Author: The Fragrance of my Mother

Chosen.

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

(When I started writing this I thought this was going to be a post processing being left. I didn’t realize it was actually about being found. Bear with me.) 

I have spent so many mornings…

 So many sleepless nights asking God the same question. 

Why can’t I let her go?

I’ve prayed until there were no words left. I’ve cried until my chest ached and the sound escaped me entirely. I’ve begged Him to take this pain away because it feels like something inside me is still bleeding. Not the kind of wound anyone else can see. The kind that reopens before my feet ever touch the floor and stays even after my head hits my pillow. 

I’ve spent nearly a year now trying to understand why this breakup has devastated me so completely. 

I’ve wondered if there’s something wrong with me because I’m so stuck in the feelings of missing her. 

At first, I thought the pain was simply about love. 

Or maybe the lack of it. 

I thought I was grieving because I couldn’t tell what had been real and what hadn’t. I replayed conversations. I questioned memories. I wondered if the woman I fell in love with had ever truly existed, or if I had simply fallen in love with the version of her I hoped was real. 

I questioned who I was in our relationship and I questioned my own judgement. 

Was I really that naive? 

Did I completely misread the person I gave my heart to? 

Did I uproot my entire life for someone who was never going to stay and had no real intention of spending their life with me even though they swore up and down that they would? 

Those questions have haunted me. Day in and day out. 

But the longer I’ve sat with the Lord, the more I’ve realized they aren’t the deepest wound. 

Because even if every “I love you” was genuine… 

Even if every promise was sincere the moment it was spoken… 

Even if she loved me the best she knew how… 

She still didn’t choose me. 

And that’s the ache that has brought me to my knees. 

Not simply wondering whether I was loved. 

But realizing I wasn’t chosen. 

Somehow, that cuts even deeper. 

Love can exist for a season. 

Feelings can change. 

People can mean every word they say in one moment and still be unable to live it out the next. 

But there is something uniquely devastating about pouring everything you have into someone-your love, your encouragement, your sacrifices, your future-and discovering that when the moment came to choose… it wasn’t you. 

That is the wound I’ve been carrying. 

The wound of not being chosen. 

I sacrificed so much. 

I uprooted my whole life. 

I walked away from my purpose and laid down my own dreams. 

I poured encouragement into someone else’s weary soul while quietly ignoring how empty my own had become. I celebrated her victories. I carried her burdens. I believed in her when she couldn’t believe in herself. I helped her build a life that ultimately, I’m no longer a part of.  I gave pieces of myself away because I thought love was proven by sacrifice. 

And somehow, despite loving with everything I had, I was still left behind. 

(None of this is at all to say that I wasn’t at fault, because I definitely was in so many ways. But I’m speaking to all the feelings in the present.)

There’s something devastating about realizing your “everything” wasn’t enough to make someone stay. 

That realization has echoed through every corner of my heart. 

It whispers that maybe I wasn’t enough. 

Maybe I wasn’t worth choosing. 

Maybe if I had loved harder…

Maybe if I had been easier… 

Maybe if I had been more patient, more beautiful, less addicted and complicated, more successful, less emotional…

Maybe she would have stayed. 

That ache doesn’t stay politely tucked away. It follows me into grocery stores, into coffee shops, onto beaches, into some of my favorite songs, into ordinary afternoons when something reminds me of her and suddenly my stomach feels like it’s been ripped in two. 

I’ve pleaded with God to remove it. 

I’ve wanted Him to perform some miraculous surgery on my heart while I slept so I’d wake up finally free. 

Instead…

He met me there. 

This morning, I went to to turn on my T.V. and make my coffee, but something stopped me. In the quiet of my home, that bears the many items that she and I once shared in our home together, I sat down on my couch and began to cry. 

Frustrated with feeling the hurt and even more frustrated that I can’t seem to move on, I once again asked the Lord to take it all away and questioned Him as to why He hadn’t yet. 

Through tears I could barely see through, something shifted. 

Not because the pain disappeared. 

But because He spoke through it. 

And I was finally willing enough to actually listen. 

As I sat there crying over the unbearable weight of not being chosen…

I realized….

Jesus knows this pain. 

Not metaphorically. 

Personally. 

Every single day He stretches out nail-scarred hands toward hearts He created. 

Every day He loves people who walk away. 

Every day he pursues people who choose lesser loves. 

Every day He watches people promise Him forever only to slowly drift toward everything else. 

Every day He offers Himself completely…

… and so often, He isn’t chosen. 

He’s treated as if He’s an option. 

He isn’t first. 

He isn’t wanted. 

