier said than done but this is why I believe it’s crucial to stay in His word).

The older I get, the more I wonder if I’ve misunderstood seasons of reduced capacity. For years I prayed for my energy to come back, but today I pray for eyes to truly just take a second to see what I would have missed had life never slowed down.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. When my capacity became smaller, my world became quieter. The noise faded, the striving slowed, and the illusion that I could control everything started falling apart. And for the first time in a very long time, I had enough silence to hear God. Although, in complete honesty, at the time, because I was so immersed in witchcraft and the new age, I was convinced it was my intuition and inner knowing. Now it’s clear as day…it absolutely was the Holy Spirit. I no longer play God, and frankly, trying to be my own saviour was exhausting.

Anyway, my point is I don’t think I would have chosen that path if you had given me the choice, but I also don’t think I’d trade what He has taught me in it.

Maybe that’s why this reader’s comment has stayed with me. I think so many of us aren’t just grieving our health. We’re grieving the version of ourselves we no longer have the capacity to be.

Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean our capacity will never return. I mean, I see it all the time in my practice with our patients in Thyroid Alchemy where it absolutely does. Sometimes healing comes, hormones stabilize, and sometimes we finally address the root causes that have been stealing our energy all along. But sometimes something else changes too: our priorities, pace and what we actually believe is worth spending our energy on.

I’ve noticed that as my faith has grown, there are things I simply don’t have the capacity for anymore. Not because I’m physically unable, but because I no longer want to spend my time, attention, or emotional energy there. That’s a very different kind of reduced capacity. It ain’t a loss, my friend; it’s peace, and frankly that’s my version of wealth.

Now I find myself praying for something different: the wisdom to recognize what actually deserves the capacity I’ve been given - which fluctuates like the seasons. We’re not meant to be in the endless pursuit of summer.

Maybe the season we’re trying hardest to escape is the very one slowing us down enough to notice what actually matters.

So I’ll leave you with the question I keep asking myself: if you stopped measuring your worth by your capacity, what would you finally have room for? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

With love,

Melissa

I used to think comparison was my biggest problem. Looking back, I don’t think it was the problem at all. I think comparison simply exposed something much deeper: I had built my entire worth on achievement.

For years I believed, without ever saying it out loud, that if I just worked hard enough, accomplished enough, became successful enough, I’d finally feel like I was enough. So I hustled, not because I loved the grind, but because I genuinely thought my worth depended on it.

Here’s where I was when that belief was running the show. In 2010, I was nearly $20,000 in debt, I’d just ended an abusive relationship and was recovering from emergency surgery after an ovarian cyst ruptured and tore part of my right ovary, and I nearly bled to death.

At the time, I lived alone, and the bills didn’t care that I was falling apart. So while I tried to build my nutrition and Chinese Medical practice during the day, I’d work in a dive bar at night, wiping sticky beer rings off of tables during drunken karaoke and Hockey Night in Canada. Not exactly the glamorous origin story.

And yet, wiping down those sticky tables, I’d whisper to myself, “A success story resides here.” I believed it completely. I just thought success looked like television, big stages, recognition, being known. So every time another practitioner landed a TV segment, every time someone’s business exploded, or someone with more money or who had more connections or received more opportunities, it felt personal. I didn’t realize it then, but comparison had become the fuel for my striving, and striving had become my entire identity.

Looking back now, as a practitioner who’s had some distance from all of it, I see it differently. Comparison didn’t just steal my joy. It actually kept my nervous system in a permanent state of proving. There was always another milestone, credential, media hit or another reason to believe I’d finally earned my place. Every achievement gave me relief, until it didn’t. Then I needed the next one, and the next one. That way of living wasn’t just exhausting emotionally; it was actually costing me physically, and I can see that clearly now.

