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Coming home to yourself isn’t always easy. But it is possible—bit by bit, light by light.

But even after years of healing, I still mistook toxicity for depth, and manipulation for love, until I finally stopped gaslighting myself and believed me

Who are you when you’re not defending, proving, protecting, surviving? I asked myself that question after the store was gone. After the adrenaline had nowhere left to go. After the avalanche ended, and I was still alive. My worth, stitched into my work. My energy, powered by pressure. My direction, determined by demand. For so long, I was driven by crisis. Crisis made decisions easy. Crisis gave me purpose. Crisis kept me upright. But crisis wasn’t the only thing that moved m

Sick days are the worst.

Just days after my dad died, and days before my reality exploded, I sent him a message soaked in love and longing. I never imagined the truths I was about to uncover would change everything.

I swallowed silence instead of screaming, wrote truth instead of texting, chose no contact while my whole nervous system ached for just one drop of the poison I finally stopped calling love.

No contact is really hard, especially when the person you cut off was your number one person. This is my story of living through it.

Grief is lonely, even when I’m not alone. My heart keeps beating, even when it aches. Even when it’s tired of aching.

I’m tired of turning hard things into lessons. I don’t want to grow through loss. I want peace. I want softness. That’s not bitterness. It’s honesty. And I’m allowed to want that now. And I do.

After months of holding it all together, I broke. Not from rage—but from longing, from truth, from the weight of everything I hadn’t let myself fully feel. This is the story of the tidal wave that undid me—and the quiet courage that followed. A story of grief, reckoning, and slowly remembering that I get to choose what comes next.

We picked these berries together last summer. It was a good day. And yet, being in a loading zone behind him a year later, I realized how heavy even the sweet moments can become. I saw him. I saw everything. And it all came rushing back.

This weekend was filled with simple things—family, sunflowers, blueberry buckets— and somewhere in the middle of it, Peace and Joy walked beside me again.

The brutality isn't just what he did to me. It's that I had to become someone I never wanted to be.

He called me Kitten, soft, sweet, and easy to control. For a while, I played the part, quiet and grateful for scraps of affection. But my voice was never gone. It was hypnotized.

It didn’t demand my destruction. It didn’t steal my breath. It simply let me be.