He isn’t enough for the people He loves. 

Suddenly my heartbreak wasn’t isolated anymore. 

The Son of God has lived inside this ache far longer than I have. 

He knows what it feels like to love without reservation and be answered with rejection. 

He knows. 

Not because He studied suffering. 

Because He lived it. 

And then another realization settled over me. 

This wasn’t the first time my heart had broken this way. 

Years before her… 

There was him. 

My finance. 

Different faces. 

Similar stories. 

The same wound. 

The same desperate ache of rejection. Of not being chosen. 

The same feeling that if I had just loved harder, sacrificed more, become easier to love, maybe this person would have stayed. 

As I sat there this morning, the parallels were almost unsettling. 

It’s as if I’ve lived this story before. 

I’ve cried these tears before. 

I’ve prayed these prayers before. 

I’ve begged God for healing before. 

And somehow… I missed what He was trying to show me. 

But maybe, somewhere beneath the ache, my spirit knew He was trying to reveal something deeper. 

Because as much as I wanted the pain to stop, there was one prayer I never prayed. 

I never begged God to restore either of those relationships. 

I never pleaded with Him to change their hearts and bring them back to me. 

I never asked Him to make the person I loved choose me again. 

Instead, my prayers have always been different. 

I asked Him to heal my heart. 

I asked Him to release me from the feelings that kept me stuck. 

I asked Him to loosen my grip on what I couldn’t hold onto. 

I asked Him to free me from the pain that kept pulling me backward. 

And maybe, even in the middle of my heartbreak, some part of me trusted that God was after something deeper than simply giving me back what I lost. 

Maybe my spirit knew there was something He was trying to uncover. 

Something He was trying to heal. 

Something He was trying to show me. 

Because if I had truly seen it then, I don’t think I would have found myself here again. 

Instead, I repeated the pattern. 

The first heartbreak nearly broke me. 

This one almost killed me… literally. 

And maybe that’s why this revelation feels so different. 

Because for the first time, I wasn’t only looking at the people who rejected me. 

I was confronted with my own reflection. 

Every time I have cried over someone walking away… 

Every time I have begged God to heal the ache of rejection…

Every time I have pleaded for Him to mend what another person shattered…

There has been another heartbreak unfolding at the very same time. 

His. 

Because while I was devastated that someone else didn’t choose me…

How often was I asking Jesus to heal me without actually choosing Him? 

Not with my words. 

I’ve always known the right words. 

I’ve always believed the right things. 

But belief and surrender are not always the same. 

With my life, I kept asking Jesus to heal wounds created by building my identity on someone else’s love. 

I kept asking Him to fill places I refused to let Him occupy. 

I ran to people before I ran to Him. 

I looked to relationships to tell me who I was. 

I expected another human being to satisfy a longing that only Jesus could ever carry. 

I wanted His peace. 

I wanted His comfort. 

I wanted His healing. 

But if I’m honest… 

I didn’t always want Him above everything else. 

I wanted Him to stop the pain while I still clung to the very things that kept breaking my heart. 

The second I would find an ounce of relief, given the chance, I would run right back to the very people I was begging Him to set me free from. 

And suddenly, I saw the mirror. 

The rejection that has wounded me so deeply is only the faintest reflection of the rejection Jesus willingly endures every single day. 

Yet unlike the people who walked away from me… 

He never has. 

He has remained faithful through every season I wandered…. Which is a lot as I’ve spent most of my life wandering away. 

Patient through every misplaced affection. 

Steadfast through every attempt to build my life on someone else’s love instead of His. 

He has never stopped choosing me. 

Even while I struggled to choose Him. 

Then another thought settled into my soul. 

For years I have prayed the same prayer… 

“Lord take me deeper.” 

I imagined deeper would be peaceful. 

I imagined it would feel like standing on mountaintops with the wind at my back. 

I thought deeper would remove all the pain. That it would be almost blissful. 

Healing. 

Comforting. 

Satisfying. 

I never imagined deeper would look like this. 

Bleeding. 

Grieving. 

Wrestling. 

Being stripped of every false foundation I had knowingly or unknowingly built my life upon. 

I know enough about God to know that most everything is forged in the fire. 

That intimacy with God isn’t formed in the absence of pain. 

That it’s born right in the middle of it. 

Maybe the deepest places of God are discovered where our own strength finally runs out. 

Because when every distraction falls away…

When every person you’ve leaned on is gone…

When every identity you’ve built around someone else’s love collapses…

You find yourself sitting in the ashes with only Jesus. 

And that’s where you discover something impossible to learn anywhere else. 

