I have a question for all the beautiful people in the world.

Do you know, I mean, really know that you are beautiful?

Do people like Margot Robbie wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and think to themselves, “damn, I really lucked out. I’m fucking hot!” I genuinely want to know the answer.

The first time I ever saw Margot Robbie in a movie I remember thinking, this woman is ridiculously beautiful. I thought to myself that if she ever wanted to date me, even just for one night, I would definitely switch teams. I remember asking myself, “does she look in the mirror and see what the rest of us see? Or does she immediately notice her wrinkles, her pores, her hair that isn’t cooperating or some other tiny feature that the rest of the world wouldn’t notice in a million years?”

I’ve wondered about this for a long time because I can honestly say I have Never looked in the mirror and thought, “I’m beautiful.”

I’m certainly not comparing myself to Margot Robbie, we are talking about entirely different leagues here, but that is part of the reason that the question fascinates me. Because even on my own very normal level, despite being told over the years that I was pretty, I’ve never looked in the mirror and thought that. I’m not even sure I have ever looked in the mirror and thought to myself I’m cute.

I have thought, I must have slept well, my face isn’t puffy. Or even, hey I don’t look too bad today. I have had times when I’ve been working out and felt good enough about my body that I could put on a swimsuit on vacation and not immediately look for something to cover myself with. I’ve even had a few days when I’ve thought; okay, I look okay today, but that is very different.

Over the years, I have had people tell me I’m pretty and some have even called me beautiful. I have run into people I knew in high school that told me they had a crush on me years earlier. Once in a while someone will say something to me about my appearance and they act like I should already know what they’re telling me. Every time, it comes as a complete shock and my response has almost always been some version of, “Yeah, right.” And it is not because I want them to convince me otherwise or because I’m fishing for another compliment.

Last week, I was showing a new friend a picture of my ex-husband because we had been talking about him. Ever since he passed away, I have kept a little collection of old photographs on my phone that I look at sometimes and one of them was our engagement picture.

She told me she thought he was handsome, but then she started talking about me, “Oh my God. You were so pretty.” And I did what I’ve done my entire life, look at her like she is crazy and give a ‘yeah right’ laugh with a half assed ‘thanks’.

She looked at the photograph and saw one person, while I looked at the exact same photograph and saw another. My eyes always went straight to my nose, that was always the thing. When I was young, I was convinced my nostrils were too wide and at some point I came up with what I thought was a brilliant solution. I put a bobby pin across them before I went to sleep thinking that somehow that would make them narrower. I would fall asleep with my nostrils pinched together and wake up in the middle of the night panicking because I couldn’t breathe. You would think that would have been enough to make me stop, but it wasn’t.

I had an equally sophisticated strategy for my waist. I would take the belts from my robes and wrap them around my waist as tightly as I could. I would sleep that way, convinced that if I did it often enough, my waist would permanently become smaller. Just like with the bobby pin, I would wake up in the middle of the night unable to breathe, apparently younger me believed most of my cosmetic problems could be solved through nighttime suffocation.

What’s funny now is looking back at pictures from that time. There was nothing wrong with my body. I took dance and gymnastics, I was athletic and I never really struggled with my weight. However, dance and gymnastics gave me a butt, so of course I decided it was too big. My hair wasn’t thick enough, my nose not small enough, always something to complain about. That is one of the strangest things about getting older and looking back at pictures of your younger self. You want to reach into the photograph, grab that girl by the shoulders and say, “What in the world were you complaining about?”

And yet, while I could always find something wrong with myself, I never did have trouble seeing beauty in other people.

One of my best friends growing up was someone I always thought was beautiful. She was thin, had beautiful hair, and when she stood and locked her knees, they bowed backward just a little and I thought it made her more adorable. She had all these little things about her that made her uniquely her. We are still friends to this day and I still adore her. I was never jealous of her in the kind of way that makes you want someone else to have less, I’ve honestly never understood that kind of jealousy. I didn’t want her to be any less beautiful, I just sometimes wondered what it would feel like to look like her.

There was also a girl a year older than me in high school who was a cheerleader with long blonde hair and I thought she was the cutest thing ever. She was beautiful and athletic and good at gymnastics and I’d occasionally look at her and wonder the same thing. What would it be like to look like that?

Years later, when I was married, my husband and I were walking through Target when a woman walked past us and I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as captivated by a complete stranger. I’ve seen beautiful people all over the world, but there was something striking about this woman. I whispered to my husband, “Oh my God. Did you see that woman?” His face said it all and at the same time we both said we had never seen anyone in real life that beautiful.

I have thought about that woman occasionally over the years, wondering what it would be like to walk through Target and have complete strangers notice you like that? But, even more than that, I wonder what she saw when she looked in the mirror. Did she see the same beauty we saw or did she go home and stand three inches from the mirror criticizing something about herself? That’s what fascinates me, because apparently the way other people see us and the way we see ourselves can be completely different.

I’ve had people tell me over the years that I resemble Julia Roberts, which I consider an enormous compliment because Julia Roberts is beautiful. There’s only one problem, I don’t see it at all. I have looked at pictures of her and tried to find whatever resemblance other people apparently see, and I can’t find it.

There is one famous face I immediately recognized myself in and it is not Julia Roberts. The first time I saw a picture of the Sphinx while learning about Egypt, I remember thinking “well, there it is, my dopple ganger.” Finally, a celebrity resemblance I could actually see. Years later when I traveled to Egypt and stood in front of her, in person, I felt the resemblance had pretty much been confirmed… Julia Roberts, I don’t see it, ancient Egyptian monument, absolutely, at least I eventually learned to laugh about the nose.

Ironically, when I had my daughter, she got exactly the kind of nose I always wished I had, a perfect little button nose. I remember looking at her as she grew up and thinking she had the most beautiful little face. I was so proud that I had somehow produced this gorgeous child with this adorable nose. Then I had my son, and as he got older, every once in a while we’d compare pictures of him with pictures of me when I was young and the resemblance became impossible to deny. He looks so much like I did and I think he is incredibly handsome. For the first time in my life, I looked at features that clearly came from me and thought those are actually pretty good features. Apparently my nose was fine all along, it was just meant to be on a boy.

Despite being so critical of myself, I somehow managed to teach my kids to see beauty differently. I have always taught them that everybody has something beautiful about them and that the things that make us different are often the things that make us the most interesting. My son is 23 now and if he thinks someone is beautiful or good-looking, he tells them. It doesn’t matter if it is a woman or a man, some random stranger he’ll never see again. Sometimes I watch people trying to figure out how to respond to him because most of us are not used to complete strangers simply saying something nice without wanting anything in return.

My daughter notices beauty in everyone too. She will point out how beautiful her friends are. She notices someone’s hair, face, body or some unusual feature that makes them unique. She can think another woman is absolutely gorgeous without somehow believing that takes anything away from her. I love that about both of them, and maybe I’m especially proud of it because it took me so much longer to learn the same thing.

Someone else being beautiful doesn’t make us any less beautiful. Someone else’s thin body doesn’t make ours the wrong size and someone else’s little button nose doesn’t make ours too big. Beauty is not some limited resource that we have to compete for, we just need to learn to appreciate the differences. Maybe that’s the irony in all of this, I’ve spent most of my life being able to find something beautiful in almost everyone except myself.

Traveling has only made that more true. I’ve been fortunate enough to see people all over the world, with different skin, hair, facial features and bodies, and some of the features that make people look the most different from one another are the things that I find the most beautiful. I love faces that are interesting and features that are unique. I can look at another person and immediately see that the thing that makes them different is the thing that makes them who they are. But for a long time, when it came to myself, different meant wrong.

If I’m being honest, I was not sure where I was going with this when I started writing this article. It came from looking at myself in the mirror and instead of telling myself I’m getting old and ugly, I told myself I wasn’t doing too bad for my age, which is a big change. And I did just start to wonder if we are all this hard on ourselves or if there are people who look in the mirror and are proud of what they see, without finding faults. I wanted to know whether or not the people the rest of us consider beautiful actually know that they are beautiful.

Somewhere in the middle of writing this, I realized I needed to ask myself a different question as well. How many years do we waste believing a story about ourselves that isn’t actually true? Because when I look at old pictures now, I don’t see what I saw then. I don’t see the nose that was too wide or the butt that was too big or the hair that wasn’t thick enough. Sometimes I look at that younger version of myself and want to ask her what in the hell she was so worried about.

And now, of course I’m older, I have wrinkles, my skin isn’t as tight and menopause has introduced me to a tiny little situation around my belly button that I most certainly did not request. My body doesn’t look the way it did when I was twenty-five or even thirty-five, but something about getting older has also made me appreciate it more.

This is the body that learned to ski just because I decided that if other people could do it, I could too. It water-skied, it danced and it did gymnastics. It has walked mile after mile through cities all over the world and has taken me to places the little girl sleeping with a bobby pin clipped to her nose couldn’t possibly have imagined seeing. Most importantly, this body created and gave birth to my two favorite humans. While it was doing all of that for me, I spent far too much time criticizing how it looked and that is the very thing I wish I had understood much sooner.

If I could go back and sit beside that insecure little girl lying in bed with bobby pins clipped to her nose and robe belts tied around her waist, I would tell her to stop trying so hard to become somebody else. I’d tell her that she is beautiful, but more importantly, I’d tell her that beauty was never supposed to mean looking like the prettiest girl in school, her best friend, the woman walking through Target or anyone else. We are supposed to look uniquely different, like ourselves.

I would like to tell her to stop searching her face for everything that is wrong with it and start noticing what makes it hers. I would tell her to appreciate her body before she looks back at photographs decades later and realizes how hard she was on something that deserved her gratitude. I would like to tell her that her body is going to do much more important things than look good in a swimsuit. It is going to carry her babies until they are too big to carry. It will play games and sports with her children, even when they don’t go easy on her. It is going to walk across countries, survive exhaustion, heartbreak and grief, and take her through a life she can’t even imagine yet.

I would tell her not to spend so much time thinking about her body that she forgets everything else she has to appreciate; her brain, her humor, her curiosity, her ability to love people and her ability to get knocked down in life and eventually get back up. And finally, I would tell her something I wish I could give every insecure young girl who is standing too close to a mirror examining everything she thinks is wrong with her.

Stop waiting until you’re older to appreciate what you have now, because one day you will look at an old picture and realize that the young girl you were so fucking mean to was perfectly fine. She just couldn’t see herself the way she saw everyone else.

I still don’t know if Margot Robbie looks in the mirror and knows she’s Margot-fucking-Robbie, maybe she does. If so, good for her, I hope somebody does. But I suspect a lot of the people we look at and think are beautiful are standing in front of their own mirrors noticing things the rest of us would never see.

Maybe none of us experiences our own beauty the way other people experience it. Maybe the goal isn’t to reach some magical point where we finally look in the mirror and decide we are beautiful enough and maybe it’s simply learning to stop looking for evidence that we’re not.

This is my face and this is my body. It is much older now and it has changed. There are wrinkles that weren’t there before and parts that have apparently decided gravity is no longer optional, but this is the body that got me here. And after everything we have been through together, it seems a little rude to keep criticizing it.

I am going to spend the rest of my life surrounded by beauty. I’ll see it in my friends, in strangers, in my children and in people all over the world. I’ll see it in tiny button noses and crooked noses, in faces that are perfectly symmetrical and faces that aren’t. I will continue to see it in all the little differences that make people look like themselves. I’ve always been pretty good at finding beauty all around me, I just wish it hadn’t taken me this long to find it in myself.

Please don’t waste so many years believing that everyone else’s differences are beautiful while yours are flaws. You were never supposed to look like them, you were only ever supposed to look like you and you should have been on your own list of beautiful people all along.

For the last several months, I have been working at a behavioral health outpatient center with people who have finally had enough of the way they were living and finally made it to treatment. Every day I hear stories from people who have known for a long time that something in their life needed to change. Most stories are filled with tragedies of overdoses, jail sentences, stress induced psychosis, ruined marriages and many other horrific outcomes. However, knowing they needed to make a change wasn’t enough to actually do something about it. It often took something painful, frightening or simply impossible to ignore before they finally decided to do something differently.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about it and what it actually takes to make us change. Why is it that most people can’t make a change by simply knowing they need to? Why is knowing the potential consequences of our actions not enough to want to prevent them? Why does that knowledge so often fail to motivate us until the consequences of our actions stop being theoretical and become reality? Why does something bad have to happen to change the direction of our lives because we weren’t changing on our own

It made me start thinking about how often I’ve seen the same thing happen to people I know, including myself. I’m not talking about addiction alone. I see it in neglected relationships, long term work stress, poor eating habits, or never going for annual medical check ups.

There are things that have happened in my life that I would have given anything to undo at the time, but I now look back on with gratitude because things may have never changed otherwise. I do believe the things we would never choose can teach us something or take us somewhere we might not have gone otherwise.

When I see some of my patients and hear their stories, it reminds me of what happened to my son 6 years ago when he was in high school. I hear how far down a dark road they have gone and I can imagine that Dylan would be somewhere on that road too, if one major consequence hadn’t yanked him out of it.

Dylan started smoking marijuana his junior year in high school during COVID. What started out as occasionally smoking it a few times a month with friends became an all day, daily habit. Just like most teenagers during COVID he was stuck at home with no social life, bored to tears with way too much time on his hands. He is that kid with ADHD that needs to have human interaction, sports, and changing scenery to keep him happy. At first he tried to hide it from me, but he was so incredibly high all the time, anyone with half a brain would have figured it out. He kept saying, “It’s just weed mom. It’s harmless and legal now.” I kept telling him it wasn’t legal for him and that a developing brain shouldn’t be exposed to it, he definitely wasn’t listening.

As his marijuana use increased, I had to watch my silly, carefree, class-clown kid become unbelievably paranoid, bat shit crazy and kind of an asshole. I remember one night he came to me angry, talking about needing to break up with his girlfriend because he was convinced she was in a porn video. I was like, Dylan, why in the world would you think that? Apparently, in a video he saw online, there was a white wall in it and there was the exact same white wall at his girlfriend’s house. I was waiting for more detail, but that was it, that was his evidence…a white wall. I tried telling him that the majority of houses in the world have white walls, but there was no reasoning with him. In his pot fueled mind, he had cracked the case.

Many nights I would wake up at 2 am with the feeling something was wrong and would find that he and his car were gone. He would shut off his ‘find my iphone and his phone so I couldn’t locate or call him. One day I had enough and I got angry with him and took his car away. He told me I didn’t love him and dramatically sulked out to our swimming pool and said he was going to drown himself. Of course I went in after him, my 125 lbs self tried to drag my soaking-wet, hoodie-wearing, 225-pound son out of the pool. It was absolutely ridiculous and I couldn’t stop asking myself how this was my life now. I had been talking to my kids about drugs and what they can do to you since they were little, after they watched me deal with my alcohol problem. I guess I convinced myself they would never do any of it.

I can laugh at the absurdity of these situations now, but I wasn’t laughing then. This wasn’t the Dylan I knew anymore, and it was obvious his marijuana use was getting out of control.

I spent hours going through his room, watching and warning him, trying to explain where this could lead him. When that didn’t work, I made him start going to see two therapists, I figured I would cover all the bases. One was my therapist, who I hoped would be able to help him look at the bigger picture and how he was coping with life or rather, not coping. The other specialized in addiction and focused specifically on his marijuana and now mushroom use.

Dylan only went because I threatened to have him committed to a psych ward otherwise, At the time, it didn’t seem to make much difference, but looking back maybe some of what they said sank in and planted ideas he wasn’t ready to act on yet. But knowing something isn’t good for you and being ready to change it are two very different things, after all. He didn’t care what any of us ‘old’ people said and continued getting high nonstop.

One day he asked me if he could sell his motorcycle and use the money to buy an old Mustang. One thing he loves to do is work on cars and he wanted one he could fix up. I agreed, believing it would keep him busy and focused on the car and hopefully get him away from marijuana.

But instead, the day after he bought it the transmission blew, costing me another $3,000. Then a few days later, he proceeded to lose the title before we ever got a chance to register it in our names. We couldn’t get the guy who sold it to us to call us back, probably because he knew he sold us a lemon, and I had no idea how to get another one. And because we had too many cars at the house, he parked it on the street and I started getting notices and fines from the homeowners association. It was one annoyance after another since the day he bought it.

Then something that I never imagined any human could do, happened. He lost the entire car! He had driven somewhere to meet friends and had gotten so high that he couldn’t remember where he had parked it. We drove around in places he thought he left it for days and still couldn’t find it. And due to the lost title situation, we couldn’t call the police and ask them to help us find it. At that point I was so sick of that car and all the nonsense that came with it, I didn’t care anymore. I think I may have actually been a little relieved it was gone, even if it meant losing the $8,000 it cost. Wherever it was, as far as I was concerned, it could live there now. I wanted to forget about the whole situation. After he lost his car, he kept saying he was going to quit smoking, that he knew he needed to, but he still wasn’t ready.

Nowadays, it is one of our favorite family stories, mine and Lexi’s at least. Whenever my kids are arguing and they call each other stupid, all Lexi has to say is, “You lost an entire car.” Dylan’s only response is, “Yep, true. Touché.”