This is the part I really want to be honest about, especially with the women I work with. Most of you aren't comparing yourselves to someone on a TV segment or a bigger stage. Your comparison shows up in the mirror, on a scale, in the feed of some wellness account promising the perfect protocol, the flattest stomach, or the most disciplined morning routine. But it's the same striving wearing a different outfit. And I believe, with everything in me, that hustling for our worth, whether we're chasing recognition or chasing the "perfect" body, is what keeps us sick. Effort isn't the problem; we should absolutely steward our bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit. It's that when your worth is riding on the outcome, your nervous system never actually gets to stand down, and a body that never stands down cannot heal. I know this to be true because my labs were a nightmare for years until I figured this out (truth is, I still slip back into old habits sometimes, because hey, I'm human, but these days I bounce back a lot faster). Far too often we chalk our fight-or-flight response up to the pressure of our day, when it can actually be rooted in something closer to idolatry: hustling at the altar of our own worth.

But here’s the part that still catches me off guard. I eventually got a lot of what I’d spent years chasing: the TV appearances, speaking engagements and recognition. And once I had it, I looked around at the people I’d spent years measuring myself against and realized I didn’t actually want their lives. Some were deeply unhappy, while others had traded their integrity to stay relevant.

To be clear, that’s not a blanket statement about everyone in the spotlight. I have very successful friends whom I genuinely root for from the sidelines like the biggest cheerleader, spelling out their name with every jump, pom-poms and all. But for me personally, I hated the networking events and the stages where the real point was working the room afterward. I suck at small talk, and I was never going to pretend to be your friend based on what you could do for me. I hated standing in a TV studio and watching a producer tell some expert to their face that they’d done a great job, then turn around and tell a colleague never to book them again.

Frankly, I sucked at playing the game, and I wanted out.

That forced a question I’d never let myself ask: what if I’d been running toward the wrong prize?

That question hit different when I came across Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians: “Everyone who competes for the prize is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown” (1 Corinthians 9:25).

I mean, you can take it as motivation or like some sort of pep talk to work harder and stay disciplined, but I hear something completely different: Paul isn’t telling us to outrun everyone else. He’s asking us which crown we’re even running for, because everyone is running for something. Some for applause, some for influence, money, or success. Or if you’re anything like I was, you’re running because deep down you believe achievement could finally tell you that you're enough. Paul calls those crowns perishable, not because success or wanting the perfect body is wrong, but because success was never built to carry the weight of our identity.

Jesus says something remarkably similar in Matthew: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).

That verse gets me every time, because comparison only grows where our hearts have already decided, “I want what they have.”

I’ve never once compared myself to an Olympic swimmer, a concert pianist, or an astronaut. I mean, why the heck would I? I’m not chasing those lives. Comparison only takes root when we believe someone else’s prize was actually meant to be ours.

Leaving Toronto wasn't running away. It was finally letting go of the need to be invited into rooms and accepted by circles that were never where I was meant to build my life anyway. I unfollowed everyone on social media, not because social media is inherently evil, but because I kept losing sight of my own calling while staring at someone else’s highlight reel.

These days my life is quieter. I live deep in the mountains in a teeny tiny town with a population that’s less than 200 residents, and my circle is small on purpose. I don’t dream about the biggest stages anymore, and I don’t measure my life by media appearances. Not because ambition is wrong, but because my definition of success changed. Or more honestly, God changed it for me.

The older I get, the more I’m convinced comparison isn’t the thief of joy because it makes us jealous. It’s the thief of joy because it quietly convinces us our worth has to be earned. And once you believe your worth has to be earned, you never get to stop running. There’s always another crown, promotion, follower, number on the scale, accolade or steep mountain to climb. It’s exhausting, and honestly, it’s a trap dressed up as ambition and drive.

So these days, when comparison starts whispering, I ask myself a different question. Not “why don’t I have what she has,” but “am I being faithful with what God has actually entrusted to me?”

Simply put: I stopped comparing what I’ve been called to steward to someone else’s assignment.

Those are two completely different races. One leaves you chronically striving, while the other leaves you free.

And after spending years chasing crowns that could never actually tell me who I was, I’ve finally found one worth running toward.

Now I’d love to hear from you: Do you struggle with comparison? I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

Nobody warned me about this one.

People love to talk about the hot flashes, brain fog, weight that shows up uninvited and refuses to leave or the dreaded 3 a.m. wake-up calls where you stare at the ceiling wondering why your body decided to rewrite the rules without asking you first.