You are not alone. 

Not because the loneliness disappears. 

But because Someone is sitting in it with you. 

I’ve spent months asking God to stop the bleeding. 

Today I wonder if He’s been holding my hand though every drop instead. 

Not because He delights in suffering. 

Not because He’s punishing me. 

But because there are places in His heart that can only be known by those willing to stay when it hurts. 

Places where tears become prayer. 

Where heartbreak becomes communion. 

Where abandonment becomes the place we finally discover we have never, ever been abandoned. 

Maybe He wasn’t ignoring my prayers. 

Maybe he was answering them. 

For years, I’ve asked Him to take me deeper. 

I just never imagined deeper would feel like dying to everything that wasn’t Him… 

Today my heart still hurts.

I still miss her.

I still grieve what I thought we were building.

I still have moments where the ache feels so heavy that I wonder if I will ever fully be free from it.

But maybe freedom was never going to look like waking up one morning and no longer caring.

Maybe freedom looks like finally knowing where my heart belongs.

Because the deepest wound was never just that someone walked away.

The deepest wound was believing that someone else’s choice determined my worth.

Believing that if they stayed, I was valuable.

If they left, I was disposable.

Believing that being chosen by another person was the thing that would finally make me whole.

But Jesus met me in that lie.

And He whispered something my broken heart has needed to hear all along:

“You were never waiting for them to choose you so you could be loved.”

“You were loved before they ever saw you.”

“You were chosen before they ever held your hand.”

“You were mine before anyone else had the opportunity to leave.”

Maybe this season wasn’t about God teaching me how to live without the person I loved.

Maybe it was about Him teaching me that I was never created to build my life on someone who could walk away.

Maybe He had to let every temporary foundation crumble so I could finally discover the Rock beneath me.

The strange thing about surrender is that we often think we’re surrendering what we love because God wants to take it away.

But sometimes He’s asking us to surrender because He wants to give us something deeper.

Something that cannot leave.

Something that cannot change its mind.

Something that cannot wake up one day and decide we are no longer worth choosing.

A love that doesn’t disappear when things become hard.

A love that doesn’t run when we become broken.

A love that chose us while we were still running away.

The same Jesus who knows the pain of being rejected is the same Jesus who looked at me in the middle of my own rejection and said:

“I am still here.”

“I have always been here.”

“I never stopped choosing you.”

And maybe that’s the miracle hidden inside this heartbreak.

The person I thought I couldn’t live without became the very place where God revealed that I had been searching for something only He could give.

I thought I was grieving the loss of being chosen by someone else.

But all along, Jesus was inviting me to receive the gift of being chosen by Him.

And that changes everything.

Because people can leave.

Promises can break.

Feelings can fade.

Lives can change.

But the love of Christ does not loosen its grip.

It does not abandon.

It does not walk away.

It does not choose you one day and reject you the next.

He chose me before I knew how to choose Him.

He chose me when I was lost.

He chose me when I was hurting.

He chose me when I was addicted.

He chose me when I was looking for love everywhere except in Him.

And He chooses me still.

This was never just a story about the person who left.

It was always the story of the God who stayed.

Yes, Lord?

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

I found this letter in a journal from several years back. It was candid, honest and as I read it back now, years later, it still strangely resonated with parts of me. But I believe wholeheartedly that it’s in these candid moments, when we don’t sanitize our prayers and we choose to wring out our hearts before the Lord, that He can do some of His deepest work in us…

Jesus, 

I wish I could tell You faith comes naturally to me. 

It doesn’t. 

Most days, unbelief feels easier. 

I don’t understand You. If I’m honest, I rarely do. 

I don’t understand how You can be good while the world is so relentlessly broken. I don’t understand why one life can carry mental illness, addiction, being gay, suicidal thoughts, grief that won’t loosen its grip-as though suffering somehow forgot when enough was enough. 

Sometimes my own mind doesn’t make sense to me. I wake up inside a brain that feels unfamiliar. Some days I can’t trust my own thoughts. Some days I can’t tell what is illness, what is fear, what is temptation, what is trauma, and what is simply being human. It all blurs together until I don’t know where I end and the darkness begins. 

If we are made in Your image, why is there so much heartbreak inside us? 

Why does the soul You created ache this deeply? 

Why does it feel every time I catch my breath another wave knocks me under? 

I don’t understand why You’ve saved my life so many times. 

I don’t understand why I’m still here. 

For what? 

There have been moments when death felt kinder than living, and yet somehow You kept pulling me back. Sometimes I wanted You to. Most times, I didn’t. 