As funny as it is now, it was the opposite back then. Underneath the lost car and the ridiculous stories, I was terrified of what was happening to my son. By this time, he also started experimenting with mushrooms with his friends and becoming more distant to his family. I had tried everything I knew to do: talking to him, reasoning with him, getting him professional help, even giving him something else to focus on. But, none of them were making him want to stop.

I was beginning to understand that you can give someone every reason in the world to change, but until they have their own reason, they won’t.

One of Dylan’s friends had parents who owned a dispensary and he would steal from his parents to sell to underage users. He made a deal with Dylan that he would give him free weed if Dylan drove him around to make the deals. Dylan told me later that he didn’t think it was a big deal because weed isn’t a dangerous drug and it was legal. He assumed everyone who smoked weed was “chill.” Besides, getting marijuana for free just for driving was an insanely good deal.

Then came the night that his friend asked him to make a deal for him because he was going to be busy. It was going to be a big sale and the buyers were driving in from an hour and a half away to buy from him. Dylan of course said no problem and made a decision that still makes me shake my head and cringe just thinking about it. He gave them our address and told them he would meet them at the end of our street.

When they arrived, four men all got out of the car. They immediately pulled a gun on him and demanded that he give them all of his drugs and money. Dylan tried to explain that he was only doing this for a friend and that he didn’t have anything else. He even offered them his Xbox, which I can laugh about now because it’s so Dylan, being held at gunpoint and somehow trying to negotiate his way out of it with an Xbox.

Eventually they must have believed him. But before they left, one of them walked up to him and hit him as hard as he could in the back of the head. The guy used the butt of the gun, which dropped Dylan to the ground. Then the guy held the gun on him once more, making Dylan think he was going to die, then they all got in their car and drove away.

Somehow, Dylan got up and walked home. He didn’t want to tell me what happened, so he told his sister. The back of his head was gushing blood, she walked him into my room as I was getting ready for bed and made him tell me what had happened.

I immediately took him to the nearest emergency room and we spent that night at the hospital while they watched him for a possible brainbleed. While I sat next to his hospital bed my mind kept going somewhere I didn’t want it to go, “What if they had pulled the trigger?”

My brain kept replaying all the ways that night could have ended differently, “What if my son had walked to the end of our street and never walked back?” I couldn’t stop thinking about how close my family had come to an irreversible tragedy, from a situation he never should have put himself in in the first place. I’d spent months trying to wake him up, trying to scare him with all the things that could happen someday if he continued this path. And then, out of nowhere, someday did show up and met him at the end of our street, holding a gun.

That night scared the shit out of Dylan in a way that nothing I said ever could. After that happened, he was immediately done and hasn’t touched a single substance since. No Marijuana, alcohol, vape or anything else, he decided he no longer wanted any part of that in his life. In fact he decided to watch over everyone else and became a designated driver for his friends, refusing to let any of them go to a party with their car.

And as strange as it probably sounds, one of the scariest nights of Dylan’s life is also something he and I can look back on with a certain amount of gratitude. I’m not grateful that someone pointed a gun at my son or hit him over the head with it, but I am grateful that he came home alive and that something changed in him afterward. Whenever he goes with me to walk the dogs he will point to the spot and say “that’s the spot where I could have died” and when I ask him if we can not talk about it, he says “why not? I’m glad it happened because it woke me up.”

And it is true, I don’t know what would have happened to him otherwise. Maybe he would have eventually grown out of it and stopped on his own. But, with our family history of being easily prone to addiction, it probably would have gotten worse and possibly for many years, ultimately almost ruining his life.

One thing I have learned from some of the hardest things that have happened to us, is that we don’t have to be grateful for the terrible thing itself. Sometimes we just need to be grateful for the lesson we learned and for the person who walked out the other side of it.

I had my own version of knowing something needed to change and still not changing it years before Dylan had his. I only drank for about eleven months after my divorce, but it became a problem pretty quickly. I knew it was getting bad, but alcohol was the one thing I’d found that could shut my brain off and numb pain I didn’t know how to deal with. At the time, I wasn’t ready to give that up.

Eventually, I had a night that I drank so much I almost died. I stopped breathing and my boyfriend at the time had to perform CPR on me. I ended up in the hospital with a blood alcohol level of .39, people tend to die at a level of 0.40. The next day I was transferred to a psychiatric facility because they needed to make sure I wasn’t a danger to myself or anyone else. I remember sitting in a room with brown lounge chairs, listening to a 70 year old lady trying to escape and yelling that she had to leave because she was about to have a baby. Soon after that I was forced to go to rehab for 30 days. I didn’t go because I’d had some great moment of clarity and decided I was ready to change my life. The choice was basically made for me and I’m still grateful for those that told me I had to go.

My mom once told me that of all her children, I was the last person she ever would have expected to become an alcoholic. She used to say she wished it hadn’t happened and she would blame my ex-husband for the things he put me through and getting me to that point. But I never saw it that way, I don’t blame him for me becoming an alcoholic. Sure, the things he said and did after his stroke and leading up to the divorce may have been the reason I turned to drinking so I didn’t have to feel it, but I only have myself to blame for how I chose to cope. I could have gone to therapy, but instead I chose to numb myself, I couldn’t blame somebody else for me making that choice

And the truth is, I wouldn’t change it and I am actually grateful for what I learned. I’m also grateful that my drinking didn’t continue for years, causing far more damage to myself and my kids. I might feel very differently if it had. But I’m also incredibly grateful that those eleven months brought me into recovery, not because I’m grateful for the things that happened while I was drinking, but because recovery changed me in ways that are hard to explain.

I sometimes joke that everybody on the planet should join a 12-step program or at least see a therapist on a regular basis, whether they have an addiction or not. Not because everyone needs treatment, but because I wish everyone had something that made them look as closely at themselves as recovery makes one look at themselves. You start figuring out why you react the way you do, what you’re trying to control, what you’re afraid of, what you need to take responsibility for and what you need to let go of. You sit in rooms with people who have made every kind of mistake imaginable, and somewhere along the way you become a lot less interested in judging other people. It also makes you more compassionate to other people’s suffering. There’s also something incredibly powerful about having people around you who understand what you’ve been through, what you’re trying to do and they want to help you do it.

I think there are too many people who go through their whole lives unhappy, angry, anxious, judgmental, controlling or just dissatisfied with life and nothing ever forces them to stop and ask themselves why. Recovery didn’t allow me that option, and I am very grateful for that. The hard things in life don’t get to me the way they used to. I don’t worry nearly as much and I have learned to laugh at the inconveniences. I don’t let people upset me anymore, no matter how angry they get and I don’t feel the same need to control how everything turns out. It isn’t that I’ve become some permanently peaceful person who never gets annoyed, my kids would be happy to clear that up but, it turns out that most things aren’t important enough to ruin my day anymore.

So when my mom says she wishes I never had to go through that period of my life, I understand why. She’s my mother, of course she does. But I don’t wish that.

I’m grateful it didn’t last longer and I’m grateful it happened, because I don’t think I would be the person I am now without what recovery taught me. I still have emotions and immediate reactions like anyone else, but I’m much more likely now to stop, think things through and pay attention to what I already know before I act.

I’ve done the same thing in other parts of my life. I spent years in a job that was slowly draining the life out of me. Working 15 hour shifts with little to no break and being hounded to work 70 to 80 hours a week. Having upper management come in and list everything we were doing wrong in their eyes and getting no appreciation. What they expected from us was nearly impossible to achieve without staying longer on your own dime. Not to mention patients coming in and yelling at me all day because I didn’t control the horrible health care in the United States.

I had been dreaming of pursuing other interests for years, but it is hard to leave a job when you are making really good money and you went to 10 years of college for it. Plus, I had been a Pharmacist for so long, I didn’t know if I had a clue how to do anything else. However unhappy I was, I was too afraid to make a change. If I hadn’t eventually lost my job during another difficult period in my life, with the suicide of my ex husband, an unthinkable situation within my family, and being pressured to work too many hours on no sleep, I honestly don’t know if I would have ever found the courage to leave and start over. Getting fired forced me to do something I’d been talking about doing for years, and looking back now, I haven’t missed pharmacy for one second. I’m being given an opportunity to find work that is meaningful to me and isn’t trying to kill me.

People do the same thing in relationships. How many times does one person tell the other, I’m unhappy, I need more from you, I don’t feel like you care anymore, and nothing ever really changes? They ask, they explain, they give a million chances and spend years trying to fix it. Maybe the saddest part is how easy it can be to stop appreciating someone while they’re still there trying and still hoping. We get used to their presence, their effort, even their forgiveness, and somehow assume they’ll just keep giving it.

Then one day they can’t anymore and they stop trying. They say they’re done and that they are leaving, and suddenly the other person sees everything they hadn’t been paying attention to. All of a sudden they are willing to go to counseling, to do better and they beg, “Just don’t leave.”. Why does it sometimes take the possibility of actually losing someone before we appreciate the person we had all along?

I’ve seen it over and over in healthcare too. Over the years, I’ve watched people become seriously ill from things they knew were hurting them and beg for another chance. They start promising that if someone can just make them better, they will stop drinking, stop smoking or finally take better care of themselves. They didn’t suddenly learn that those things could hurt them, they had known for years. What changed was that the consequence was no longer something that might happen someday, it was happening to them now.

Maybe that’s the strange thing about change. We would like to think knowing something is wrong should be enough to make us do something differently, but sometimes it isn’t. The familiar thing we are doing can still feel safer and more enjoyable than the unfamiliar thing that might make us happy and healthy. Or maybe sometimes we just keep telling ourselves we will deal with it later and later becomes further and further away. Suddenly, life doesn’t give us that choice anymore. I don’t know whether everything happens for a reason or not. Maybe it does, but I do believe that even the things we would never choose can change us, teach us something, or push us somewhere we weren’t brave enough to go on our own.

There are things in my life I once would have erased if someone had given me the chance. Now, some of them are the very things I am now grateful they happened.

Maybe the lesson isn’t that we should be grateful for terrible things, maybe it is that we should learn to listen to what we already know before life has to scream it at us.

No child is born having enemies, they have to be taught who to fear.

Every child enters the world the same way, filled with curiosity and open to whoever they meet. Reaching for another child they’ve never met and ready to laugh with another child they met 2 minutes earlier. They don’t care what religion the other child’s family belongs to or where their parents came from and they certainly don’t know they are supposed to be suspicious of each other yet.

The fear and hatred for others comes later. Somewhere along the way, someone teaches us who “they” are and once we learn who “they” are… it’s surprisingly easy to forget that they were once children, too.

Which made me wonder… who teaches us who the enemy is?

That question has stayed with me ever since a conversation I had recently with a man in recovery. We were talking about things that shaped who we are; our shame, things from our pasts or parts of ourselves we’ve struggled to accept. Eventually he told me something that surprised me, “I’m embarrassed to be Jewish” he said. I would never have thought he felt that way as he seemed to proudly wear his yarmulke on the top of his head daily.

I asked him why he was embarrassed and he told me that growing up, he was taught that the world hated Jewish people and wanted to kill them. More specifically, that Muslims hated them and wanted them dead. He was taught that the jewish people could be rounded up again someday and that another Holocaust could happen.

He wasn’t angry when he told me and he wasn’t trying to convince me of the same thing. He was simply telling me what he had been taught to believe as a child.

I asked him, “Do you still believe that?” He paused then answered, “I don’t know.”

“So, if your children came to you today,” I asked, “would you want them to carry that same fear?” He paused again, then said “I think I already taught them that fear.”

When he told me all of this, I found myself getting angry, annoyed even. With everything happening in Gaza, it was hard for me to listen to someone talk about being taught to fear Muslims without thinking about the Palestinian families who are suffering right now. I was dumbfounded that a grown man could still believe this and not see the truth.

I need to be honest; I walked into that conversation carrying plenty of my own emotions. I am outraged by what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza. So, when he began talking about growing up afraid of Muslims, part of me wanted to pull away or ask him how he could still possibly believe that. I look at the atrocities happening to the Palestinians and I feel grief, anger, and disbelief. I believe we have a moral responsibility to speak out when innocent people are suffering, even when doing so is uncomfortable.

Then I stopped myself, not because my outrage disappeared, but because I realized something uncomfortable. The person sitting across from me wasn’t a government, he wasn’t a military commander, and he wasn’t the one directly inflicting the harm. He was a human being describing the fear he inherited as a child.

And that made me ask myself a different question… At what point does inherited fear stop protecting us and start imprisoning us? At what point does it stop being a survival instinct and become a reason to dehumanize people we’ve been taught to fear—most of whom we’ve never even met—until another parent’s child is no longer seen as a child at all, but as the enemy?

This isn’t something that belongs to one religion or one group of people. History doesn’t just leave us with stories; it has a way of creating fear that gets passed down for generations.

Every community that has survived unimaginable trauma carries scars: You can see it in Jewish families who were shaped by the Holocaust, and in Palestinian families who have lived through generations of displacement, occupation, loss, war and the present horror of an ongoing genocide. You can see it in black families shaped by slavery and racism, in Indigenous families with legacies of stolen land and stolen children, and in refugees who have fled homes they may never see again.

The trauma doesn’t just disappear when a war ends and we don’t just leave it all behind when a generation dies. It more often than not becomes the story we hand to our children.

Parents tell their children what happened because they want them to know their history or even to protect them. Sometimes that story keeps them safe, but most often it keeps them afraid. There is a difference between remembering history and becoming trapped by it.

We should remember history, of course we should. Remembering honors those who suffered, but remembering isn’t the same thing as teaching a child to expect it from everyone they meet. Living in perpetual fear risks allowing yesterday’s trauma to dictate tomorrow’s choices.

I’m not suggesting that these fears come from nowhere or that the threats people face aren’t real. Antisemitism does exist, so does Islamophobia and racism. There are people in this world who genuinely hate other people just because of their skin color or their religious beliefs. But if we teach children to see an enemy before they even see a person, how does any of this ever get better? If every stranger becomes a potential enemy, fear becomes the loudest voice in the room and fear is rarely a good architect for peace.

There is one thing I want to make absolutely clear. I oppose the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza. My anger and criticism is directed at a government and its policies—not at Jewish people or Judaism and not at an entire ethnic or religious community. The two are not the same thing.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve allowed a dangerous idea to take hold; that criticizing the actions of the Israeli government automatically makes someone antisemitic and that just isn’t true. Antisemitism is hatred, prejudice, or discrimination against Jewish people because they are Jewish. Opposing the policies or military actions of a government is something else entirely.

The two ideas should never be treated as interchangeable. Conflating them does harm in every direction and can silence legitimate criticism of governments. It can also make it harder to recognize genuine antisemitism when it actually occurs.

Understanding the fear carried by the man sitting across from me didn’t make me any less heartbroken for Palestinian families. What it did was remind me to put the responsibility where it belongs.

Governments, politicians, military leaders and political movements make decisions, children do not. Ordinary people do not deserve to be reduced to the worst actions committed in their name.

I had to confront something in myself too. If I believe Palestinians deserve to be seen as human beings instead of stereotypes, then I have to extend that same humanity to the Jewish man sitting across from me. Not because I agreed with anything he had been taught and not because I stopped opposing what is happening in Gaza

But because that’s exactly what I wish the world would do for everyone. I don’t want a world where Palestinian families live in fear, and I don’t want a world where Jewish families live in fear either. Mostly, I don’t want another generation of children to grow up with the belief that another group of human beings is destined to be their enemy.

Our histories should teach us empathy and not perpetual hatred. The lesson of past atrocities should never be that one people’s suffering matters more than another’s. It should be that no group of people should have to endure them again.

The easiest thing in the world is to inherit someone else’s fear, while the hardest thing in the world is to inherit it… and decide it ends with you. Imagine raising children who know history without becoming prisoners of it and who recognize injustice without assuming everyone is an enemy. They should be able to mourn the suffering of their own people without becoming indifferent to the suffering of someone else’s.

Maybe that’s how cycles finally break. Every generation has a choice, we can hand our children our wisdom or we can hand them our fear and call it history.

I still think about that conversation. Not because I believe one man spoke for an entire religion or an entire people, he didn’t. I think about it because, for a moment, I watched someone realize, maybe for the first time, that he passed something to his children that he wasn’t sure he wanted them to have. That the greatest inheritance he might leave his children wasn’t his faith, his traditions, or his history, but his fear.

As I left that conversation, I realized something… Every one of us has inherited a story we didn’t write. The question isn’t whether or not we inherited it, the question is whether or not we will keep telling it.

Maybe that’s the question we need to be asking ourselves. Not just what did our parents teach us, but what did they hand us that no longer belongs in the next generation.

What fears have we inherited that we never chose and which ones will end with us?

“When was your last mammogram?” my OB-GYN asked during my annual exam.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Probably a while ago.”

She glanced back at my chart.

“Actually, you had one last March.”

Then she paused.

“That was after they found the lump. The biopsy came back benign.”

I laughed.

“Wait… what? The what?”

She looked up from my chart.

“The lump.”

“I had a lump?”

Now she looked confused.

“Yes… you had a mammogram, additional imaging, and a biopsy.”

I stared at her.

“I don’t remember that.”

She looked at me like I was joking, then with concern. She described a series of events that should have been impossible to forget: a mammogram, follow-up testing, weeks of uncertainty, conversations about what might happen if the results came back badly.

The problem was not that she remembered those events differently than I did. The problem was that I didn’t remember them at all.