Nobody told me perimenopause would also drag out every single place I’d quietly built my identity apart from God and hold it up to the light.

I’ve spent decades studying health, and I’ve spent almost three of those decades deep in New Age spirituality before Christ got a hold of me. So my instinct in any crisis has always been the same: fix it, find the root cause, run another lab, try another supplement, dial in another protocol, optimize harder and ya, control more.

I still believe God calls us to steward our health well. But I’ve started wondering if perimenopause and menopause were ever meant to be purely biological. What if they’re spiritual transitions too?

Reverse puberty

There is a term that you’ll hear floating around the wellness space about perimenopause and that’s calling it, reverse puberty. Frankly, I find it quite fitting.

Puberty prepares a young woman for a new season. Perimenopause prepares a woman for another one entirely. One opens the door to fertility, while the other closes it. But here’s the double standard: our culture throws a party for puberty and throws a pity party for menopause, as if a woman’s best years quietly expire the moment her hormones shift. *Cue the eye roll*

Scripture tells a completely different story. God keeps handing His biggest assignments to older women, and not despite their age…because of it.

The women of Scripture told a different story first

Reading the Bible in this season of life hits different for me (for reference, I’ll be 48 years old this August), probably because I can see pieces of myself in them.

Sarah was long past the age the world considered useful, and God was nowhere near finished with her (Genesis 18). Elizabeth conceived John the Baptist after everyone had already closed the book on her story (Luke 1). Naomi was so convinced her best days were behind her that she changed her own name to Mara, meaning bitter, certain God had dealt harshly with her (Ruth 1). She couldn’t see it yet, but God was already writing her redemption.

And then there’s Anna. Eighty-four years old, widowed, no husband or children mentioned and no worldly status to speak of. God chose her to be one of the very first people on earth to recognize the Messiah (Luke 2:36-38). Frankly, I wish we were told more about her.

Our culture tells women that youth is their greatest asset. Scripture has been saying for thousands of years that faithfulness is. Psalm 92:14 puts it plainly: the righteous “still bear fruit in old age.” Proverbs 31 doesn’t crown a woman for her waistline but rather crowns her for her wisdom, strength and fear of the Lord.

Hormones change, but God does not.

What’s actually happening biologically

Perimenopause is a genuinely remarkable transition, and most of us were sold an oversimplified version of it.

For years, the story was that menopause means the ovaries “shut down” and that’s the end of it. The real picture is more interesting. Even after menopause, the ovaries don’t go fully dark. Hormone production shifts dramatically, and other organs, especially the adrenal glands and fat tissue, step in to keep contributing to estrogen production through different pathways.

The body doesn’t stop. Rather, it adapts, and it transitions, which in my opinion is quite beautiful when you come to think of it.

It’s the exact lesson God has been driving home the whole time. This season isn’t an ending but rather a transition, in your body and soul.

What our hormones are trying to teach us

The Bible never assigns spiritual meaning to estrogen, progesterone or testosterone. But I think each one still reveals something about God’s design.

Estrogen supports growth, resilience and the tissues that let a woman’s body flourish. Progesterone prepares the womb to sustain life and, through one of its metabolites, has a calming effect on the brain, which tells you just how intentional God was with the female body. Testosterone gives women strength, motivation, confidence and drive.

None of these hormones define your worth. But every one of them points to God’s very cool craftsmanship.

So here’s the real question menopause forces you to answer. When flourishing shifts, peace gets harder to find, strength stops showing up as easily as it used to, where do you go looking for it?

It was never supposed to be in your hormones (despite you blaming them for everything). Rather, my fellow Control Freak, it was always supposed to be in Christ.

The burden modern women carry

This is where I think our culture has completely failed women, and I say that as someone who lived it.

I spent almost three decades in New Age thinking, and its favourite selling point was empowerment. Manifest your dream life, abundance, healing and your future. It sounds inspiring on the surface, but underneath it all? It’s a trap.

Because if you’re the one responsible for creating your entire reality, every setback is suddenly your fault. Every illness is a limiting belief you failed to heal. Every unanswered prayer is a frequency you never quite hit. Every struggle is just one more problem you didn’t solve hard enough.

