The Light That Stayed
By the age of 30, I’d already lived more lives than anyone I’ve met around my age. Married with 2 kids (another shortly on the way), working on the purchase of our 3rd home; We had already lived in 3 major cities, started multiple successful businesses, and lived through charged historical events that showed us who we are. That all came after the years of domestic violence I lived through as an adult. After a turbulent childhood that left me with deep scars and an uneven playing hand.
My story began shrouded in darkness. For five years now I’ve been uncovering pieces of it I didn’t even remember: memories beginning before I was three, ones that shaped far more of me than I ever understood. To receive them now completely rearranged my spirit. I’m only now beginning to take the pieces and make something with it of my own choosing.
My life has been a long becoming. My innocence was stolen very early. I grew up fast, weathered chaos and pain, and learned early how to survive. As a young woman, I walked through abuse, through motherhood before I was ready, through the exhaustion of building and proving and performing. But I already knew well the verses of survival: Smile, poise, be quiet, don’t speak. Ignore the bad, look for the good.
I became a single mom, a nurse, a poster child online for the single do-it-all woman. The world watched as I met the boy I’d grown up with down the street. We were immediately inseparable and my trajectory was forever changed. His love deserves no small credit in the story of my revival. We were so happy, so innocent, aiming for the moon with everything we wanted at our fingertips.
Then the world split into two deafening world views, and the bottom of my world dropped out.
I learned the values and beliefs I was raised on, and held quietly to my chest, like the winning hand no one knew I had—The beliefs that fueled me on every hopeless, heartbroken night, informed my kindness, gave me my love for beauty—were not tolerated by the group I thought I belonged to. The freedom and expression I experienced online was suddenly being weaponized against me. I was confused, and afraid. I thought I was on the good side, the kind one?
I became afraid of who I was, what I believed in. I was told, never directly, what kind of person I was: Hateful, intolerant, crazy. The world of mental and emotional abuse I’d been raised in had found me again. This time, it was asking me to rise. It asked of me to journey to my center, question everything, and come back again embracing my core.
What followed was a different kind of becoming: the slow, tender healing of my soft girl, housewife (my husband calls it queen) era. The season where I’ve learned to let gentleness do what force never could.
The one where I began to make a home not just around me, but within me. Where I finally began to notice life unfolding from my perspective, not the perspective of how others perceived me. The one where I finally began to see my own worth and trust in my own voice. The one where God is taking all of my loss and my pain and my missteps, and gathering them up for redemption.
This space is where I’ll begin to tell my story, slowly, softly, and with care; Of course, that will be but a small part. The core of this space is for finding the beauty and joy in the every day.
But I’ve learned how silence and confusion can shape a life. Shame breeds in the dark, but I’ve learned how remembering can begin to set you free. So I will also share what is true, not for sympathy, but so as to set my lamp upon a hill for any young woman journeying one of the harrowing roads I have: alone, stumbling through the dark. May she find here a flicker of light, of hope, of truth; that she is not her mistakes, nor the mistreatment of others.
She is worthy, wanted, chosen—and healing and redemption belongs to her, too.