The strange part isn’t that I don’t remember that season of my life.

I do.

I could recall countless details about the people around me. I remember conversations with my family during the year following my ex-husband’s suicide. I remembered a friend’s marital struggles, I remembered another friend’s financial hardship. I remembered the challenges my children were facing at school and with their acceptance of their father’s death.

I remember checking on people I loved. I remember who needed encouragement, who needed a phone call, who needed someone to show up.

I remember birthdays, celebrations, disappointments, crises, and ordinary conversations that somehow stayed with me.

I remember all of it.

What I could not remember was my own experience wondering whether I had cancer. At first, I viewed this as a memory problem, then an attention problem. Then I was just unsure…

I’ve replayed that season in my mind more times than I can count, hoping the memory would come back.

It never has.

I told my brother about it later. “How can you not remember something like that?” he asked. Believe me, I’d wondered the same thing. Then he said something that sounded very familiar. “Sometimes your brain protects you. Sometimes during hard seasons in life we go on autopilot, just going through the motions without attaching any emotion.”

Maybe he’s right.

Maybe when life asks us to carry more than we can possibly hold, our minds quietly decide which burdens get our attention and which ones get tucked away somewhere we can’t reach.

I don’t know if that’s exactly what happened.

I just know that everyone else’s pain stayed crystal clear.

Mine disappeared.

For years, my life revolved around responding to the needs of other people. There was nothing unusual about that. My children needed me. Friends called when they were struggling. Family leaned on one another through impossible seasons.

Then came grief.

Loss.

More responsibilities.

More people to carry.

What began as a loving response to difficult circumstances slowly became the way I lived. The strategy worked. It helped me survive and because it worked, I never questioned it.

Looking back, maybe that was the real danger.

One day, I found myself standing in my kitchen holding a carton of milk that had passed its expiration date. The milk wasn’t “bad.” It was nutritious, useful, necessary. It had done exactly what it was supposed to do. That’s good, right?

But now it had reached the point where something that once sustained us no longer could. Standing there, I wondered if the same thing can happen to the ways we cope.

The habits that carry us through life’s hardest seasons often become part of our identity. We trust them because they’ve never failed us. But sometimes we forget to ask whether they still serve the purpose they once did.

Caring for other people was never the problem.

It probably saved me.

It gave me purpose when life felt impossible.

But somewhere along the way, caring for everyone else became automatic, while caring for myself became optional.

Without realizing it, I slowly disappeared from my own list.

When I later started reading about caregiver burden, I expected to find descriptions of exhaustion and burnout, those were certainly there, but what struck me most wasn’t the fatigue.

It was the gradual narrowing of attention. The way caregivers can become so focused on everyone else’s well-being that they stop noticing their own.

I recognized pieces of myself in every chapter. Not all at once, just enough to make me uncomfortable.

A few months after all of this, I left on a trip that changed my life.

Nepal.

India.

The Philippines.

I thought I was going to serve other people. Instead, I slowly started finding myself. Not because I stopped caring, not because I became selfish. But because, for the first time in a very long time, I realized those weren’t the only two options.

That time I spent traveling abroad, alone, didn’t teach me to stop loving people.

It taught me that I belong among the people I love.

That taking care of myself isn’t taking something away from someone else.

It’s making sure there’s still something left of me to give.

I still love deeply.

I still show up.

I probably always will.

But now I’m trying to remember something I forgot for far too long.

I matter too.

A few nights ago, I listened to an old Buddhist story about impermanence.

The teaching is called anicca—the idea that everything changes. Every season. Every relationship. Every joy. Every sorrow. Every version of ourselves.

Nothing stays.

At first, that sounds heartbreaking.

But maybe it’s actually an invitation.

The story tells of a young prince whose heart had never really been opened. He cared about power, achievement, and himself more than the people around him. An old wise man led him to a magnificent white horse, and the prince climbed onto its back.

The horse carried him away.

What felt like a single ride became an entire lifetime.

He became lost in a distant forest. He met a woman. Fell in love. Married. Raised two children. Worked with his hands. Laughed. Grew older. Built a simple, beautiful life.

Then, in one devastating moment, everything he loved disappeared.

His wife.

His children.

His entire world.

He collapsed in grief.

And then…

He opened his eyes.

He was back in the palace garden.

Only moments had passed.

The horse was still standing there.

His parents were kneeling beside him.

His entire lifetime had been a dream.

Except it wasn’t.

Because although none of it had “really” happened, his heart had changed forever.

He finally understood that every person we love, every ordinary Tuesday, every dinner around the table, every conversation we assume we’ll have again… is temporary.

Not to make us afraid.

To make us pay attention.

Life has taught me this lesson in ways I never wanted to learn.

When my ex-husband died, there were suddenly no more conversations left to have.

No chance to revisit old hurts.

No opportunity to say one more thing.

Whatever existed between us simply became… finished.

More recently, I watched a dear friend experience the unimaginable loss of her son.

There are moments in life when words become completely inadequate.

You don’t fix grief.

You don’t explain it.

You simply sit beside it.

Watching her reminded me that every single one of us is walking around carrying people we miss.

Parents.

Children.

Spouses.

Friends.

Versions of ourselves that no longer exist.

We spend so much of our lives believing there will be another Christmas.

Another phone call.

Another visit.

Another ordinary Tuesday.

Sometimes there is.

Sometimes there isn’t.

The strange thing is that remembering this doesn’t make me feel hopeless anymore.

It makes me feel awake.

I linger a little longer when I hug my kids.

I call people instead of thinking, I’ll do it next week.

I notice sunsets that I would have hurried past a few years ago.

I let conversations breathe instead of rushing toward the next thing.

Because one day…

these ordinary moments will become extraordinary memories.

The coffee you’ll drink tomorrow morning.

The dog waiting at the door.

Your mother’s laugh.

Your child’s voice calling from another room.

The friend who texts you something completely ridiculous.

None of them are permanent.

And that’s exactly what makes them sacred.

Maybe peace isn’t found by trying to hold onto everything.

Maybe peace comes from finally accepting that we can’t.

Maybe the purpose of remembering that life is always changing isn’t to become sad.

It’s to become present.

To stop postponing love.

To stop waiting to say thank you.

To stop assuming we’ll always have another chance.

The ancient Buddhist teachers believed that suffering softens when we stop fighting the changing nature of life.

I think they were right.

Not because loss stops hurting.

But because love becomes deeper when we remember it isn’t guaranteed forever.

So today…

Call someone.

Forgive someone.

Watch the sunset.

Sit a little longer at the dinner table.

Listen when someone tells you about their day.

Take the trip.

Say “I love you.”

I’ve spent years grieving people who are gone, relationships that ended, and versions of myself that no longer exist.

If there’s one thing they’ve all taught me, it’s this:

Life was never asking us to hold on forever.

It was only asking us to be fully present while we had the chance.

I don’t know whether the universe sends us lessons, or whether we simply start noticing patterns when we’re finally ready to see them.

But I can’t ignore this one.

Before anyone misunderstands me, this isn’t a story about excusing harm. It’s about what happened to me when I found myself sitting across from people I thought I already understood.

A couple of years ago, one man’s choices changed my life.

My brother-in-law crossed a boundary that never should have been crossed. It didn’t just hurt me—it sent shockwaves through my entire family. Relationships I thought were unbreakable fractured. There were tears, disbelief, anger, and more questions than answers.

Today, my family is okay again. More truth eventually came to light, my sister divorced him, and the relationships that mattered most found their way back to one another.

But healing relationships isn’t always the same thing as healing yourself.

Somewhere inside me, there was still anger.

There was still betrayal.

There was still a part of me that saw the words sex addiction and immediately thought of the damage one person’s choices had caused.

And then life did something I never expected.

I took a job at a behavioral health center because I wanted to help people. When I first started, I worked with people recovering from alcohol addiction, drug addiction, severe mental illness, and psychotic breaks.

A month and a half later, my entire patient group changed.

Now I spend my days sitting in a room full of men recovering from sex addiction.

The first few days were harder than I expected.

Some of the things they said triggered me. Every mention of a wife reminded me of betrayal. Every story sounded like another excuse. I found myself carrying old anger into a room full of strangers.

And then something unexpected happened.

I started seeing people instead of labels.

One man walked in looking absolutely defeated.

Another talked openly about the shame he carries every single day.

One admitted that he’d become someone he never wanted to be.

I found myself genuinely liking one of them. He’s funny. Charming. Kind. Some days he walks in looking so disappointed in himself that you can’t help but see the weight he’s carrying.

And I hate how confusing that feels.

Because my heart is doing something my mind wasn’t expecting.

It’s remembering that they’re human.

That doesn’t excuse the harm they’ve caused.

It doesn’t erase the pain of the people they’ve hurt.

And it certainly doesn’t mean that every person who commits sexual harm is the same.

I also want to be careful about what I’m saying—and what I’m not.

The men sitting in front of me are not people accused of violent sexual crimes, abusing children, or preying on vulnerable people. When I think about those kinds of acts, my response is entirely different. My heart breaks only for the victims, and accountability matters deeply.

The people I’m meeting are individuals in treatment who are confronting compulsive sexual behaviors and the damage those behaviors have caused in their own lives and relationships. That doesn’t erase the hurt they’ve caused. It doesn’t excuse betrayal or broken trust. But it has reminded me that not everyone who carries the same diagnosis carries the same story, the same level of harm, or the same willingness to change.

Some people manipulate without remorse.

Some exploit because they enjoy power.

Some never accept responsibility.

Others seem genuinely horrified by what they’ve become and desperately want to stop repeating it.

Those aren’t necessarily the same people.

Holding compassion for one doesn’t erase accountability for another.

I still don’t know what to do with all of my feelings about my own experience.

I still don’t know whether I’ll ever stop wishing I’d received an apology that never came.

And I don’t know whether the universe placed me in this room for a reason, or whether healing simply has a strange sense of humor.

But every day I sit with these men, something unexpected happens.

Hatred becomes curiosity.

Certainty becomes nuance.

And I wonder if healing isn’t always about letting someone else off the hook.

Maybe sometimes it’s about refusing to let one person’s actions determine how we see every human being who reminds us of them.

I don’t have an answer.

I’m just paying attention.

And maybe that’s where healing begins.

Before I took my kids to South Africa, people had opinions.

Lots of them.

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“You’re taking your kids there?”

“I don’t think I’d ever go to South Africa.”

The funny thing is…

I wasn’t afraid.

I’d wanted to visit South Africa for years. Friends who had lived there told me Cape Town was one of the most beautiful places in the world, and everything I’d researched said the same thing. I knew apartheid had ended decades earlier. I also knew that, like anywhere else in the world, there were places to avoid and common-sense precautions to take. I wasn’t planning to wander unfamiliar neighborhoods in the middle of the night, but I also wasn’t about to let other people’s fears keep me from experiencing a country I’d dreamed about visiting.

So in 2015, the three of us boarded a plane.

Actually… several planes.

A ten-hour flight from Phoenix to London.

A ten-hour layover where we explored the city, wandered past Buckingham Palace, and tried our best to stay awake.

Another ten-hour flight to Johannesburg.

Then one final flight to Cape Town. Our luggage decided not to join us. Somewhere along the way it missed a connection and continued its own adventure while we began ours.

We picked up our rental car, and I started driving into Cape Town. Within minutes, both of my kids were asleep in the back seat. After nearly thirty hours of traveling, they didn’t stand a chance.

I still laugh every time I look at the picture I took of them—completely passed out before we’d even begun exploring South Africa.

I, on the other hand, was wide awake.

Because I had an entire country to discover. Over the next couple of weeks, I drove us all over South Africa.

We rode the cable car to the top of Table Mountain and stood looking out over one of the most beautiful cities I’d ever seen.

We drove the breathtaking Garden Route, stopping whenever something caught our attention.

We visited a colony of African penguins waddling along the beach.

We drove hours out of our way just to stand where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. I’d always imagined that landmark would be symbolic more than anything else, but standing there, you could actually see the water from the two oceans meeting.

At one little restaurant along the way, our waitress heard our accents and asked where we were from.

“The United States,” we told her.

Her eyes lit up. “I can’t believe I’m meeting a real American teenage girl!” She was talking about my daughter. Apparently American teenagers mostly existed through television in her world. My daughter thought it was hilarious.

We zip-lined through the rainforest.

Every day somehow managed to be even better than the one before.

Eventually, we arrived at Quartermain’s Camp near Port Elizabeth. It was unlike anywhere we’d ever stayed. Our safari tent was small but cozy, complete with hot water, a shower, and even a toilet tucked inside. There were two cots.

Naturally, my kids claimed them both. Apparently, motherhood sometimes means sleeping on the floor of a safari tent in South Africa. So I spread out my sleeping bag between them, and honestly, I wouldn’t have traded places for anything.

Every evening, our guides cooked dinner over an open fire. To this day, I still think it’s some of the best food I’ve ever eaten.

Fresh bread baked over the fire, coffee that somehow tasted better simply because we were drinking it in the African bush.

Long conversations around the fire beneath a sky overflowing with stars.

Everything about it felt simple, peaceful, and unforgettable.

That afternoon, we climbed into an open-air safari vehicle for our very first game drive.

It already felt like something we’d never forget.

We spotted giraffes, elephants, and a pair of cheetahs stretched lazily across the grass. Then we came upon a mother black rhino and her baby.

Our guide quietly shut off the engine so we could watch them.

For a few peaceful moments, everything was perfectly still.

I’d been happily snapping pictures of the mother and her baby when everything changed.

It happened so fast that one of the last pictures I captured shows the mother rhino frozen mid-stride, charging directly toward us.

A split second later, she slammed into our Jeep and my phone flew from my hands.

Our safari vehicle had three rows of seats. My son was sitting directly behind the driver and my daughter and I were sitting in the row behind him.

When the rhino hit us, she tried to climb into the opening where my son was sitting.

His instincts kicked in immediately. He threw himself sideways just as her enormous head came over the side of the Jeep. Thankfully, she was simply too large to climb all the way in.

Then she backed up.

Our guide turned the key.

Nothing.

She charged again.

The Jeep lurched from the impact.

He tried the ignition again.

Nothing.

She backed up once more.

Charged.

Hit us again.

The whole thing probably lasted less than a minute. Inside my head, it lasted forever. I wasn’t thinking about myself. I was thinking about my children.

How do I protect both of them?

If she flips this Jeep over…

Who do I grab first?

How do I save them both?

And if one of us dies…

How could I ever leave South Africa without one of my children?

The thoughts came so fast I couldn’t even finish one before another took its place.

Finally…

The engine turned over. Our guide threw the Jeep into gear, and we sped away.

The rhino simply turned around and trotted back to her baby as though nothing unusual had happened.

A little while later, we pulled over to change the tire she’d ripped open.

The three of us climbed out of the Jeep. For several seconds, nobody spoke. We just stared at each other.

Then, almost simultaneously, all three of us burst into laughter.

Not polite laughter.

The kind of uncontrollable, can’t-catch-your-breath laughter that only comes after you’ve been absolutely terrified.

Between laughing fits, we started looking over the damage.

The armrest beside my son’s seat had been ripped apart where she’d tried to climb into the Jeep. Part of the metal body had been torn open. The tire was shredded. Every dent and tear was a reminder of just how close she’d come.

It felt surreal standing there laughing while our guide calmly changed the tire, as if being attacked by a black rhino was just another maintenance stop.

Eventually, when we had all caught our breath, we climbed back into the Jeep and continued the drive.

On the way back to camp, our guide finally broke the silence.

“In twenty years of doing this,” he said, “I’ve never had anything like that happen.”

Then he smiled.

“You can consider yourselves either very unlucky…

or very lucky.”

At the time… I wasn’t entirely sure which.

That night, lying in my sleeping bag on the floor of our safari tent, I kept replaying everything that had happened.

The sound of the impact.

The engine refusing to start.

The look on my son’s face as he instinctively threw himself out of the rhino’s path.

The thoughts that had raced through my mind as I tried to figure out how I could possibly protect both of my children if the Jeep rolled over.

I assumed the next morning’s conversation would be short.

“Do you guys still want to go on the game drive?”

“No.”

Honestly, I wouldn’t have blamed them.

If anyone had suggested climbing back into that Jeep, I would have understood if they’d wanted to spend the rest of the trip safely back at camp.

So the next morning, I asked.

“Are you guys sure you want to go?”

My son looked at me like I’d asked a strange question.

“Yeah, what are the chances that happens twice?”

My daughter nodded. “We’ll just stay away from the black rhinos.”

That was it. No long discussion. No hesitation. No dramatic speeches. They simply climbed back into the Jeep.

For the next couple of game drives, whenever our guide pointed toward another rhino, my kids would laugh.

“We’re good.”

“We’ve seen enough rhinos.”

Especially the black ones.

The guides would excitedly point them out, and my kids would politely decline.

“We’re okay.”

“I think we’ve had enough rhinos for one trip.”

Eventually, even that nervousness faded. By the end of the trip, seeing another rhino no longer made our hearts race. It simply became another animal in the distance.

Looking back, I realized something.

The lesson wasn’t that scary things never happen.

Sometimes they do.

Sometimes the thing everyone warned you about never happens.

And sometimes the thing you never imagined does.

A black rhino really can charge your Jeep.

Life can surprise you in ways you never expected.

But fear has an interesting way of working.