I’m not saying manifestation changes your hormones. I’m saying that living under constant pressure to control every outcome in your life is an enormous psychological load, and your body keeps score. Here's the mechanism: your stress hormones and your reproductive hormones are wired to the same control panel in your brain. So when you're running on chronic stress, that panel doesn't just handle the stress side quietly and leave your hormones alone. It messes with your sleep, your mood, your inflammation, and yes, how rough or smooth your perimenopause ends up being.

Modern women aren’t just carrying groceries and calendars. They’re carrying the crushing belief that everything depends on them, and that belief is exhausting entire generations of us.

The gospel offers something radically different. Jesus never told anyone to control everything. Rather, He told them to trust Him. He didn’t say, “carry the weight of the world girlfriend!” He said, “Come to Me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

For someone like me, that’s still one of the hardest lessons to actually live out, because surrender feels irresponsible when you’ve spent your whole life believing control is what keeps you safe. But maybe that’s exactly why this season is so refining. Perimenopause and menopause expose the illusion that we were ever in control to begin with.

What if this isn’t decline at all?

There’s an old, ugly insult that’s still floating around: “you old bag.” Most people don’t realize it likely traces back to a woman’s womb, a cruel little reminder of how long society has tied a woman’s value to her reproductive capacity.

That’s tragic, but thankfully, Scripture never played that game.

The Bible never says a woman’s value expires when her fertility does. If anything, it moves in the exact opposite direction. It celebrates wisdom, faithfulness, perseverance, character, hope and the fruit of the Spirit, not the fruit of the womb.

This is God’s invitation, if you’re willing to take it. Perimenopause isn’t God taking something away from you. It’s Him gently prying your fingers off everything you were never meant to worship in the first place: youth, productivity, appearance, performance, control and even perfect health.

That doesn’t mean you stop taking care of your body - far from it, in fact. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and it deserves real care, nourishment and stewardship. But your peace was never meant to hinge on perfect labs, hormones or perfect health. That’s literally impossible.

I used to believe freedom would show up the day I finally figured my body out. Now I know true freedom was never found in mastering my hormones but in surrendering to the One who already mastered death.

That might be the greatest gift perimenopause and menopause have to offer. Not that they strip away your identity, but that they finally reveal where your identity has been hiding all along.

Has this season reshaped what you worship without realizing it? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

I’ve heard it a thousand times. “Just trust God.” It’s one of those phrases Christians say with the best intentions, and if I’m honest, I’ve probably said it to people too.

But over the last few months, I’ve come to realize something so uncomfortable. I don’t actually know what that means, not intellectually, and definitely not experientially.

Because the more I read Scripture, the more I notice something that completely dismantles the version of faith I secretly wanted. Paul was beaten, imprisoned, and shipwrecked. John the Baptist, Jesus’ own cousin, was beheaded. Job, a “blameless and upright man,” lost nearly everything. I mean, come on, even Jesus suffered!

Which forces me to ask a question I’m almost ashamed to admit:

If God hasn’t promised to spare me from suffering, what exactly am I trusting Him for?

The Question I Couldn’t Shake

I’ve had a fear of losing everything for as long as I can remember. I even have a name for it: Cat Food Under the Bridge Syndrome.

It sounds funny, but trust me, it’s not. It’s the story my brain has told me since I was a little girl, despite how much money is in my bank account. What if you lose everything? What if your whole life falls apart? What if you end up with nothing?

Looking back, I think I know where it came from. Growing up, my dad constantly worried we were going to lose everything. “We’re going to lose the house.” “We’re not going to make it.” That was the soundtrack of my childhood.

Whether those fears were realistic almost doesn’t matter. When you’re a child, you don’t know how to separate someone else’s fear from reality. You just absorb it. Some kids inherit their parents’ eye colour. I inherited my father’s fear.

Somewhere along the way, my brain decided security was fragile, that everything I loved could disappear overnight, and that if I wasn’t careful enough, smart enough, or prepared enough, I’d lose it all and end up eating cat food under a bridge.

If I’m honest, that fear has quietly shaped far more of my life than I’d like to admit.