Why? 

What am I still doing here? 

People say You have a purpose for my life. 

Sometimes that feels comforting. 

Sometimes it feels impossible to believe. 

I question Your goodness.

I questions Your motives. 

I question Your silence. 

I question every “why” that has ever crossed a human mind. 

Why do You feel closest after the storm instead of before it? 

Why does obedience sometimes feel less like peace and more like walking blindfolded toward a cliff, hoping Your voice catches me before I fall? 

I want to love You. 

I just don’t always know how. 

I want to obey You. 

I just don’t know how to carry things that feel so much bigger than I am. 

Sometimes I wonder if You’ve asked something of me that I’m simply too weak to live out? 

I don’t understand Your character nearly as much as people say I should. 

I don’t understand this world. 

I don’t understand where You are in so much of it. 

I don’t understand why you go silent.

I don’t understand why You seem content to leave so many questions unanswered. 

And maybe the hardest confession of all…

Sometimes I don’t even know how to trust You. 

Not because I don’t want to. 

Because I don’t know how.

Trust sounds beautiful until it costs everything… which you say to consider… and yet… 

It sounds beautiful until it asks you to keep walking when there is no light. 

Until it asks you to believe Someone you cannot see over the evidence you can. 

I don’t know how to sustain a faith that often feels impossible.

I don’t know how to keep saying yes when I don’t know where yes is leading me. 

Sometimes I envy people whose certainty comes easily. 

Mine doesn’t. 

Mine limps. 

Mine argues. 

Mine cries. 

Mine has to be dragged back to You over and over. 

And yet… 

Every road I’ve taken away from You has only made one thing painfully clear. 

There is no peace anywhere else. 

I’ve looked. 

I’ve tried to outrun You. 

I’ve tried to numb myself. 

I’ve tried to explain You away. 

I’ve tried to fill the ache with things that promised relief and only left my emptier. 

Nothing has ever quieted my soul except You. 

Even when I’m angry with You. 

Even when I don’t understand You. 

Even when I question everything about You. 

My spirit still turns toward You. 

I can’t explain that either. 

Somehow, beneath all the confusion, beneath all the doubt, beneath every unanswered question…

My soul still loves you. 

Not because You’ve answered everything. 

Not because You’ve made life easy. 

Not because You’ve explained Yourself. 

Just because somewhere deeper than my understanding, I know You. 

Or maybe… 

You know me. 

And maybe that’s enough for today. 

Sometimes, all I have left are two words. 

Yes, Lord. 

Not because I’m confident. 

Not because I understand. 

Not because I’m fearless. 

But because those two words are the only worship I can still offer. 

They are whispered through tears. 

They are spoken with trembling hands. 

They are screamed to what feels like an empty sky.

They are carried by a faith that often feels even smaller than a mustard seed. 

But they’re Yours. 

So if You’re asking me to keep walking… 

Yes, Lord. 

If You’re asking me to trust before I understand… 

Yes, Lord. 

If you’re asking me to let go of something I can’t imagine my life without…

Yes, Lord.

If You’re asking me to believe that one day every question will finally find its answer…

Yes, Lord. 

I don’t understand You. 

Maybe I never will on this side of heaven. 

But somehow…

Against my own logic, against my own questions, against every reason I have to walk away-

My spirit still loves You. 

And today, that love is enough to keep saying yes. 

Amen. 

On Silence and Seeing.

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

I used to think I would always recognize God by the fire. 

By the moments that left me undone. By the tears that came so easily in worship. By the unmistakable feeling that He was near. I knew how to find Him when He felt loud. 

I don’t know that I know how to find Him when He whispers. 

The last few months have been a blur of hospitals, diagnoses, fear, uncertainty, medications, healing, survival. Somewhere in the middle of trying to stay alive and stay sane, I think I became numb to my own life. It wasn’t intentional. I think my mind simply did what it had to do. 

There are seasons where surviving is the only prayer you have left. 

And maybe that’s enough. 

But now something is changing. 

I’m getting steadier. 

My body is slowly recovering. My mind is beginning to settle. The chaos that demanded every ounce of my attention has quieted, and in its place is…silence. 

It’s strange. 

I thought once the crisis ended, I would feel relief. Joy. Passion. Gratitude spilling out of me. 

Instead, I feel quiet. 

Sometimes it’s almost too quiet. 

I told God the other day that I miss the fire. I miss the passion. I miss the overwhelming awareness of His presence that once seemed so familiar. 

Yet when I go to pray, I find it hard to even approach Him. 

I don’t entirely know why. 