Sometimes it keeps us from doing things that would probably turn out just fine.

Other times, something genuinely frightening happens, and fear tries to convince us it will happen every time.

That’s how fear quietly shrinks our lives.

One bad relationship convinces us not to love again.

One failed business convinces us never to take another chance.

One rejection convinces us to stop applying.

One heartbreak convinces us to stop trusting.

One terrifying experience convinces us to stay home instead of exploring the world.

Without realizing it, we slowly hand fear the steering wheel.

I was proud that I hadn’t let other people’s fears keep me from taking my kids to South Africa.

But I was even prouder watching my children refuse to let one terrifying experience steal the rest of our adventure.

As parents, we spend so much of our lives trying to teach our children.

That week… they taught me.

They reminded me that courage isn’t pretending something scary didn’t happen.

It isn’t denying the fear.

It isn’t acting tough.

Courage is acknowledging that something frightened you… and deciding it doesn’t get to make all of your future decisions.

Sometimes courage is booking the ticket anyway.

Sometimes it’s applying for the job.

Sometimes it’s leaving the relationship that no longer feels safe.

Sometimes it’s asking for help.

Sometimes it’s starting over.

And sometimes… it’s climbing back into the Jeep after a black rhino just tried to flip it over.

Most of the things we fear never happen.

But every once in a while… something does.

The question isn’t whether frightening things will happen. The question is what we do after they do.

Do we stop traveling?

Do we stop trying?

Do we stop trusting?

Do we decide that because something bad happened once, it will happen every time?

Or do we climb back into the Jeep?

To this day, the rhino charging our Jeep is still one of our favorite family stories. Not because it wasn’t terrifying. It was.

But because every time we tell it, I’m reminded that courage isn’t pretending you’re fearless.

Sometimes courage is simply refusing to let fear write the rest of your story.

The next morning, I watched my son climb back into the Jeep without hesitation and my daughter climbed in right next to him. I smiled as I took my seat and looked at the two of them sitting there, ready for another adventure.

We came to South Africa hoping to see lions, elephants, giraffes, and rhinos.

I never expected the most extraordinary thing I’d witness would be the quiet courage of my own children… sitting in the seats in front of me.

Most of us reach a point in life where we feel stuck.

Not inconvenienced.

Not delayed.

Stuck.

The kind of stuck where you can’t see a way forward.

Maybe it’s losing a job and sending out application after application while nothing seems to happen. Every day that passes makes you wonder what comes next and whether you’ll ever find your footing again.

Maybe it’s a divorce you never expected, and suddenly you’re facing a future that looks nothing like the one you planned. You haven’t been alone in years, and you’re not sure how you’re supposed to start over.

Maybe it’s addiction, and you’ve convinced yourself you’re too far gone, that you’ve relapsed too many times, made too many mistakes, and caused too much damage to ever truly recover.

Maybe it’s a financial decision that keeps you awake at night because you can’t imagine how you’ll ever dig yourself out.

Maybe it’s grief. The kind that makes it hard to imagine ever feeling normal again after losing someone you love.

Or maybe it’s a mistake that feels so big you’re convinced you’ve ruined your entire life.

Whatever the circumstances, the feeling is the same.

You look at the situation in front of you and think:

I don’t see a way out.

I’ve had many moments in my life when I’ve felt exactly that way.

Moments when I couldn’t see a path forward.

Moments when I was absolutely convinced I was stuck.

And if I’m being honest, there have been times when I felt so overwhelmed that my mind wandered into some very dark places because I couldn’t imagine how things could possibly get better.

What I’ve learned since then is that being unable to see a way forward doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.

Sometimes we just haven’t found it yet.

Strangely enough, one of the best lessons I’ve ever learned about those moments came from a rental car in Portugal.

A friend and I had rented a car and were exploring the country on our own. Most of the trip went smoothly, although there were a few moments when the road signs seemed to have been designed by people who enjoyed watching tourists become confused.

On our first mishap, we accidentally drove down a road that turned out not to be a road we were supposed to be driving on.

At least not with a car.

We didn’t realize that until we reached the bottom and found ourselves surrounded by a restaurant with outdoor seating and several little shops.

People were eating dinner. Waiters were carrying food. Shop owners had displays set up outside. And there we were…

Driving directly through the middle of it.

I was mortified.

My friend was laughing.

The people sitting at the restaurant looked surprised for about three seconds and then started laughing too.

I started to put the car in reverse when one of the shop owners motioned for me to pull forward so I could turn the car around instead.

He moved some of his displays out of the way.

People eating dinner scooted their chairs back.

Fortunately, everyone was good-natured about it, and we eventually escaped with nothing more than wounded pride.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t even the most ridiculous driving incident of the trip.

At one point, I was following my GPS through one of the small towns when it directed me down a narrow street between two rows of buildings.

The farther I drove, the narrower it became.

Still, nothing about it seemed impossible. The GPS had sent me there, so I assumed it would eventually connect to a larger road.

Then I reached what looked like a tiny intersection where another narrow street crossed in front of me.

I slowed down, trying to figure out which direction I was supposed to go next.

That’s when a woman walked up to my car.

I rolled down the window.

“You can’t go that way,” she said, pointing straight ahead.

I looked past her and finally realized what I hadn’t noticed while focusing on the road. The street ahead wasn’t really a street anymore.

It opened into a pedestrian area lined with little shops and restaurants. People were eating dinner, browsing storefronts, and walking through the narrow alleyways.

Suddenly, it made perfect sense why there were so many people around.

“Can I go left?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Can I go right?”

Another shake of her head.

Then she motioned behind me and said,

“You have to turn around.”

Looking back, I probably should have simply backed out the way I had come.

Instead, I took her advice literally and started trying to turn the car around.

At first, it seemed reasonable.

Then I pulled forward.

Backed up.

Adjusted my angle.

Pulled forward again.

And somehow, before I knew it, I had managed to get the car wedged diagonally across an alleyway that was already far too narrow to begin with.

To this day, I couldn’t tell you exactly how I accomplished it.

I just know that at some point I got out of the car to see if the situation looked any better from the outside.

It didn’t.

Standing there, I stared at the car in disbelief.

It was literally wedged diagonally between the buildings.

There was maybe two inches between the front bumper and the corner of the building in front of it.

Maybe another two inches between the back of the car and the corner of the building behind it.

The car wasn’t touching anything, but it felt like it was.

I remember looking at it and thinking, I honestly don’t think this car is ever leaving this alleyway.

What had started as a simple attempt to turn around had somehow become a situation that felt completely impossible.

Normally, I’m pretty good at laughing at travel mishaps.

After visiting 45 countries, I’ve been lost more times than I can count. I’ve missed trains, gone the wrong direction, ended up in places I never intended to visit, and found myself in situations that probably should have stressed me out more than they did.

Travel has taught me not to panic.

Most of the time.

This was not one of those times.

As I stood there looking at that car sitting diagonally across the narrow street, I genuinely could not see a way out.

Not a difficult way out.

Not an expensive way out.

No way out.

My mind immediately started jumping ahead.

How much does this car cost?

What happens if I can’t get it out?

My insurance isn’t going to cover whatever this is.

I remember looking at the situation and thinking that the only way this car was leaving that street was by being life flighted out by crane.

Meanwhile, my friend was laughing hysterically.

I was not.

At one point I remember telling her, “This isn’t funny.”

She disagreed.

Strongly.

The problem wasn’t that I thought the situation was difficult. The problem was that I genuinely believed it was impossible.

And that’s a very different feeling.

At that point, people started gathering.

Some were laughing. Some were shaking their heads. Most seemed thoroughly entertained. Then, without being asked, they started helping.

One person would motion for me to move forward.

“Stop.”

Another would signal me backward.

“Stop.”

Forward an inch.

“Stop.”

Backward an inch.

“Stop.”

Inch by inch, they guided me through what eventually became something close to a thirty-point turn.

Every time I thought we had reached the limit of what was physically possible, somebody would motion for me to move just a little farther.

And somehow, another inch always existed.

My friend was laughing so hard she could barely breathe. The crowd seemed strangely invested in the outcome. And eventually, against all odds, the car was pointed in the right direction and we escaped.

As it turns out, Portugal wasn’t quite finished teaching me this lesson.

A few days later, my friend and I were leaving Lisbon before sunrise to catch a flight home. We were staying in an apartment in the middle of the city, and the streets were exactly what you’d expect from an old European neighborhood—narrow, crowded, and seemingly designed before anyone imagined cars would someday exist.

I thought I’d wait until we reached a larger road before turning on the GPS.

That was my first mistake.

My friend was trying to pull up directions while I navigated the maze of tiny streets. I turned left out of our apartment complex, and within a minute we realized we were heading the wrong direction.

When I reached the end of the street, I spotted what looked like another road and turned right.

It wasn’t.

A short distance later, we realized we had driven ourselves into a dead end.

I stopped the car and looked around. Then I looked in the rearview mirror. And that’s when I saw it.

One of Lisbon’s famous yellow trams.

The kind that run on tracks through the city.

The kind that was directly behind us.

At first, it was sitting there quietly.

Then the light came on.

My friend and I looked at each other.

“Oh no.”

For a brief moment, I imagined myself explaining how I had somehow managed to block one of Lisbon’s historic trams before sunrise.

But then something surprising happened.

I didn’t panic.

A few days earlier, I probably would have.

A few days earlier, I would have been convinced I was trapped.

Instead, I put the car in reverse and started backing down the street.

I was trying to move quickly enough to get back to the road we’d come from, but carefully enough not to hit anything along the way.

Every few seconds, I’d glance in the rearview mirror.

The tram was getting closer.

And closer.

And closer.

My friend and I kept watching it approach while silently calculating whether we were going to make it.

I continued backing up.

The tram continued moving forward.

And somehow, we reached the intersection with about two car lengths to spare.

I pulled out of the way, and the tram rolled past as if nothing had happened.

The situation wasn’t actually any different from the others.

The difference was me.

By then, Portugal had already taught me that just because I couldn’t immediately see the solution didn’t mean one didn’t exist.

Sometimes experience doesn’t prevent us from making mistakes.

Sometimes it simply teaches us not to panic when we make them.

At the end of the trip, my friend thanked me for being willing to drive.

She told me there was no way she would have attempted it herself and that because I did, we were able to see so much more of the country than we otherwise would have.

I laughed.

After everything that had happened, I wasn’t entirely convinced I had successfully driven Portugal.

I felt more like Portugal had successfully driven me.

But her comment stuck with me.

Because the goal isn’t to navigate perfectly.

The goal is to keep going anyway.

To make the wrong turns.

To learn from the mistakes.

To back up when necessary.

And to trust that even when you can’t see the way out, you’ll eventually find it.

Looking back, what I remember most isn’t finally getting the car out.

It’s how certain I was that there was no solution.

I was absolutely convinced we were stuck.

Not inconvenienced.

Not delayed.

Stuck.

I couldn’t see a solution.

I couldn’t imagine a solution.

I was convinced there wasn’t one.

And then we moved forward an inch.

Backward an inch.

Forward another inch.

And before I knew it, we were out.

Portugal helped me to discover that the same thing is true in life.

Most of the biggest challenges I’ve faced weren’t solved all at once.

And I didn’t solve them alone.

I had friends beside me.

I had people willing to listen.

I had people who could see angles I couldn’t see from where I was standing.

Sometimes that’s a friend.

Sometimes it’s family.

Sometimes it’s a therapist, a support group, a mentor, or someone who has simply walked the road before you.

There is no shame in needing help to get unstuck.

In fact, some of the biggest turning points in my life happened because I stopped trying to figure everything out by myself.

My problems were solved the same way I got that rental car out of that tiny Portuguese street.

One tiny adjustment at a time.

One conversation.

One decision.

One day.

One step.

When we’re in the middle of a difficult season, we often assume that because we can’t see the entire path, there isn’t one.

But that’s rarely true.

Sometimes the way forward only reveals itself after we’ve taken the next inch.

Being unable to see a way out doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.

It just means you haven’t found it yet.

And sometimes the only thing you can do is move forward an inch.

Then another.

Then another.

Until one day you look around and realize you’re no longer stuck at all.

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Healing and obsession can look surprisingly similar from the outside.

One involves learning from the past. The other involves continuing to live there.

The problem is that sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.

Both ask questions. Both search for answers. Both replay old conversations and revisit old wounds.

The difference is that one eventually helps you move forward, while the other keeps you circling the same story long after it has ended.

After my last relationship ended, I became obsessed with understanding what had happened.

When someone enters your life and makes you feel deeply seen, deeply loved, and deeply understood, only to leave you feeling confused, questioning yourself, and wondering how everything went so wrong, it is natural to want answers.

Not every breakup creates this kind of obsession. But the ones that leave us baffled—the ones that make us question our own reality and struggle to reconcile the person we fell in love with with the person we experienced in the end—often do.

Most of us don’t walk away from those experiences thinking, “Well, that was strange. Onward.” Instead we replay conversations. We revisit memories. We search for meaning.

I certainly did.

There were things said to me during that relationship that made me question myself in ways I never had before. I spent hours reflecting, wondering if I had somehow missed something fundamental about who I was. Was I selfish? Was I manipulative? Was I lacking self-awareness? At one point, I even found myself seriously considering whether I might be a narcissist.

That sounds ridiculous to me now, but at the time it didn’t.

I remember talking to my daughter about it one day. After listening to me go on about it, she said:

“Mom, narcissists don’t spend this much time worrying about whether they’re narcissists.”

I laughed, but honestly, I felt relieved. Because she was right. The fact that I was willing to examine myself wasn’t evidence that I was a bad person. It was evidence that I cared enough to look honestly at my own behavior.

Once I got past the self-doubt, I thought I was moving toward healing.

Instead, I moved into a different phase.

The research phase.

Like so many people after a painful breakup, I turned to books, podcasts, articles, and videos. I wanted to understand what had happened. I watched videos about narcissism, avoidant attachment, emotional manipulation, trauma bonds, and relationship dynamics. Every video seemed to answer a question I’d been carrying.

“That’s it,” I’d think.

“That’s exactly what happened.”

For a while, those videos genuinely helped. They helped me stop blaming myself for everything. They helped me recognize patterns I hadn’t seen before. They helped me make sense of experiences that had felt confusing and contradictory.

But somewhere along the way, something changed.

The relationship ended, but I was still spending part of every day focused on it.

I wasn’t talking to him anymore. I wasn’t seeing him anymore. Yet he still occupied space in my mind because I was consuming content about people like him. About relationships like ours. About explanations that might finally give me the certainty I was searching for.

Every video offered another piece of the puzzle.

Every expert had another theory.

Every explanation brought relief.

And then I clicked on the next one.

Part of that search was probably healthy.

When a relationship leaves us confused, it makes sense to want to understand what happened so we don’t repeat it. We look back at conversations and revisit things that were said, hoping to make sense of what felt confusing at the time.

In my case, I could now see things that hadn’t made sense before. Comments that once left me confused started to feel different when I revisited them.

Some of his accusation began to look more like confessions. Some criticisms revealed more about him than they did about me. Some of the things that hurt the most suddenly made sense when I stopped taking them at face value and started considering what they might have been revealing beneath the surface.

Eventually, I landed on an explanation that seemed to fit. Whether I was right or wrong almost doesn’t matter now. What matters is that once I thought I had found the answer, I didn’t stop searching.

What strikes me now is that there is an enormous amount of content devoted to helping us explain the people who hurt us. One video explains narcissism. Another explains avoidant attachment. Another breaks down anxious attachment. Then there’s borderline personality disorder, trauma bonds, love bombing, emotional unavailability, fearful avoidance, gaslighting, intermittent reinforcement, childhood wounds, attachment injuries, and a hundred other frameworks designed to help us understand what happened.

But I kept wondering: Where are the videos telling people when to stop?

Where are the articles that say, “You’ve done enough research now”?

Where are the experts saying, “You don’t need another explanation”?

In all the videos I watched, I don’t remember hearing anyone say, “At some point, you need to stop watching videos.”

I don’t remember anyone saying, “You understand enough now.”

I don’t remember anyone saying, “You may never know exactly what they were, and that’s okay.”

Instead, there always seemed to be another layer to uncover, another trait to analyze, another behavior to explain, another reason to keep looking.

And while those resources can be incredibly helpful, I sometimes wonder if we spend so much time learning how to identify unhealthy people that we forget to teach people when it’s time to stop studying them and start living again.

Where is the discussion about the possibility that our search for answers can become its own kind of addiction?

Because I think it can.

I think many of us start looking for answers because we’re hurt, and then continue looking because we’re afraid to let go of the story.

We tell ourselves we’re healing.

We tell ourselves we’re learning.

And sometimes we are.

But sometimes we’re just keeping the relationship alive in a different form.

We are still centering our lives around someone who is no longer in them.

The relationship may be over, but we’re still spending hours thinking about it, analyzing it, diagnosing it, and trying to solve it.

I understand why.

There is comfort in finally having language for experiences that once felt impossible to describe. There is comfort in realizing we weren’t crazy, weak, or imagining things.

But eventually there comes a point where no new information changes anything.

You understand enough.

You know how you felt.

You know what happened.

You know the relationship wasn’t healthy for you.

And no amount of additional analysis is going to change that reality.

At some point, healing asks something different of us.

It asks us to stop trying to understand the other person and start focusing on ourselves.