Witchcraft Was Never About Magic

People often ask me what drew me into the New Age. The answer usually surprises them. It wasn’t power, it wasn’t rebellion, and it definitely wasn’t wanting to cast spells. It was fear.

For twenty-nine years I desperately wanted certainty. I figured if I could just know what was coming, I could prepare for it, avoid the pain, and make the right decision every time.

Tarot cards became an unhealthy obsession, not because I wanted to control other people, but because I wanted to control tomorrow.

Looking back, I don’t think I was worshipping tarot cards because I was worshipping certainty. Frankly, certainty felt safer than trust.

Then I Read 1 Corinthians 10

Lately I’ve been making my way through 1 Corinthians. In chapter 10, Paul reminds the Corinthians about Israel wandering through the wilderness. They experienced miracle after miracle: they walked under the cloud, crossed the Red Sea, and ate manna from heaven.

Then Paul says something that completely stopped me. “They drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4, NKJV).

I’ve read that verse before, but this time I couldn’t move past it. That Rock was Christ. Not the water. The Rock.

I Think I’ve Been Looking for Water

If you asked the Israelites what they needed in the wilderness, they’d answer immediately: water. And they’d be right, because without it they’d die, I mean, who wouldn’t?

But what if God was teaching them something even bigger than how He provides? What if He was teaching them who provides?

The water came, and it also ran out. They got thirsty again, but the Rock remained. He literally chose an object where the provision of water would seem from the outside nearly impossible.

And suddenly I realized I think I’ve spent most of my life chasing water: money, security, predictability, a growing business, good health, the reassurance that everyone I love will be okay. I’ve literally been chasing things that come and go.

The Thought I’m Almost Ashamed to Admit

When I caught myself thinking about eating cat food under the bridge and then spiralling out about the potential of my husband (who’s perfectly healthy) dying, I remembered what I hear Christians often respond with: “but you’d still have Jesus.”

And this is the hard part for me to admit…I mean, I literally cringe admitting this:

My honest reaction was: So what? How is having Jesus enough?

Listen, this isn’t because I don’t love Jesus but because I’m realizing I don’t actually know what it means to trust Him if He hasn’t promised me the outcome I desperately want.

That’s a painful realization. But I think it’s an honest one.

Maybe I’ve Never Learned How to Suffer Well

I don’t want you to misunderstand this part. I absolutely believe suffering is inevitable, and more than that, I believe it forms us. Scripture is incredibly clear about that. God uses suffering to produce perseverance, character, humility, and dependence. I don’t think suffering is pointless. That isn’t what I’m wrestling with.

What I’m actually wrestling with is much more personal: how do I stop being afraid of it? Because if I’m honest, I don’t think I’ve ever learned how to suffer well.

For years my nervous system lived in survival mode. I’d catastrophize, rehearse worst-case scenarios, and fixate on everything that could go and was going wrong rather than fixing my eyes on Christ and what could and was going right. No wonder my hormones, gut, and nervous system eventually paid the price. Living like disaster is always around the corner is exhausting.

It’s why I have so much compassion for the women I work with in my practice at Thyroid Alchemy. Because as much as I remind the women I work with about their wins, it feels like half the time their eyes just glaze over the fact that focusing and being deeply grateful (not to me but God) for those wins is actually a part of their protocol.

Perimenopause Has Been Exposing Things I Didn’t Know Were Still There

Something else has been happening lately. As I walk through perimenopause, I honestly feel like more of this is coming to the surface.

I’ve started wondering if perimenopause isn’t only a physical transition. I wonder if it can also become a deeply spiritual one, almost as though God is gently exposing old fears, wounds, lies, and old places where I’ve unknowingly placed my trust, so He can start healing them.

I’m still processing that thought. (Side note: I think that deserves an article all on its own.)

So What Does It Mean to Trust the Rock?

I wish I could wrap this up with a neat Christian answer. I can’t. I’m still wrestling with it. But here’s what I’m beginning to see.

Maybe trusting the Rock doesn’t mean believing I’ll never be thirsty again. Israel got thirsty more than once. Maybe it doesn’t mean believing suffering won’t come. Jesus never promised that.

Maybe trusting the Rock means something much deeper: believing that Christ remains exactly who He says He is, even when my circumstances don’t become what I hoped they would.

Maybe that’s why Paul didn’t say the water was Christ. He said the Rock was Christ. Water comes, water goes. Businesses grow and shrink. Health changes. People leave. Circumstances shift. But the Rock remains.

And Paul didn’t write, “the Rock is Christ”; he wrote, “the Rock was Christ.” So maybe a part of the answer here is for me to go back in time and see all the times He was there with me through the hardest moments in life and produced a way that I would have never imagined at the time.

If I’m honest, there are still days when fear feels louder than faith, and days when I want guarantees more than I want God. But at least now I know what I’m praying for.

Not a life without suffering, certainty about tomorrow or the promise that I’ll never lose anything I love. I’m praying for something much harder:

a heart that trusts the Rock more than it trusts the water.

Maybe That’s the Miracle

Maybe the greatest miracle wasn’t simply that water came from a rock. Maybe the greater miracle is that Christ had been faithfully sustaining His people all along, even before they recognized Him.

Maybe that’s what Paul wanted the Corinthians to remember. And maybe it’s what I need to remember too.

Maybe learning to trust the Rock isn’t about becoming fearless because it’s actually about slowly discovering that Christ is more trustworthy than the story fear has been telling me since I was a little girl.

I don’t fully believe that yet. But for the first time, at least I feel I’m finally asking the right questions. I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

With love,

Melissa

I was reading James because I was in the middle of something personal, something I’m still working through, and a verse ambushed me halfway through the chapter and I haven’t been able to shake it since.

James 1:6:

“But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.”

My first read? I skipped right past it.

I assumed James was talking about the skeptic. The person lying awake wondering if God is real. The one on the edge of walking away from their faith entirely.

That’s not me. That’s not most of us.

But the more I sat with that verse, the more I started to wonder if James was talking about something far more uncomfortable. Something most of us would never identify as doubt at all.

Because here’s my honest confession: I don’t spend much time questioning whether God exists.

What I spend time doing is trying to figure out how everything is going to work out.

I want to know if I made the right call. I want to know what’s coming. I want to see around corners. I don’t just want certainty. I want guarantees.

That’s when the verse started to unsettle me.

The Greek word James uses, translated as “double-minded,” is dipsuchos. Literally, two-souled. Not someone who doesn’t believe. Someone divided. Someone being pulled in two directions at once.

And suddenly this wasn’t theoretical anymore.

I spent nearly three decades in the New Age. Not because I hated God or was trying to be rebellious. I was trying to feel safe. I was trying to know what was coming next. Tarot cards, psychics, oracle cards, manifestation — I wasn’t spiritually searching so much as I was desperately trying to get control over my own life.

Becoming a Christian didn’t cure that desire. I just started directing it at God instead.

“Okay, Lord. I’ll trust You. But can You just show me how this ends first?”

Maybe you’ve prayed some version of that prayer. Not because you’re faithless. Not because you’re walking away. But because certainty feels so much safer than trust, and a guaranteed outcome feels so much easier than pure dependence.

That’s the wave, I think.

A wave has no anchor. It moves wherever the wind pushes it. One good thing happens and I feel peace. One unexpected setback and the spiral starts. One answered prayer and I feel steady. One silence from God and suddenly I need explanations.

Everything shifts with the circumstances. Like a wave.

I’ve spent a long time thinking my biggest struggle was doubt.

I don’t think that’s right anymore.

I think it’s divided loyalty. Wanting God and wanting guarantees at the same time. Wanting faith while quietly keeping one hand on the steering wheel, just in case.

James wasn’t exposing my doubt but rather, my need for control.

And if that’s true, then maybe faith isn’t about finally getting all the answers. Maybe it’s about deciding who you trust when you don’t have them.

I wrestle through:

• Why my nervous system struggles so much with uncertainty

• Why I subconsciously believed faithfulness should equal protection

• How New Age spirituality fed my need for control

• What I’m slowly realizing about prayer, suffering and God

This one is messy, existential, uncomfortable and very much me thinking out loud in real time.

Thanks for listening.

With love and surrender,

Melissa

I was 15 the first time I walked into an occult shop.