It asks us to accept that we may never fully understand why someone behaved the way they did.

It asks us to make peace with unanswered questions.

And perhaps most importantly, it asks us to stop needing validation from experts, strangers on the internet, or psychological labels.

The truth is, I no longer need to know exactly what he was.

Maybe he was a narcissist.

Maybe he wasn’t.

Maybe he was avoidant.

Maybe he was wounded.

Maybe he was fearful.

Maybe he was all of those things or none of them.

What matters now is not who he was.

What matters is how I felt.

I felt confused.

I felt diminished.

I felt like I was constantly defending my reality.

I felt like I was becoming someone I didn’t recognize.

And that is enough.

I don’t need a diagnosis to validate my experience.

Eventually I realized that peace wasn’t hiding in the next video.

It wasn’t waiting for me at the end of one more article, one more podcast episode, or one more expert opinion.

Peace wasn’t going to come from finding the perfect explanation.

It was going to come from accepting that I might never have one.

Because in the end, I don’t actually need to know exactly what was wrong with him.

I only need to know what wasn’t right for me.

The greatest gift I’ve given myself wasn’t finally figuring him out.

It was realizing that I didn’t have to.

Because there comes a point when understanding stops setting us free.

And the next step in healing is not another answer.

It’s letting go of the need for one.

Sometimes we wake up in the morning and something feels off.

Nothing terrible has happened. There has been no bad news, no argument, no disaster waiting for us when we open our eyes. And yet there is a heaviness. A sadness we can’t quite explain. A restlessness. A sense that something isn’t right.

We all have mornings like this. Mornings when the body feels tired even after sleep. Mornings when our hearts feel tender for reasons we cannot name. Mornings when the world outside our window looks exactly the same, but somehow feels a little further away.

The feeling itself isn’t usually the problem.

The problem is what often comes next.

Before we’re fully awake, before we’ve even had our coffee, a thought quietly slips in.

What’s wrong with me?

Instead of simply noticing that we feel sad, anxious, tired, or unsettled, we begin looking for evidence. We compare ourselves to other people. Other people seem happy. Other people seem productive. Other people seem to have it together.

And just like that, a difficult feeling becomes something heavier.

The sadness is no longer just sadness. It becomes evidence that we are flawed. The insecurity becomes evidence that we don’t belong. The frustration becomes evidence that we’re failing.

This is what Buddhist teachers call the second arrow.

The Buddha taught that when a person is struck by an arrow, it hurts. But if a second arrow strikes the same place, the pain and suffering becomes even greater.

The first arrow is what life brings us.

Disappointment. Fear. Loneliness. Embarrassment. Grief. Insecurity. Frustration.

These experiences are part of being human. No one escapes them. They arrive the way weather arrives—sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes intensely, but always as part of life itself.

The second arrow is what we add.

The second arrow is the story we tell ourselves about the feeling.

I feel frustrated becomes, “I’m a terrible mother.”

I made a mistake becomes, “I’m not good enough.”

I feel insecure becomes, “I don’t belong here.”

I feel sad becomes, “Something is wrong with me.”

What I’ve come to realize is that the second arrow rarely arrives alone. One becomes two. Two become six. Six become twelve.

A moment of frustration becomes a character flaw. A mistake becomes a verdict. A difficult season becomes proof that we are failing at life. Before long, we are no longer carrying the original pain. We are carrying the weight of every story we have attached to it.

What weighs us down is not the stumble itself. It is the heavy cloak of shame we wrap around it. The suffocating layers of blame. The endless replaying of what happened and what we should have done differently. The belief that every mistake says something permanent about who we are.

And yet, what if the difficult feeling was never the problem?

What if the sadness, embarrassment, frustration, uncertainty, and fear were simply part of being alive? Part of the tender, vulnerable, beautiful experience of being human. Of loving. Of caring. Of trying.

There is a kind of peace that comes with that realization.

Not the absence of difficulty, but the absence of the belief that difficulty means we are failing.

I think this is what we are really afraid of when we cling so tightly to self-blame. We are afraid of our own humanness. We are afraid that being imperfect means being bad. We are afraid that if we stop punishing ourselves for our mistakes, those mistakes will define us. As if shame is what keeps us good. As if self-criticism is what keeps us growing.

But when I look back at the moments when I was hardest on myself, they weren’t born from cruelty.

They were born from caring.

The mother who lies awake replaying the moment she lost her patience does so because she loves her children fiercely. The teacher who questions whether he’s good enough does so because he cares deeply about his students. The person who obsesses over a mistake at work does so because they genuinely want to do well.

Beneath self-blame is often something surprisingly tender.

Love.

Responsibility.

Hope.

The desire to be better.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to turn that caring into criticism. We learned to believe that shame would improve us. That self-punishment would protect us from future mistakes. That if we were hard enough on ourselves, we could somehow avoid being human.

I remember one particular moment when my children were younger.

For two days, I had been asking them to clean up after themselves. I reminded them again and again. Patiently at first. Then less patiently. Eventually, after being ignored for what felt like the hundredth time, I got angry.

Not screaming. Not out of control.

Just a mother who had reached the end of her patience.

The frustration itself wasn’t what stayed with me. The first arrow rarely is.

What kept me awake that night was everything that followed.

A good mother wouldn’t have gotten angry.

A better mother would have handled that differently.

Why can’t you be more patient?

The second arrow had become a dozen second arrows.

By the time I was done replaying the interaction, I wasn’t a mother who had gotten frustrated. I had convinced myself I was a bad mother.

Feeling guilty, I went to my children and apologized.

“I’m sorry I got mad,” I told them.

My son looked at me and said something I have never forgotten.

“Mom, will you stop apologizing? You should get mad at us. We didn’t do what you asked.”

I laugh when I think about it now, but in that moment my son saw something I couldn’t. I wasn’t suffering because I got frustrated. I was suffering because I had turned one imperfect parenting moment into a judgment about my worth as a mother.

Years later, I have found myself in a very different situation.

I recently began facilitating groups for people struggling with addiction and mental health challenges. One day I decided to play a guided meditation for the group. What I didn’t realize was that the video was packed with advertisements.

Just as everyone settled in, an ad interrupted.

Then another.

Then another.

With every interruption I felt embarrassment rising inside me. I remember thinking, “These people came here for support and healing, and I can’t even get through a meditation without ads popping up.”

The familiar thoughts began knocking at the door.

Maybe you’re not cut out for this.

Maybe you shouldn’t be leading these groups.

Maybe you’re failing the people who need help.

Years ago, I would have opened that door and invited every one of those thoughts inside. I would have gone home embarrassed and replayed the experience for days.

But this time something different happened.

I noticed the feeling, but I didn’t build a story around it.

Instead, I laughed.

When the meditation ended, I told the group that maybe the ads had given us an unexpected lesson. Life works that way sometimes. We find a little peace, settle into a rhythm, and then something unexpected interrupts the moment. A setback. Bad news. A difficult conversation. A craving. A disappointment.

The goal isn’t to avoid the interruption.

The goal is to learn how to return.

For the first time, I could see the space between the first arrow and the second. I still felt embarrassed. I still felt human. But I didn’t let that feeling become evidence that I wasn’t capable of doing the work.

There is a Zen saying that the obstacle is the path.

I love that idea because it reminds me that the very thing we are struggling with is not a detour from our lives. It is our life. It is where the growing happens. It is the rough ground where the roots grow deep.

Our impatience is often where we learn patience.

Our uncertainty is often where we learn courage.

Our mistakes are often where wisdom begins.

The stumble is not proof that we are failing.

More often, it is proof that we are learning.

Maybe the goal isn’t to stop getting hit by the first arrow. As long as we are alive, we will experience disappointment, fear, grief, insecurity, embarrassment, and frustration.

Maybe the goal is simply to stop reaching for the second.

To recognize the feeling.

To let it be what it is.

And to remember that being human has never been the same thing as being broken.

I’ve been trying not to follow the news lately.

But every now and then a story finds me anyway. A headline. A documentary clip. An article about women who were exploited, manipulated, assaulted, or harmed by men who continue to live publicly successful lives.

Every time I read one of those stories, I find myself wondering the same thing: How do they do it?

How do they get out of bed every morning knowing the person who hurt them is still building a life? Still earning respect. Still finding love. Still moving through the world as though nothing happened?

My experience was not the same as theirs. I was not raped or physically assaulted, and I would never compare my experience to women who survived violence or criminal abuse. But recently I’ve found myself understanding something about those women in a way I never did before.

Three months before I flew to Texas to help my sister, my ex-husband died by suicide.

His death left me carrying questions that I will probably never fully answer. I found myself wondering how often people suffer silently. How often they convince the world they are fine while privately struggling. How often the people closest to them never fully understand what they are carrying until it’s too late.

In the months that followed, I looked at people differently. I became more aware of suffering I couldn’t see. More aware that we often have no idea what someone is carrying behind closed doors. Looking back now, I think that’s part of why I felt so much compassion for my brother-in-law.

At the time, my sister’s health was declining, and everyone who loved her was worried. I flew to Texas hoping I could help. I wanted to support her and encourage her to undergo a procedure that might improve her health and quality of life. More than anything, I wanted more time with her.

My sister has always been one of my heroes. Growing up, she was one of the people I admired most. Strong, capable, resilient. The kind of person who made difficult things look manageable. Watching her health decline felt deeply unfair.

One of my favorite photos from that trip was taken by my niece. My sister is asleep in a hospital bed after her procedure. My other sister and I are asleep on a couch beside her. When I look at that photo now, I don’t see exhaustion. I see love. We weren’t there because we had to be. We were there because we loved her. We wanted her to get better. We wanted her to know she wasn’t alone.

I remember sitting beside her hospital bed explaining why I believed she needed the procedure. I remember looking at her and thinking, Please do this. Please take care of yourself. Please stay here.

Looking back, I realize how much of that trip was motivated by love and fear. I loved my sister, and I was terrified of losing her.

During that trip, her husband had to leave town briefly for work, and I stayed behind helping care for her. He called constantly. Had she eaten? Was she resting? Did she need anything? Should he come home?

Every time he called, I heard worry. Every time he called, I heard a husband who was terrified he had made the wrong decision by leaving town. Every time he called, I admired him a little more.

It hurt me to watch my sister suffer, but I only saw it occasionally. He lived with it every day. While everyone worried about my sister, I found myself wondering how he was holding up.

After losing someone I cared about, I think I had become especially sensitive to the possibility that other people might be hurting quietly and not know how to ask for help. I felt sorry for him. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to watch the person you loved for decades struggle every single day.

So I did what felt like the most natural act of compassion in the world.

I told him that if he ever needed someone to talk to, I was there.

At the time, it felt insignificant. Looking back, it became one of the most consequential conversations of my life.

Over the next few months, he called occasionally while traveling for work. We talked about ordinary things. My travels. His work. My sister. Life. Nothing about those conversations struck me as unusual.

Then one day he told me he would be in town shortly after I returned from a trip and asked if I wanted to get together so he could hear about it. I thought nothing of it.

I had known him for twenty-five years.

We had taken family vacations together. I had stayed in his home. We had shared holidays, milestones, and memories. If someone had asked me to make a list of people I would never need to worry about, his name would have been on it.

That is why what happened next caught me completely off guard.

Before we were supposed to go to dinner, he said he needed to stop by his hotel room to pick something up. I didn’t think twice about it. Why would I? I trusted him.

Inside that room, everything changed.

At first I thought I was misunderstanding what was happening. Then I realized I wasn’t.

He came on to me and tried to persuade me to sleep with him. When I made it clear I wasn’t interested and wanted to leave, the conversation didn’t simply end. He continued trying to convince me. He continued acting as though this was something I might eventually agree to if he could just find the right words.

I remember feeling trapped between disbelief and discomfort. More than anything, I wanted to get out of that room.

The thing that shocked me wasn’t that a man had expressed interest in me. The shocking part was that it was him.

The man married to my sister.

The man I had known for twenty-five years.

The man I trusted.

The man I had been feeling sorry for.

I wanted to leave, but my suitcase was still in his car. I remember sitting in the passenger seat on the drive home feeling physically sick, trying to understand what had just happened. My head was spinning.

How did this happen?

When I got home, my children immediately knew something was wrong. I told them I was fine. Thirty minutes later, I was telling them everything.

What followed was not just discomfort. It was months of confusion.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I replayed every conversation in my mind. I questioned my judgment. I questioned my memory. I questioned whether I should say something or stay silent.

And underneath all of those questions was one I was almost ashamed to admit.

Did I do something wrong?

Intellectually, I knew I hadn’t. But when someone crosses a line you never imagined they would cross, part of you starts searching for an explanation. I replayed conversations. I reconsidered innocent interactions. I examined every detail looking for something I might have missed.

Eventually I reached a conclusion that should have been obvious from the beginning.

I hadn’t done anything wrong.

But arriving at that conclusion took far longer than it should have.

The questions never stopped. How did this happen? How do I tell my sister? What happens if I tell her? What happens if I don’t?

I asked other people what they thought I should do. Most of them told me not to tell her. They were worried about her health. They thought perhaps he was going through something. They didn’t want to add more stress to an already difficult situation.

Their advice made sense.

And yet every part of me felt unsettled by staying silent.

One of the things I carried during those months was the belief that my sister needed him more than she needed the truth. She was already struggling physically. He had resources. He could be there for her in ways I couldn’t. I worried that exposing what happened might take away support she genuinely needed.

Looking back, I realize part of my silence came from underestimating her strength.

For months, it affected every part of my life.

I wasn’t sleeping.

I wasn’t eating normally.

I couldn’t stop replaying what had happened.

I couldn’t stop wondering what I was supposed to do.

There were nights when I would stare at the clock until six in the morning and realize I had never fallen asleep. An hour later I would have to get up and work a fourteen-hour shift.

I was exhausted.

I couldn’t concentrate.

I wasn’t functioning like myself.

Yet life didn’t stop.

Patients still needed medications. Work still expected me to show up. Bills still had to be paid. Responsibilities still existed.

Nobody looking at me would have known that I was carrying something that was quietly consuming every part of my life.

I wasn’t losing sleep because I couldn’t decide whether he was wrong.

I was losing sleep because I couldn’t decide what my responsibility was.

Was I supposed to tell my sister and risk destroying her marriage?

Was I supposed to stay silent and carry it alone?

Was there a version of this where nobody got hurt?

The answer, of course, was no.

Eventually the truth came out.

The fallout spread through the family exactly the way I had feared it would. My sister’s marriage ended. We later learned things that suggested the life we thought he was living was not the life he had actually been living.

The discovery that he had been unfaithful for years was particularly difficult to process. Not because it changed what happened to me, but because it forced me to confront the possibility that someone can spend years presenting one version of themselves to the world while living a very different reality underneath.

For twenty-five years, I thought I knew who he was. I thought I knew his character. I thought I understood his values. I thought I understood his marriage.

Then, piece by piece, those certainties began to disappear.

Later, after everything came out and we were finally able to talk openly about it, my sister said something I have never forgotten.

She told me I didn’t realize how strong she was.

She reminded me that she did not need him in order to survive.

She had family.

She had people who loved her.

She had herself.

At the time, I thought I was protecting her.

In reality, I was forgetting who she was.

She was still the same woman I had admired my entire life.

What still bothers me isn’t that he moved on.

People move on.

Marriages end.

Relationships end.

Lives change.

What I struggle to understand is how someone can leave so much damage behind and never seem affected by it.

My sister lost a marriage.

I lost trust in someone I had known for twenty-five years.

I spent months unable to sleep, unable to eat normally, unable to focus on my work, carrying a secret I never wanted and a decision I didn’t know how to make.

Yet from the outside, it often felt as though none of that mattered.

Life simply continued.

I understand mistakes.

I understand human weakness.

What I don’t understand is how someone can watch other people’s lives unravel because of their choices and never seem to acknowledge it.

How do you leave that much damage behind and simply move on?

How do you live with that?

Maybe that’s the question I’ll never fully answer.

What I do know is that this experience changed me.

For twenty-five years, I would have told you I knew exactly who he was.

Now I’m not sure any of us know people as well as we think we do.

What happened didn’t just change the way I saw him. It changed the way I saw trust. It changed the way I trusted my own instincts. It changed the way I move through relationships. It changed the assumptions I once made about safety and character and certainty.

And maybe that is why I think differently now when I read stories about women carrying consequences years after the men who hurt them have moved on.

Not because our experiences are the same.

They aren’t.

But because I finally understand that the event itself is often only the beginning.

The real story is what people are left carrying afterward.

The sleepless nights.

The self-doubt.

The loss of trust.

The relationships that change.

The parts of themselves they have to rebuild.

If this experience affected me this deeply, I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like for women whose violations were far more severe.

When I read their stories now, I don’t just think about what happened to them.

I think about what they are still carrying.

And I think about how heavy that must be.

A few weeks ago, someone I’ve known since high school reached out after reading something vulnerable I had written.

Later, he told me that was the moment he wanted to know me better.

Not a filtered photo. Not a carefully curated version of my life. A story. A piece of my truth.

Since then, we’ve spent hours talking about our lives, our mistakes, our children, and the dreams we still have for the future.

Somewhere in those conversations, I noticed myself doing something I hadn’t fully paid attention to before.

Every time he tells me something he likes about me, I immediately start telling him what’s wrong with me.