At the time, it didn’t feel dark to me. It actually felt fascinating, mysterious and like maybe there were answers somewhere outside of the life I was currently living.

At the core of it, I believe I was searching for safety.

But let’s rewind for a second…

I grew up in a home with good parents, but emotionally, everyone always seemed overwhelmed by something. My father struggled deeply with anxiety and catastrophizing around his business. My sister, who was seven years older than me, was going through a very volatile teenage phase at the time. My mother spent most of her energy trying to hold the household together, whether it was not upsetting my father, calming my sister, or just keeping the peace.

And somewhere inside all of that, I learned very quickly not to become another problem.

I became quiet and highly introverted. I spent a lot of time alone in my room writing stories, painting, studying and learning how to disappear into myself.

Not because my father was abusive (because, to be clear, he never was). But I learned how to read the emotional temperature of a room constantly, how to walk on eggshells and stay small enough not to add more stress to an already emotionally overloaded environment.

Underneath all of that was this constant fear that everything could fall apart at any moment.

And looking back now, I think that fear shaped far more of my life than I realized at the time.

Growing up, spirituality itself wasn’t really a major part of my life. I attended Catholic school for a while, but my home itself was mostly godless. My father especially had a very negative association with religion because of his upbringing. His mother, who began having children at the age of 15 in a very poor and rural area in Brazil, was deeply religious (Protestant), but not in a way that brought safety or peace into his life. Religion, in his experience, felt harsh, fear-based, and controlling.

So faith never felt like an anchor growing up.

If anything, anxiety did.

Growing up, every year we would travel to Brazil, where my family is from, and some of my earliest exposures to spirituality weren’t through church or scripture. They were through fragmented moments that felt mysterious, intense, and honestly unsettling to me as a child.

Brazil is deeply multicultural, and there are spiritual traditions woven into everyday life there that were very different from anything I understood at the time. I remember one day running ahead of my family on the beach when I tripped and looked beside me to see a dead rooster lying in the sand (for reference, roosters don’t hang out on the beach) So even as a child, I knew it hadn’t just wandered there. It had clearly been left as part of some kind of ritual or sacrifice. Mind you, the fact that my family began yelling out, “Macumba! Macumba!” was enough of a hint.

Moments like that stayed with me.

Not because I fully understood them, but because they added to this growing feeling that there were unseen forces and things beneath the surface of ordinary life that maybe, somehow, could explain why the world felt so unstable to me.

By the time I was a teenager, I wasn’t just intrigued by spirituality anymore because I was drawn to it.

I think part of that came from how emotionally unsafe I had felt for so much of my childhood.

When you grow up constantly trying to read the room, trying not to upset anyone and trying to prevent things from falling apart, the idea of certainty becomes intoxicating.

Control becomes comforting. In fact, I made control my God and called it wisdom. But control isn’t safety, it’s a sword. Control isn’t wisdom; it’s self-protection, and self-protection is often self-sabotaging.

I mean, just show me what you’re white-knuckling and what you can’t let go of, and I’ll show you what you worship.

Looking back now, I can see that almost everything I became drawn to promised some version of safety:

Answers.

Signs.

Direction.

Reassurance.

The idea that maybe I could somehow avoid pain if I just understood enough, became smart enough, and somehow looked into the future, and even I suppose…manipulated it.

The first time I walked into an occult shop was during one of our trips to Brazil with my aunt. She was deeply into pyramids, energy, spiritual practices, and what I would now recognize as New Age beliefs. At the time, it all felt fascinating to me. It was mysterious, like there was something hidden underneath ordinary life that other people couldn’t see.

By the time I was 18, I bought my first tarot deck.

And if I’m being completely honest, tarot became less of a curiosity and more of a coping mechanism.

I didn’t trust myself, my life, and I certainly didn’t trust uncertainty.

So I started looking for reassurance everywhere.

I would pull cards constantly looking for direction, clarity, and confirmation. And even when I got an answer, it was never enough. I’d pull another clarifying card…and then another.

It became obsessive.