He tells me I’m beautiful, and I start pointing out all the things I don’t like about my body and the signs of getting older.

He tells me he loves how close I am with my children and how impressed he is with the mother I’ve been, and I start telling him about all the mistakes I made along the way.

He tells me he thinks I’m funny, and I tell him I leave my clothes on the bathroom floor after I get out of the shower.

He tells me how kind he thinks I am, and I tell him I can be a total bitch sometimes.

He tells me he admires everything I’ve survived, and I tell him I’m messy, scatterbrained, have ADHD, and can be stubborn.

After one of these conversations, I found myself saying, “You know, I’m really not this insecure.”

And I meant it.

The strange thing is that when I’m alone, I actually like myself.

I’ve spent years learning to accept who I am. I know I’m not perfect. I start more projects than I finish, my house isn’t always clean, and I can be emotional and stubborn. But I also know I’m adventurous, resilient, compassionate, curious, and strong.

I’ve traveled the world alone. I’ve raised two incredible children. I’ve survived things that should have broken me.

When I’m by myself, I don’t spend much time worrying about my flaws anymore.

The fear only seems to show up when someone else starts seeing the good in me.

The problem isn’t that I don’t know my worth.

The problem is that I’ve been hurt enough times to feel the need to disclose all my flaws before someone gets too attached. It’s as if I’m trying to make sure they have all the information before they decide how they feel about me.

I don’t want to be accused later of pretending to be someone I’m not.

So I point out the messiness, the ADHD, the stubbornness, the clothes on the bathroom floor, the unfinished projects, and the flaws I assume they’ll eventually notice anyway.

Somewhere along the way, honesty became a protection mechanism.

Maybe I’m not trying to talk people out of liking me.

Maybe I’m trying to make sure they can’t say I didn’t warn them.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized where some of that comes from.

Years ago, I spent a long time trying to save a marriage that had become an unsafe place to stay.

Even after everything that happened, I still found myself defending the man I had loved. I told my children he loved them. I reminded myself that he wasn’t a bad person, that he had suffered, that he had struggled, and that he had tried.

Not because what happened was okay.

But because I could still see the humanity underneath the pain.

Later, in another relationship, I was honest about the things that made me insecure. I told him I was disorganized, messy, and a little all over the place.

At first, those things were accepted. Even celebrated.

But eventually, some of those same vulnerabilities became criticisms and things that were used against me.

And maybe that’s what happens when you’ve been hurt.

You learn to get ahead of the disappointment. You start introducing your flaws before someone else discovers them. You point them out first. You prepare your own defense case.

Not because you hate yourself.

Because you’re trying to protect yourself.

The funny thing is, the compliment that affected me most wasn’t the one I expected.

It wasn’t when he told me I was beautiful.

It wasn’t when he told me I was smart.

It wasn’t when he told me he enjoyed talking to me.

It was when he said, “One thing I’ve noticed about you is that you’re incredibly loyal.”

That one stopped me.

Not because I didn’t know it was true.

I did.

In fact, if you asked me what quality I value most about myself, that’s probably the answer I would give.

I’m fiercely loyal—to my children, my friends, the people I love, the people I work alongside, and sometimes even to people who have hurt me.

Not because I don’t have boundaries. Not because I excuse bad behavior. But because once I care about someone, I care deeply.

I become protective.

I become the person who shows up.

The person who stays longer than she probably should.

The person who fights for the people she loves.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t why the comment hit me so hard.

It wasn’t because I didn’t know I was loyal.

I did.

It was because he recognized it as something valuable.

For most of my life, loyalty has simply felt like what you do when you love someone.

You show up.

You fight for them.

You defend them.

You stay when things get hard.

You try to understand them, even when they’ve hurt you.

I never really thought of it as something special.

But hearing someone say it was one of the things they admired most about me made me realize how rarely I’ve seen that quality reflected back.

Not because it hasn’t existed in my life. I have wonderful friends. I have children who would do anything for me.

But I’ve spent so much of my life being the one who fights for other people that I don’t know if I’ve spent much time believing I deserved someone willing to fight for me in the same way.

Maybe that’s why that compliment meant more than being called beautiful or smart or funny.

It wasn’t flattery.

It felt like recognition.

And maybe that’s what all of us are looking for.

Not perfection.

Not admiration.

Not someone who thinks we’re flawless.

Just someone who sees us clearly.

The good and the bad. The strengths and the flaws. The cups left around the house. The unfinished projects. The scars. The resilience. The loyalty. The heart.

And chooses us anyway.

Lately, I’ve realized something.

Healing isn’t just learning to love ourselves.

I think I learned that lesson years ago.

The harder lesson is learning to believe someone else can love us too.

Not the polished version. Not the version that’s always strong. Not the version that has everything figured out.

The real version.

The one with flaws.

The one with fears.

The one that’s still healing.

Maybe being loved isn’t the hard part.

Maybe believing you’re worthy of being loved the way you’ve spent your life loving everyone else is the hard part.

Maybe that’s why so many of us immediately argue with compliments.

Maybe it’s why we hand people a list of warnings when they start getting close.

Maybe it’s why we keep trying to convince people not to love us before they’ve even decided whether they do.

We’re not rejecting ourselves.

We’re protecting ourselves.

But maybe there comes a point when protection starts looking a lot like distance.

And maybe the next step in healing isn’t finding more reasons we’re worthy.

Maybe it’s learning to believe the people who already see them.

For twenty-five years, I was a pharmacist.

For twenty-five years, I thought I was an alchemist.

I measured milligrams. I verified doses. I compounded when needed. I worked with substances designed to ease pain or steady a heart rhythm.

Technically and historically, that is alchemy.

Pharmacy grew out of ancient practices of compounding, extracting, and distilling. Early apothecaries were chemists and mystics at the same time. They believed matter could be transformed into something more refined.

Back then, I understood my work in practical terms. Safety. Precision. Responsibility.

It was transformation, but I did not call it that.

At the time, I thought I was working with chemistry.

Only later did I begin to see the metaphor.

Chemical reactions. Dosages. Molecules.

Historically, alchemists believed base metals could be transformed into gold. They worked with furnaces and formulas, convinced refinement was possible, that something common could become something precious.

But alchemy was never only about metal.

It was about transmutation.

Over time, gold became symbolic. Not just of wealth, but of consciousness. Clarity. Awakening. Something purified by fire.

What I did not understand then was that I had been working with a different kind of raw material all along.

Lead can look like trauma. Addiction. Grief. Shame. Guilt. Chaos.

For years, I tried to fix pain externally. I adjusted the dose. I changed the formula. I stabilized the symptoms.

But the deeper work was internal.

I do not just want to transform substances anymore.

I want to transform suffering into meaning. Chaos into steadiness. Heartbreak into language. Grief into compassion. Guilt into boundaries. Shame into self-trust.

That kind of alchemy does not happen in a lab.

It happens in awareness. In honesty. In sitting inside the fire instead of running from it.

Spiritual awakening is not about becoming someone else.

It is recognizing what was already there.

Resilience. Intuition. Discernment. The ability to begin again.

When that chapter closed, I did not stop being an alchemist.

I just stopped looking for gold outside of myself.

Maybe Rising Unbroken is not about reinvention.

Maybe it is about sitting with what nearly broke you and asking what it refined.

Maybe it is about honoring the fire instead of pretending it did not burn.

I was let go from a job this week, though by then it had already become obvious to both my employer and me that it wasn’t the right fit.

I had actually been preparing to give my notice once my new position officially went through. But before I could, she looked at me and said, “I just don’t see this working out long term.”

And the strange thing is, I think my conscience helped make that true.

The older I get, the more I’m realizing how important it is to stay true to yourself. How exhausting it becomes to constantly betray your own instincts and morals just to keep other people comfortable.

Not in some self-righteous way. Just in the quiet internal sense of being able to live with your own decisions when you lay your head down at night.

Especially when you’ve spent years trying to find your way back to yourself.

Originally, I thought the job might actually be fun. It was something completely different from the world I had spent twenty-five years in. After years of high stress, constant pressure, and the emotional exhaustion that came with being a pharmacist, part of me thought maybe this would feel lighter.

Instead, it somehow felt heavier.

Not because the work itself was harder, but because I slowly realized the job required a level of silence and compliance that I couldn’t comfortably settle into.

I was supposed to smile, follow the script, stop asking questions, and trust that certain things were “just how business works.”

But over the last few years, as I’ve healed and slowly started becoming more connected to myself again, it has become harder and harder to disconnect from my own instincts just to keep things comfortable for everyone else.

And ever since it ended, I’ve replayed it over and over in my mind, wondering if I was making a bigger deal out of it than I should have been.

But deep down, I know what I felt.

There have been plenty of times in my life when finances would have kept me showing up anyway. Times when I would have told myself to keep my head down, smile politely, collect the paycheck, and stop asking questions.

And honestly, maybe that’s what a lot of people do when they’re trying to hold their lives together. Maybe sometimes it’s what people have to do.

But lately I’ve noticed something uncomfortable happening inside me.

The more self-aware I become, the louder my internal alarm system gets.

It was a dental office. Recently sold, recently rebranded, and trying to maintain the appearance that everything was business as usual.

And the longer I worked there, the more uncomfortable I became with the way information was carefully worded, redirected, or withheld until people were already emotionally or financially committed.

No one was necessarily flat-out lying to people. That’s what made it so morally confusing.

It was more subtle than that.

The wording would shift. Conversations would be guided a certain way. Information that might make someone pause or reconsider often wasn’t made fully clear until much later in the process.

Sometimes it felt less like helping patients make informed decisions and more like steering them toward the outcome that most benefited the business.

And maybe some people would just call that sales. Maybe they would say this is simply how private healthcare works.

But after twenty-five years of trying to advocate for patients as a pharmacist, it didn’t sit right with me.

What I saw as being upfront and honest with people, the dentist often saw as me creating unnecessary problems or turning patients away.

I voiced out loud several times that I wasn’t comfortable using wording that felt intentionally misleading or avoiding full transparency with people who were trusting us with both their health and their money.

And every time I said it, it became more obvious that my values and the direction of the business were no longer aligned.

And to be fair, I understood the pressure behind that. Businesses need to make money. New owners want to grow quickly. Overhead is expensive. Staff needs to be paid.

But somewhere along the way, it started feeling less like healthcare and more like sales.

I spent years helping people find the cheapest option for medications, telling them when another pharmacy accepted their insurance, calling doctors to ask if there was a similar medication that would cost less, searching for discount cards, or trying to help people stretch impossible budgets just a little further.

So suddenly finding myself in an environment where the business side seemed to come first no matter what felt deeply uncomfortable to me.

Maybe that’s why I kept trying to make it make sense in my head.

At the same time, another opportunity was slowly coming together in the background. One that actually felt aligned with who I am becoming.

A job working with people struggling with mental health and addiction. A job that, strangely enough, made me feel hopeful again instead of drained.

I was just waiting for all the final pieces to go through. The background check. The TB test. The paperwork. That strange in-between stage where nothing feels fully secure yet.

Even though I dreaded walking into the office most mornings, I still kept worrying about how to leave the “right” way.

I worried about giving enough notice.

I worried about inconveniencing them.

I even asked the new job if they would be okay with me starting later so I could give my current employer a full two weeks.

That’s the part I keep thinking about.

I was carrying the emotional weight of leaving responsibly from a place that had no hesitation about letting me go the moment I became inconvenient.

And to be fair, I understand why I became inconvenient.

I kept asking questions I probably should have stopped asking.

Questions about honesty. About transparency. About where the line is between sales and misleading people.

When patients asked why they suddenly owed more money, I struggled with being told not to directly explain that the office was now out of network. Instead, I was encouraged to say their insurance had changed.

Maybe some people would see that as normal business language. Maybe some people wouldn’t think twice about it.

But I did.

The reasoning behind certain policies also seemed to shift depending on the situation. Sometimes rules were presented as strict and non-negotiable, but in other situations those same rules suddenly became flexible if it benefited the business.

And maybe there were explanations for all of it that I didn’t fully understand. But over time, my discomfort kept growing anyway.

And the truth is, I understand survival mode more than I wish I did.

I know people justify things when they’re scared. I know fear can blur lines. I know what it feels like to make choices you later have to sit with in the quiet.

So this isn’t me pretending I’ve always been morally courageous. I haven’t.

But I think there comes a point in healing where your internal alarm system starts getting louder instead of quieter.

And once that happens, staying silent starts costing something too.

I kept thinking about how easy it is to slowly disconnect from yourself. Not all at once. Not in some dramatic movie moment. Just little compromises that pile up over time. Tiny moments where your stomach tightens but you tell yourself not to make things difficult. Moments where your instincts whisper, “This doesn’t feel right,” and you answer back, “Yeah, but I need this job.”

I could have smiled more. Agreed more. Learned to separate my feelings from the work.

I could have stopped questioning things and just done what I was told.

But at some point, constantly betraying your own instincts starts to wear on you in ways that money can’t fix.

And I think I’ve finally reached the point where I can no longer unknow what I feel.

It changes the way you move through relationships. Through workplaces. Through conversations. Through your own mind.

You become less willing to betray yourself for approval.

Less willing to stay silent just to keep peace.

Less willing to ignore discomfort for the illusion of security.

The strange thing is, that doesn’t always make life easier. Sometimes it makes life messier at first. Sometimes it costs you things. Sometimes it gets you labeled difficult instead of agreeable.

Sometimes it gets you let go.

I wasn’t devastated when it ended. In many ways, I felt relieved. My body had already been trying to tell me for weeks that the environment wasn’t right for me.

But I still felt embarrassed.

And that surprised me.

How quickly we internalize rejection as proof that something is wrong with us, even when we already knew we wanted to leave.

Even when part of us was miserable.

Even when we dreaded walking through the door every day.

Even when our body had been trying to tell us for weeks that something wasn’t aligned.

I came home that day mentally replaying everything. Wondering if I was being too sensitive or if what was happening really was unethical. Wondering if I should have just stayed quiet and stopped questioning everything. Wondering if being honest and questioning things is admirable or just inconvenient in the real world.

And the truth is, I still don’t fully know how to build a life that feels both financially stable and deeply aligned with who I am and who I want to be in a world where people often prioritize profit over the well-being of individuals.

I don’t know whether choosing integrity over silence will always work out in my favor, but I’m realizing being able to live with myself and look at myself in the mirror matters more than money or material things ever will.

What I do know is this:

Peace bought through self-betrayal is expensive too.

And I think there comes a point in healing where your soul simply gets too tired to keep paying that price.

They say hurt people hurt people. But if that were true, my daughter should be a monster. She’s been through more than most people I know, from a young age, and somehow she didn’t just become the opposite. She became something stronger than that.

There was always something different about her. By three years old, she had the soul of a 60-year-old in a tiny body. She carried the wisdom of someone who had already lived a lifetime. She was happy, light, completely herself, but also curious about everything and everyone.

Her grandma and grandpa often came over for dinner, and when they were ready to leave, she’d climb right into their car and say, “Bye, Mom, I’m sleeping at Grandma’s tonight.” And of course, they always let her. She wasn’t afraid of much. She just loved life and wanted to experience all of it.

When we went to visit my grandma, her great-grandma, she would light up in a completely different way. My grandma made these handmade Christmas ornaments and stockings, beautiful, detailed, time-consuming pieces that she put so much love into. Every year she would give each of us just one ornament.

But Lexi, every time we went over there, would ask, “Can I see your ornaments?” and carefully go through them one by one, saying things like, “Wow, Granny, this one is so beautiful. How did you make this?” She would ask questions, admire the work, and genuinely appreciate it in a way that made my grandma feel special.

She was the only one my grandma would say, “Go ahead and pick a couple.” She ended up with more ornaments than anyone else, and even multiple stockings, because she would find patterns she loved and ask about them, and my grandma would just make them for her.

That was who she was. She didn’t just notice things. She made people feel like what they created mattered.

If someone new came to our house, she didn’t hide behind me. She walked right up to them like she’d known them forever. “Hi, I’m Lexi. Do you want some string cheese?” I don’t know why it was always string cheese, but it was.

One time my brother’s girlfriend came over when Lexi was about three and a half, and her baby brother had just been born. She proudly introduced herself and said, “This is my little brother… he poops his pants. But it’s okay because he’s a baby.” She just had that way about her, saying things that made people laugh and making people feel comfortable and seen.

My brothers called her their little princess. She didn’t just enter a room, she changed it.

One morning when she was five, after staying up way too late the night before, she still woke up early. I asked her, “Why don’t you ever sleep in? You were up so late?” And she happily announced, “Because, Mom… every day is so beautiful, I can’t wait for the next one.”

Every time we passed a park, she’d say, “Mom, there’s swings! Can we go?” And we would, no matter what we were doing.

And then her world changed.

I’ve written before about how her dad had a stroke, and after that, he wasn’t the same. The man we knew slowly disappeared into mental illness, addiction, and instability, and our whole world changed with him. There were things she had to see and carry that no child should ever have to understand.

The night he tried to strangle me, she was eight years old and had to be brave enough to tell the police what happened. Because of her statement, they took him to jail. After that, during the times he struggled the most, he would tell her over and over, over the years, that it was her fault he went to jail. In many ways, he tied so much of his suffering and downward spiral back to that night and made her feel responsible for it. A lot of his anger, pain, and blame got placed onto her shoulders and she carried guilt that never should have belonged to her.

And that’s where it began.

After everything fell apart, I was supposed to be the strong one. But instead, for a while, she had to watch her mom fall apart too. When I couldn’t sleep and the nightmares wouldn’t stop, I turned to drinking to quiet my mind. It didn’t last forever, and it wasn’t every night, but it was long enough. It wasn’t just one bad night. It was a season.

Long enough that my mom had to come stay with me for a summer. Long enough that my daughter saw more than she ever should have had to see. One night, I passed out, and I woke up to her dripping water on my head because she wanted to make sure I was still alive. She was only nine, that part still breaks me when I think about it.

As her and her brother were growing up, during the times they did go over to their dad’s house, which became fewer and fewer over the years, he wouldn’t let her have dinner until she had been on the treadmill. It made her feel like if she didn’t look a certain way, she wasn’t good enough.

There were other things too… things I won’t go into here, but the way he treated her, the things he put her through, they left a mark.

As the kids got a little older and moved into their teen years, there were times when their dad, when he was in one of his depressive states, would call to take it out on us. I learned how to shut that down. I got to the point where I would say, if you’re not calling to talk about the kids, I’m not going to have this conversation.

My son handled things differently. He’s like a duck. Things roll right off him. If someone says something hurtful, he doesn’t absorb it. He doesn’t take it in. If his dad tried to make him feel bad, he would hang up or not answer.

He put up armor.

But not my daughter.

She absorbed everything because it was her dad. She would always want to answer the phone and would feel bad if she didn’t. Sometimes I didn’t even know he had called until she’d come out of her room crying, trying to explain that he had spent the conversation telling her she didn’t care about him, or that if he died, she wouldn’t even care.

That was when I realized how much weight she was carrying emotionally, and I put her back in therapy to help her learn how to deal with him. I also tried to teach her how to stand up for herself.

Finally, one day, I heard her on the phone saying, “You’re the adult in this relationship, not me. I’m not going to put up with this anymore. If you want to call me back when you’re acting like an adult, I’ll talk to you, but otherwise I’m not going to.”

And hearing her finally stand up for herself like that felt like watching her start to understand that loving someone didn’t mean letting them hurt you.

Her little brother needed her too and looked up to her in so many ways. He never wanted to go to his dad’s house unless she was going to be there too. And during that period when I wasn’t the mom I should have been, he clung to her like his life depended on it. When he struggled, she stepped in. She was strong so he didn’t always have to be. She protected him fiercely and loved him without resentment.

Even when someone hurt him, she didn’t hesitate. There was a girl in high school who had spread lies about him, and while I was trying to figure out the right way to handle it, Lexi had already gone into his phone, found the girl’s number, and called her herself. She told her exactly what she did was wrong and that it wasn’t okay. The girl apologized.

That was Lexi. If she saw something wrong, she didn’t wait. She acted.

From the time she was old enough to really talk, she sang constantly. My house was filled with music all day long. By the time she was six, people were already pointing out that she had perfect pitch. I put her in guitar lessons and voice lessons, and before long she started writing her own songs. As she got older, some of the lyrics became deeper and heavier, and there were times I would listen and ask, “Are you okay? Do you need to talk to someone?” She would just laugh and say, “Mom, music is my therapy.” And honestly, I think it helped save parts of her that the world tried very hard to break.

Then came high school.

She was sexually assaulted, and she didn’t tell me for six months because she thought it was her fault. It was the first time she had ever gone to a party, the first time she had ever gotten drunk.

When she finally told me, I encouraged her to go to the police, and I put her back into therapy. But things didn’t get easier right away. A few of her own friends turned on her and said they didn’t believe her. And when she finally went to the police station, the first question a female officer asked her was, “What were you wearing?” As if she hadn’t already spent months blaming herself enough and carrying shame that shouldn’t have been hers.

For a while, I didn’t recognize my own child. She didn’t want to be touched, she pulled away, she became depressed. I didn’t know how to fix it. I wanted to take it away from her, but I couldn’t. All I could do was support her and remind her it wasn’t her fault.

For a while, it looked like that might break her. But it didn’t. Over time, she found her way back.

And not only that, she turned it into something that could help others. Over the years, when I’ve had friends or people I know tell me that something similar happened to their daughters, Lexi has been willing to call them, to talk to them, and to tell them she’s been there and that they can get through it.

She no longer carries that shame, she knows now it wasn’t her fault. And if sharing her story helps someone else, that’s what she wants to do.

For a while, it felt like maybe some of the hardest years were finally behind her. Until one Thanksgiving…

Things had just started to feel like they might be getting better between her and her dad. He had been doing a little better, and for the first time in a long time, there was some hope. It was the first time in years they had gone to his house for a holiday. Her, her fiance and her brother went to their dads for Thanksgiving dinner.

At some point during the night, he started drinking, eventually getting drunk. He said something about me, something negative, and she did what she had always done. She defended me fiercely.

And that’s when he turned on her.

He got so angry that he went straight for the thing he knew would hurt her the most, and he looked at her and said, “You deserved to be raped.”

When she got home, I knew something was wrong immediately. She was crying in a way I had never seen before. She couldn’t catch her breath. Her fiancé was furious. I had never seen him like that. He just kept pacing, saying, “I’m going to kill him.”

Her brother had come home earlier, and when he heard what happened, he grabbed his keys and started for the door, saying he was going to go beat the shit out of his dad. I had to stop him and tell him that wasn’t going to fix anything.

When I finally got the full story out of her, my heart broke in a way I don’t think it ever had before. Not just because of what was said, but because it came from her father.

She kept saying, “If my own dad would say something like that to me… maybe I do deserve bad things.” And that was the moment I realized just how deep the damage had gone.

I texted him immediately and told him he was done. That he was no longer welcome in our lives, and that he was to stay away from my kids.

And Lexi, she blocked him after that, for almost a year.

Eventually he reached out from another number and begged for forgiveness. He told her that he had been sober for 5 months and asked if she would give him one more chance. He asked if they could meet for lunch and she went.

She forgave him.

They started rebuilding their relationship. He was sober and on medication for his bipolar disorder. For the first time, there was hope that maybe he could become the dad she had always wanted, and that maybe she could finally have the relationship with him she had hoped for.

But then, a year later, he took his own life.

She was in the middle of nursing school when it happened, and it hit her hard, not just because she lost him, but because she had just allowed herself to hope again. And that hope was gone.

But she didn’t stop. She kept going.

A year after he died, she said something I will never forget: “I just hope wherever he is… he knows that I forgave him.” That was her biggest concern. Not what she went through. Not what she lost, just that he knew he was forgiven.

I was supposed to be her hero.

I was supposed to protect her more than I was able to.

I was supposed to be the one who showed her how to be strong.

But somewhere along the way, I realized she was the hero in my story.

Over the years, I’ve apologized to my kids over and over for what they’ve been through, especially my role in it, and for that period after the divorce where I wasn’t who I should have been.

Not once did she judge me. She would actually get frustrated with me for being too hard on myself. She would say, “Mom, it’s okay. People make mistakes, you learned from it, you were still the best mom.”

And once she said something I’ll never forget: “If I could pick different parents, I wouldn’t. Even if I didn’t have much of a dad, I wouldn’t trade you for anything.”

There have been times I’ve been hard on myself, times I’ve made mistakes, and she’s always the one who shifts my perspective. When I was dating someone I shouldn’t have been, she would say, “Mom, if this were me, is this the kind of relationship you would want for me?” And when I would beat myself up over mistakes, she’d say, “If this were me, what would you say to me right now? I know you wouldn’t want me being this hard on myself.”

She was always reminding me to give myself the same grace I gave everyone else.

Now I ask myself those questions all the time.

She taught me that!

We say hurt people hurt people like it’s inevitable, like pain gives people permission to pass it on, but it doesn’t. Pain explains behavior, but it doesn’t excuse it. At some point, we all choose what we do with what we’ve been given.

My daughter chose something different.

She didn’t become bitter or closed off, and she didn’t just become someone who helps. She became someone who inspires others to be stronger, to love themselves, and to believe they can come through hard things and still be whole.

She’s going to be a nurse. And one day, after one of her clinicals, she told me she wanted to go into pediatric oncology. I remember asking her why she would want to work somewhere that could feel so heavy every day. And she said, “Yeah, it’s sad… but can you imagine being there to help and watch a kid kick cancer’s ass?”

She doesn’t just see the hard parts, she looks for where she can help. She looks for the good even inside something painful and she chooses to be part of that. She doesn’t worry about how it will affect her, because she knows she’s strong enough to be there for someone else.

I was supposed to raise her.

But somewhere along the way, she showed me how to live.

And when I look at her and her brother, I honestly don’t know how I got so lucky. I don’t know how, through everything they’ve been through, I ended up with two kids who are as strong, kind, and resilient as they are.

They’ve both faced things that could have broken them. And somehow, they didn’t just survive it, but they became better because of it.

This week she graduated from nursing school, and I couldn’t be prouder. The road to get here wasn’t easy, but she is, to me and to so many people around her, a true inspiration.

I may have been the one who brought her into this world…but she’s the one who has shown me how to be stronger in it.

Today is my son’s birthday. It’s mine too.

He was born on my 30th birthday after a 26-hour labor, and honestly, it feels like he held out just to make sure he landed on my day, which somehow makes perfect sense now because from the very beginning, he’s been equal parts chaos and humor.

I remember once trying to describe him to someone, and I said, “He definitely thinks outside the box.”

His sister jumped in and said, “He doesn’t just think outside the box. He’s so far outside the box, he doesn’t even know where the box is.”

That’s him.

He can drive me crazy sometimes. He’s messy, he’s all over the place, and there are days he can make me question my sanity. He’s like a bull in a china shop, moving through life without always realizing what he’s knocking over, and it’s hard to even have serious conversations with him sometimes because he’s always joking or goofing around.

And he’s always been like that.

When he was little, I had to watch him constantly. If I didn’t, I’d find him under tables trying to unscrew things like he had some kind of project going on. By the time he was five, he was lighting things on fire.

When he was around nine, I used to pick him up from school before going to his grandma’s to get his sister. One day he walked up to the car, didn’t look at me, didn’t say a word, just got in the back seat.

Then he leaned forward, handed me a note, and sat back again, completely expressionless.

I opened it, and it said, “When driving to grandma’s, turn into Target. Don’t ask why, just do it.”

It felt like a ransom note.

And honestly, I was so caught off guard by the whole thing, and so impressed with the creativity, that I actually turned into Target.

He demanded attention in a way that was almost impressive. If you were giving it to someone else, he would find a way to get it back. His poor sister figured that out early and mostly just let him have it.

Even in school, he couldn’t help himself. One time he got detention for coming back from the bathroom singing and dancing and completely disrupting the class. One of his teachers once told me she didn’t even know where to sit him, because no matter where he was, everyone ended up turned around watching him, waiting to see what he would do next.

By the time he was in high school, that hadn’t changed. There were a lot of sleepless nights. He was always doing something, out with friends, not checking in, taking my car before he was even 16, using my credit card to buy food for everyone because he wanted to be the nice guy.

He was the kind of kid you couldn’t stay mad at.

And he’s always been someone who talks to me about everything. There’s not really a secret between us. Sometimes he tells me more than a mother ever wanted to know, but I love that he feels he can talk to me about anything.

But that’s only part of who he is.

He notices people. He cares about people. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t just walk past someone who needs help.

When he was little, if I didn’t give money to every homeless person he saw, he would get upset. I can still hear him saying, “But mom, they need food,” trying to hold back tears like it physically bothered him not to help.

One time I went out to my car to grab one of my sweatshirts and it was gone. It was one of my favorites. I asked him where it was, and he told me that the night before he had been talking to a man at the gas station who was homeless. He said he asked him if he was cold, and when the man said yes, he gave him both of my sweatshirts so he would have enough to stay warm.

As much as I wanted that sweatshirt back, especially because I had gotten it in another country, how could I be mad at him?

The other day, he was at the grocery store right as it was getting dark and saw a woman sitting outside who was really drunk. He said she looked like she was in her fifties. He went up to her and asked if she was okay, and she told him her husband had kicked her out of the car and left her there.

So he stayed with her and made sure she got home safely. He got her a Waymo and waited with her until it arrived and she got in.

Later, when he called to tell me about it, I laughed and asked why he would get a Waymo instead of just getting an Uber.

He said it was because she was really drunk and he didn’t want to risk someone taking advantage of her.

That thought never even crossed my mind, but it did his.

Our house has turned into a revolving door at times because when he meets people who need help, he doesn’t hesitate to offer it. Whether it’s a place to stay, a ride, or whatever he has, he’s always willing to share.

And I’ll be honest, that hasn’t always been easy for me.

There have been moments where I’ve had to take a step back and remind myself that the way he sees people and the way he chooses to trust and help is not something I want to take away from him, even when it pushes me outside my comfort zone.

That’s the part of him I’m most proud of.

I know as he gets older, the other things will fall into place. He’ll learn to be more organized, more clean, and a little more responsible, and I’m already seeing evidence of that.

But it’s a lot harder to teach someone to be kind or to have the kind of empathy he has. I’ll take that any day over being a little bit cleaner.

Somewhere along these last 23 years, without me always getting it right as a mother, he became this person.

And if this is who he is, then I know I got something right.

I met a woman recently who told me she doesn’t like doing things alone.

And I’m not talking about just big things like travel or anything extreme. I mean everyday things. She doesn’t like going to the grocery store by herself. Running errands alone makes her uncomfortable. Even just being somewhere by herself, without someone next to her, doesn’t feel natural to her.

And the more she told me, the more I realized how often I’ve heard this before.

I’ve met so many women over the last few years who feel the same way. Women who look at me with a mix of curiosity and disbelief when they find out I travel alone or go places by myself, like it’s something they could never imagine doing.

And I get it, because I remember that feeling.

There was a time in my life when I didn’t feel comfortable doing things on my own either. It wasn’t until after my divorce that I really started to figure out how to enjoy my own company and move through the world without being afraid to do it alone.

I listened while she continued telling me about how she had started a new job, and on her first day she went to get lunch. She planned to take it back to her car and eat alone, like she always did. But this time she stopped. She decided to sit inside and eat it there instead.

She said she felt nervous the whole time.

But when she finished, she called her husband. Not because anything big had happened, but because she was proud of herself for sitting down and eating alone in a restaurant, around other people, for the first time in her life.

And I told her I was proud of her too. That even though she’s in a happy marriage, it’s important for her to keep doing things like that. To keep growing her own confidence. To not lose that part of herself.

And I remember thinking about how something so small for some people can feel like such a big step for someone else.

And also how often what we fear is not what actually happens.

We don’t talk enough about how many people grow into adulthood without ever feeling fully comfortable in their own skin.

And part of that makes sense. We live in a world where we’re constantly exposed to worst-case scenarios. We hear about terrible things happening, we see it on the news, and over time it starts to shape how we see the world. It makes us more cautious, more aware, sometimes more afraid.

But it’s not just that.

It’s also the quieter fear. The one that has nothing to do with danger, and everything to do with perception. The discomfort of being seen alone. Sitting by yourself in a restaurant. Walking into a place without anyone next to you. Wondering what people might think.

Somewhere along the way, especially for women, we start to tie our identity to who we are to other people.

A wife. A mom. A partner. A friend.

And those roles can be beautiful, but if we’re not careful, we slowly lose something underneath them.

We get so used to being needed, being part of something, being seen in relation to someone else, that we stop practicing what it feels like to just be ourselves.

To sit with ourselves. To go places by ourselves. To exist without needing to fill the space with someone else’s presence.

And I don’t think we always realize it’s happening.

It doesn’t feel like we’re losing ourselves. It just feels like life.

But then something as simple as sitting alone in a restaurant suddenly feels uncomfortable. Not because it’s unsafe, but because it’s unfamiliar.

When I talk about independence, I’m not talking about needing to prove you don’t need anyone. I’m not talking about staying single or leaving a relationship.

I’m talking about something quieter than that.

I’m talking about having yourself.

Knowing who you are when no one else is there. Being comfortable in your own presence. Trusting yourself enough that you don’t disappear inside the roles you love.

Because in my experience, that doesn’t weaken relationships. It makes them stronger. Healthier. More balanced. As long as there’s space for both people to exist fully, not just as roles, but as individuals.

And for a lot of people, this doesn’t start with something big.

It starts small.

Maybe it’s sitting down and eating by yourself instead of taking it to your car. Maybe it’s going to a movie alone, or running errands without feeling like you need to be on the phone with someone the whole time.

Little things.

Not because they’re dangerous, but because they’re unfamiliar.

And at first, they can feel uncomfortable. You might feel like people are looking at you, judging you, wondering why you’re alone.

But sometimes it’s not even that.

Sometimes it’s a deeper fear. The kind that comes from everything we hear and see, the idea that something could happen, that someone might not have good intentions.

And while that does exist, it’s not the whole picture.

The majority of people in the world are good.

Most people are just living their lives, not paying attention to what you’re doing, not looking to harm you, not thinking about you at all.

And over time, you start to realize that too.

You realize you can walk into a place, sit down, exist in your own space, and be okay.

That most moments are just normal.

And something starts to shift the more you do it.

You realize you can handle it. You realize you don’t need to fill every quiet moment. You realize you’re okay in your own company.