By the time I was in my 30s, I was deeply immersed in Wicca. So much so that when I’d hear women casually call themselves “witches,” it would actually irritate me. To me, it wasn’t some trendy feminist aesthetic or something you adopted after reading a book by Lisa Lister. I genuinely viewed Wicca as a religion I took seriously. I had studied it intensely and built parts of my identity around it.

Looking back now, I don’t think I was actually searching for enlightenment because what I was really after was relief from my anxiety.

And the strange thing is that even in the middle of all of it, I would still secretly pray to God sometimes. Not Hecate, Freya or Artemis…but God.

Especially when things got really hard.

I didn’t really know who He was. I didn’t understand Christianity, and from what I remember, we never spoke to Jesus in Catholic school. It was God, Mary and the Saints. Jesus felt distant, abstract and even silly to even be speaking to, and if I did, I’d be “one of those people.” But something in me still reached for Him anyway.

At the same time, I was becoming more deeply immersed in the New Age world, manifestation, tarot and learning to “co-create my reality.” The idea that your thoughts, energy, and frequency were shaping what happened to you.

And honestly, part of me loved it because it made me feel powerful.

If I could predict things, maybe I could protect myself.
If I could understand enough, maybe I could finally relax.
If I could manifest the right outcomes, maybe nothing bad would happen.

But underneath all of it, I was exhausted.

I white-knuckled everything in my life:

My business.
My future.
My relationships.
My success.
My healing.

I kept moving the goalposts, believing that if I just achieved enough, earned enough, became enough, then I would finally feel safe versus losing it all and eating cat food under a bridge.

But the safety never came.

And eventually, the logic behind manifestation started falling apart for me completely.

I remember looking at tragedies happening in the world and thinking: Are we really saying these people suffered because they were in the wrong frequency? That their lives fell apart because they “manifested” or simply weren’t in the “right frequency” somehow?

None of it made sense anymore.

That was the beginning of something cracking open in me.

Around that same time, I had a friend who loved Jesus deeply. I used to watch how she showed up with her four daughters and husband. A part of me looked at them and scoffed, thinking, “Ugh…Bible thumpers.” But the other part of me was a little curious because I secretly wondered what it must feel like to be that devoted.

After a series of frustrations with the new age, I looked up to the sky and said, “Jesus, if you’re real, show me something undeniable. Something that stops me dead in my tracks.”

Not long after that, while out walking my dogs on a route I had taken countless times before, I looked up and saw what looked like a glowing cross in the mountains. I just stood there in awe and thought, “Okay, maybe this is Him.”

But even then, despite the doubt that I still wrestled with, something had shifted.

But even then, despite the doubt that I still wrestled with, something had shifted.

And listen — if you’d told me even seven months ago that I would become a Christian, I would have laughed in your face. Genuinely. I was probably one of the most judgmental New Agers you’d find when it came to Christianity. Bible thumpers. Blind faith. All of it. I had an opinion and I wasn’t quiet about it.

So I understand if you’re reading this and rolling your eyes a little. I get it. I was you.

But here’s the thing I’ve wrestled with when it comes to sharing any of this, especially to people who are where I used to be: I can’t argue someone into what I experienced. You can’t describe a mountain view to someone who’s never seen mountains and expect them to feel it. They’ll nod and say that sounds nice. But they won’t know it. This wasn’t an intellectual conversion for me but rather an encounter. And those don’t transfer, they just kind of…happen.

All I can do is tell you what it was like on my side of it.

Slowly, the things that once pulled me in started repulsing me instead.

Not out of fear but out of exhaustion.

I started realizing that so much of my spirituality had never actually been about peace, because it had been about control.

And Christianity confronted that in a way nothing else ever had.

Because faith doesn’t operate like a vending machine.

You don’t just ask for certainty and immediately receive an answer.

You don’t get to eliminate suffering.

You don’t get full control over outcomes.

And honestly, the surrender, the waiting and trusting God when I don’t fully understand what He’s doing has been categorically the hardest.

I still wrestle with the idea of suffering, uncertainty, and at times wanting reassurance.

But I also know this:

For the first time in my life, I don't feel like I have to be my own saviour anymore. Turns out, that position was already filled. That 15-year-old girl walking into an occult shop? She just walked into the wrong door. The right one was open the whole time.