And that builds.

Not all at once, but over time.

Until one day, the things that used to feel uncomfortable don’t feel like a big deal anymore.

And that confidence doesn’t just stay in those small moments. It follows you into bigger ones.

And sometimes those bigger moments turn into something you never would have imagined before. A trip by yourself. Going somewhere new without anyone to rely on but you. And you come back realizing you were capable of more than you ever thought.

And I think that’s why this matters more than we realize.

Because even if you’re generally happy, those small fears still take something from you.

Worrying about what people think. Feeling uncomfortable being on your own. Having that quiet thought in the back of your mind that something could go wrong.

Even if it’s small, it changes how you move through the world.

And over time, those small moments add up.

You don’t fully relax. You don’t fully enjoy where you are. You don’t fully experience things the way you could.

And I think as human beings, we’re meant to feel more than that.

We’re meant to move through the world with a sense of confidence. Not because nothing could ever go wrong, but because we trust ourselves enough to handle it if it does.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this doesn’t just show up in us.

It shows up in how we raise our kids too.

Because raising kids comes with a kind of fear you can’t really explain until you’ve felt it.

Believe me, I was scared. There were moments I thought I would fall apart if anything ever happened to my kids. There were times I thought I would never forgive myself if something went wrong.

But I also knew something else.

One of the worst things I could teach them would be to fear the world, to fear people who are different from them, to believe that the safest way to live is to stay small and protected.

That’s not the life I wanted for them. Because that kind of fear doesn’t protect you, it limits you.

I wanted them to trust themselves. To know they could move through the world on their own and be okay.

I wasn’t careless about it. I talked to them about being aware, about trusting their instincts, about paying attention to what doesn’t feel right.

But there’s a difference between teaching your kids to be aware and teaching them to be afraid.

I never wanted fear to be the thing that shaped how they saw the world or their place in it.

I think about my daughter.

One summer, when she was only sixteen years old, we had been to South Africa together, and on the way back she wanted to go visit my brother and her cousins in Prague, so I let her.

I put her on a plane in London and sent her there by herself, which already felt like a big step. But what felt even bigger was knowing that when it was time for her to come home, she was going to have to make that entire trip back alone.

It wasn’t a simple flight. It was international travel, connections, and navigating airports she had never been through before, including Heathrow, one of the busiest and most overwhelming airports in the world.

I remember when she called me. I could hear the fear in her voice. She didn’t know where to go or what to do next, and every part of me wanted to fix it for her, to walk her through every step and make it easier.

But I couldn’t. I wasn’t there.

So I told her what I could, that she was going to have to ask someone for help and figure it out.

And she did.

She found her way through that airport, made her connection, got on the right flight, and made it all the way home. But what stayed with me wasn’t just that she made it home. It was who she was when she got there.

She was more confident, more sure of herself, like she had just proven something to herself that no one else could have given her.

My son had his own version of that.

He was fourteen, and we were in Spain. We were all planning to stay longer, but he didn’t want to miss football practice, so he decided he was going to fly home early on his own.

Again, this wasn’t a short or simple trip. It was international travel, connections, and airports he had never navigated before.

At one point his flight was delayed and he missed his connection, which meant he had to go up to someone and figure out what to do next, how to get rebooked, and how to get home.

And he did.

And just like his sister, he came back different.

Those moments don’t just get them from one place to another.

They change them.

Because confidence isn’t something we can hand to our kids.

It’s something they build when they’re put in situations where they have to rely on themselves and realize that they can.

And I think that’s true for all of us.

We don’t become less afraid because the world suddenly becomes safe.

We become less afraid because we start proving to ourselves, in small ways and big ones, that we can handle it.

That we can walk into something unfamiliar and figure it out.

That we can trust ourselves.

The world isn’t less scary because you avoid it.

It becomes less scary when you realize you can move through it.

I was catching up with a good friend about a month and a half ago.

We don’t get to talk as often as we’d like, so when we do, we actually catch up.

We were both talking about how life feels really heavy right now, and how it seems like almost everyone we know is going through something in one way or another.

She’s traveled the world. She’s strong, capable, resilient, and right now she’s moving through a life transition that, for her, isn’t easy.

She was asking me about my trip, and I told her I just needed to get away for a bit. There was too much happening in the world, and I needed some distance from it. I didn’t want to keep watching the news and feeling like everything was on fire.

And then she said, “Yes, these are exciting times.” She was serious.

“Exciting?” I said. “That’s not the word I would use for it.”

And then she started to explain what she meant.

Not because things are good.

But because things are being exposed.

Because when everything looks like it’s falling apart, sometimes it’s not just destruction.

Sometimes it’s the beginning of something breaking open.

And it made me think of a house.

Sometimes something is so worn down, so patched together over time, that no matter how much you try to fix it, it’s never really solid again. At some point, the only way to rebuild it right is to tear it down and start over.

And something about that changed the way I was looking at everything.

Because when I look around, I’m starting to see it.

People who never used to pay attention are paying attention now.

People are speaking up who never used to.

People are starting to question things that never used to get questioned.

And more and more, things just aren’t adding up the way they used to.

But when you’re in it, it doesn’t feel like a shift.

It just feels chaotic.

Like things don’t make sense anymore.

It is right in front of us now and we can’t ignore it anymore.

But the more I’ve sat with it, the more I keep coming back to that perspective.

Because maybe this isn’t just chaos.

Maybe it’s collapse.

Not just in people’s lives, not just in the things we’re individually going through…

but in the systems we’ve all been relying on too.

And maybe collapse isn’t the worst thing.

Because the system is not working the way it’s supposed to anymore.

It’s been strained for a long time.

Held together just enough to keep going, but not enough to actually function the way it should.

And now it’s getting harder to ignore.

That’s what she meant.

And I’m starting to see it that way too.

It’s probably going to be painful for a while. For all of us.

But if we can start to see that we’re in this together, maybe we can actually get through it.

Because maybe it has to burn to the ground before we can rebuild something better.

A few weeks ago, on March 21st, it was the two-year anniversary of my ex-husband’s death by suicide.

That day, my daughter texted me and asked, “Why is it harder now than it was right after it happened?” I started giving it more thought than I expected to. What seemed like a simple question opened up something deeper.

And as I sat with it… I realized something I hadn’t fully allowed myself to see before.

I think we lost him twice.

The first time wasn’t when he died. The first time was when he was still alive.

We had been married for ten years when everything changed. He had surgery to repair a torn patellar tendon, and about a week later, he had a stroke. That’s when we found out he had been born with a hole in his heart, something no one had ever caught.

At the time, our kids were just three and six.

From the outside, it looked like a medical crisis. Something you go through. Something you recover from. But what followed wasn’t something we were prepared for.

He became someone different.

At first, it was subtle. Then it wasn’t.

He slipped into a deep depression, and eventually he was diagnosed as bipolar. But he didn’t know how to handle it. Instead of getting the help he needed, he started trying to manage it himself with alcohol, with drugs, and even steroids. Anything that might quiet what was happening inside him.

For two years, I tried to help him.

I encouraged him to get treatment. I tried to explain that something had changed in his brain, that this wasn’t just stress or a phase. I reached out to his family. I did everything I knew how to do to hold things together, for him, for our kids, for our life.

But it kept getting worse.

And eventually, it crossed a line I couldn’t ignore.

One night, after we were already separated and he was staying with his parents, we got into an argument. He came to the house, broke in, pulled me out of bed, and tried to strangle me.

And that was the moment I knew… I couldn’t save him. And I couldn’t stay.

I didn’t divorce him because I stopped loving him. I divorced him because he became someone I didn’t recognize.

And there’s a kind of grief in that, that no one really talks about.

Because they’re still here.

Still calling. Still showing up. Still hurting you.

You don’t get to mourn them. You just learn how to survive them.

I was raising two kids, trying to protect them, trying to make sense of behavior that didn’t make sense. There wasn’t space to sit in sadness. There wasn’t time to process what we had lost.

I remember thinking, more than once, that it might have been easier if he had died when he had the stroke, because in so many ways, the man we knew already had. And at least then, we could have remembered him as he was, instead of living through everything that came after.

And even thinking that felt wrong. Because he was still here. But so much of him wasn’t.

There were moments, though. Little glimpses. At football games. At performances. Sitting next to each other, laughing and teasing like nothing had ever changed. For a second, I’d see him again, the man I married, and I’d think maybe he’s still in there.

And then just as quickly, it would disappear. That kind of back-and-forth does something to you. It keeps you holding on while also slowly letting go.

Because the truth is, he was a good man.

He wasn’t perfect. We were both stubborn. We argued. But he was loving in a way that was real and consistent before everything changed.

He was the kind of man who would see a shirt somewhere and buy it because he thought it would look good on me.

He helped my brothers. He got them jobs and let one of them live with us after a divorce. When my younger brother was struggling in high school, he wanted him to move in with us so he could help guide him, coach him, and give him a different environment.

When our kids were little and he came home from work trips, he’d walk in the door and say, “Who loves me?” and we’d all pile on him in one big hug.

We got married young, 22 and 23, and we really were happy.

Once, after we’d already been married for years and had our daughter, someone asked if we were newlyweds. When we said no, he told us, “Don’t ever lose that love for each other.”

And we hadn’t. But, somewhere along the way, we lost that version of him. So when he died, everything shifted again.

Because when he was alive, I was too busy surviving who he had become and how he treated me and my kids. When he died, I finally had space to miss who he used to be.

And now that the pain he caused is no longer happening, all that’s left is the love.

But grief isn’t simple. And it wasn’t just mine.

My son had just started getting close to him again. Over the last year, their relationship had been growing in a way it hadn’t in a long time. He told me once, “Dad seems like he’s finally getting better.”

So when he died, my son couldn’t understand it. “Why would he wait until we were close again to do that?” he asked. Especially when it seemed like he was doing better than he had in years.

My daughter had her own heartbreak. She had just forgiven him. After everything he had said and done, things no child should have to hear, she had finally reached a place where she could see that those moments weren’t really him. That it was the drinking, the pain, the broken parts of him.

He had asked for her forgiveness and she gave it. They had just started trying to rebuild something when he died. And I think what shattered her the most was the finality of it.

As long as he was alive, there was always this quiet hope that one day, he might fully become the dad she had always wanted. When he died, that hope died too.

She took one of the last voicemails he left her, a message telling her he loved her and how proud he was of her and of how well she was doing in nursing school, and turned it into a teddy bear. When you press its paw, it plays his voice.

One day, after she had moved out, my son and I were cleaning her room. We were going through things, picking things up off the floor, and I accidentally stepped on the bear.

And suddenly, his voice filled the room.

We both froze.

We just stood there, staring at each other, completely caught off guard. It scared us at first. For a second, it felt like he was just there.

And then we started laughing. Not because it was funny, but because it was so unexpected, so surreal, so him in a strange way.

And after that, we started telling stories. The goofy things. The ridiculous things. The moments that made us shake our heads and laugh.

Sometimes I’ll tell my kids stories from when we were first married, the little things I used to think were so funny about him.

Like the time we were filling out our wedding invitations and he told me his middle name was spelled differently, Michael, but spelled M-I-C-H-E-A-L. I remember thinking it was strange, but okay. And then when his mom saw the invitations, she said, “They spelled Tony’s middle name wrong.” He had been spelling his own name wrong his entire life.

That was him. A little naive. A little goofy. Easy to love.

And that’s what we do now. We remember him in pieces. The good ones. The hard ones. The confusing ones.

Since the anniversary of his death, I’ve been thinking about him almost every day.

Maybe that’s why it’s been sitting so heavy on my heart lately.

Maybe that’s why I’m writing this now.

Not the version of him we struggled with, but the one I loved.

I find myself missing him in a way I didn’t expect. Wishing I could talk to him, even just once in a while like we used to.

We kept some of his clothes when we cleaned out his apartment. And lately, I’ve been wearing his sweatshirts around the house. Sometimes even his shoes.

I don’t really have a logical explanation for it.

Maybe it’s just a way to feel close to him again.

Grief doesn’t always make sense like that. But I’ve learned something through all of this. Grief isn’t always one moment. It isn’t always clean or linear or predictable.

Sometimes it comes in layers. Sometimes it waits until you’re finally safe enough to feel it. And sometimes, you don’t just lose someone once.

Because the first time, I didn’t really get to grieve him. I was too busy surviving who he had become. Too busy protecting my kids. Too overwhelmed, too angry, too exhausted to sit in the sadness of losing the man I once knew.

There wasn’t space for grief back then. Only survival.

So when he died, that grief finally found me. And it came not just for who he was at the end, but for who we had lost all those years before.

And that’s why it feels heavier now. Because I’m not just grieving him once.

I’m grieving him twice.

When my son picked me up from the airport, he brought the dogs.

Usually, they go crazy when they see me, jumping and barking like I’ve been gone forever, even if it’s just been a few days. But this time, they just… stared at me.

For a full three minutes, they looked at me like they were trying to figure out who I was, like something about me didn’t match what they remembered. And then suddenly it clicked, and they got excited.

Except one of them, the one who usually clings to me, ran back to my son’s lap.

I laughed, but it felt strangely symbolic.

On the drive home, my son was excited to see me. I was excited to see him. And then, as we pulled into the neighborhood, he said, “Do you think we could go stay in a hotel tonight?”

I said, “What?”

“I didn’t clean. I didn’t think you were coming home yet.”

I had told him a couple of times. He just forgot.

The house looked like squatters had been living there. Clothes everywhere. Takeout bags stacked up. My room taken over. Gym equipment in places it shouldn’t be. A backyard that hadn’t been touched in three months, more jungle than lawn.

I love him so much. And yet he can drive me absolutely insane.

It was strange to be home.

I had missed my kids. I was ready to come back. I was tired of moving constantly. I wanted to figure out what my life looks like now. But almost immediately, I missed something.

Not a place.

A feeling.

Because somewhere along the way, I learned how little I actually need.

I got used to bucket showers, even cold ones, and I used to despise cold showers. I didn’t have a bathtub for three months, something that used to feel essential to me, and I was fine. More than fine. I was happy.

But it wasn’t just that.

I wore the same clothes over and over again, something I used to think would bother me didn’t. I used to care about outfits, about having options, about looking put together. And somewhere along the way, that just disappeared. I rotated through the same few things without thinking about it. One pair of sneakers. One pair of flip-flops. Some of my favorite clothes were the ones I bought for three dollars in Nepal and India. Soft, comfortable, easy. And I realized I didn’t miss the rest. I didn’t need closets full of choices. I didn’t need anything fancy.

Even the way I ate changed. In Nepal, during the service work, we had the same lunch every day: rice, lentils, vegetables. Dinner varied a little, but not much. And it was good. Not just good, but real. Simple food, fresh, made with care. And I was completely content eating the same thing over and over again. I didn’t need endless options. I didn’t need variety for the sake of it. I was satisfied.

When I was volunteering, I lived in shared quarters. A simple room with bunk beds, and I actually liked it. There was something about it that felt grounding. And when I was traveling, I stayed in places that cost me between six and twelve dollars a night. Basic rooms, nothing fancy, but they were clean, safe, enough. And I realized that “enough” felt better than everything I used to think I needed.

And standing in my house—with a backyard, a pool, space, comfort—I had this strange realization:

I don’t think I want this. Not like I used to.

I don’t want the maintenance, the pressure, the constant upkeep. I want a slower life. The kind where people aren’t always in a hurry, where they’re not constantly chasing more, where people laugh more, gather more, connect more. Where happiness isn’t something you schedule around work.

And that’s where it gets complicated.

Because as much as I can picture that life, I can’t picture it without my kids.

When I was gone, we talked more than we do when I’m home. We FaceTimed. We called. We made time. At home, everyone is busy. We pass each other. We assume there’s always tomorrow. But when there’s distance, there’s intention.

And that messed with me a little.

Now I’ve been home a few days. The house is clean. My bed is comfortable. There’s a sense of normal again. And reality is starting to settle in.

I don’t have a clear plan. I don’t have a job lined up. I don’t have everything figured out.

And part of me starts to panic. Starts to think maybe I shouldn’t have gone.

Because I know what people would think. That it was irresponsible. That I should have had a plan. That at this stage in life, you don’t just leave everything and hope it works out.

I read something the other day that stuck with me. That sometimes, the life you actually want is on the other side of being misunderstood.

Meaning that sometimes the life you want doesn’t make sense to other people. It doesn’t look responsible or safe. And if you wait until it does, you might never move at all.

And I started thinking about how much of my life I made decisions based on what other people would think. Not in the obvious ways. I’ve always traveled alone, done things people might consider different. But when it came to responsibility, to work, to stability, to what a life is “supposed” to look like, that’s where I stayed longer than I should have.

That’s why I stayed in a job that was slowly draining me. Because I had invested so much into it. Because it looked right. Because leaving would have looked irresponsible.

And I think a part of me needed everything to fall apart before I gave myself permission to choose differently.

And I know some people would think I’m crazy for doing it, for leaving without a clear plan, for not having everything lined up. And maybe they’re not wrong.

But I don’t regret it. Not even a little.

I’d do it again.

Because what I gained from that time, who I became while I was there, was worth more than the security I thought I was protecting.

And now I’m here.

Somewhere between the life I had… and the life I know I want.

And I don’t fully know what comes next.

And maybe that’s the hardest part.