Maybe because numbness doesn’t disappear the moment the danger does. 

Maybe because God is teaching me something I couldn’t have learned in the fire. 

I’ve begun wondering if His silence isn’t absence at all. 

What if it’s an invitation? 

Not an invitation to chase another emotional high or manufacture an experience that feels spiritual. Not to create a version of God that only exists when I feel Him. 

But an invitation to seek Him. 

Just Him. 

It’s easy to mistake emotional intensity for intimacy. 

Sometimes we become addicted to the feeling of God instead of God Himself. 

But feelings are beautiful servants and terrible foundations. They come and go with circumstances, hormones, exhaustion, grief, healing. 

God doesn’t. 

Maybe that’s why this season feels so unfamiliar. 

Because He’s teaching me to stop listening for Him long enough to begin looking for Him. 

And I’ve started seeing Him everywhere. 

In the sunlight spilling across my living room. 

In the birds that seem completely unconcerned with tomorrow. 

In the quiet rhythm of making tea. 

In the breeze moving through the trees. 

In the deep breath my lungs can finally take. 

In ordinary Tuesday afternoons that would have once felt unbearably insignificant. 

I’m beginning to realize that He has always been here. 

I was just moving too quickly and too erratically to notice. 

Or perhaps I was hurting too deeply to see. 

The hidden places are funny like that. 

God has a habit of meeting people there. 

Not always on mountaintops. 

Sometimes in the deserts. 

Sometimes in the prison cells. 

Sometimes beside hospital beds. 

Sometimes in the ordinary homes where nothing miraculous seems to be happening except that a weary soul decides to keep looking. 

I wonder if slowing down wasn’t a punishment after all. (Though I really questioned that for a time.)

Maybe it was mercy. 

Because left to myself, I would have kept running. 

Kept distracting. 

Kept filling every quiet space with some noise, because it’s all I had come to know. 

Instead, my body forced me into stillness. 

It stripped away so much of my independence, so much of my routine, so much of what I thought made me…me. 

And now all that’s left are these quiet days. 

Days where the greatest miracle isn’t something dramatic. 

It’s noticing. 

Noticing beauty. 

Noticing breath. 

Noticing grace. 

Noticing that God has never actually stopped speaking. 

Maybe He’s simply speaking a language I’ve forgotten how to hear. 

Or maybe He’s asking me to stop trying to hear Him altogether and learn to see Him. 

To recognize Him in creation. 

In kindness. 

In peace that arrives without explanation. 

In the slow healing of both body and soul. 

There is a strange tension I can’t quite explain. 

Part of me wonders if this numbness is simply my nervous system finally exhaling after months (years if I’m really honest) of holding its breath. 

A reprieve. 

A mercy. 

Another part of me wonders if I’ll ever feel deeply again. 

It’s a strange place to live-grateful beyond words to be here, yet unable to fully access the emotions I expected to accompany that gratitude. 

I don’t have neat answers for it. 

I only know that if my life has taught me anything, it’s this: 

God does some of His deepest work where certainty ends. 

He seems remarkably comfortable in places that make us uncomfortable. 

In waiting. 

In hiddeness. 

In unanswered questions. 

In slow healing. 

In letting go. 

In silence. 

The world tells us that if God is moving, it will be obvious. 

Scripture seems to tell a different story. 

A mustard seed. 

Yeast hidden in dough. 

Treasure buried in a field. 

The Kingdom has always loved hidden places. 

So maybe this season isn’t evidence that I’ve lost God. 

Maybe it’s evidence that He’s inviting me to know Him differently. 

Not through adrenaline. 

Not through constant emotional intensity. 

But through faithful attention. 

Through choosing to seek Him when nothing inside me feels spectacular. 

Through finding Him in sunshine. 

In birdsong. 

In stillness. 

In the sacredness of ordinary life. 

In the ordinary rhythms of a life I almost lost. 

Because maybe that’s what faith looks like when it grows up.

Not louder. 

Deeper. 

And if this quiet season is where He teaches me to recognize His fingerprints instead of relying on His voice, then maybe the silence isn’t empty after all. 

Maybe it’s Holy. 

Eleven Years.

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

Eleven Years. 

Somehow it’s been eleven years. 

Eleven years since my mom took her last breath, and somehow it still doesn’t make sense. 

People say time heals. I don’t know if I believe that. I think time teaches you how to carry what never really gets lighter. It teaches you how to breathe around an ache that never leaves. Some days it’s tucked quietly into the background. Other days it consumes everything. 

Today is one of those days. 

I still miss her with every part of me. 

I can still hear her laugh if I close my eyes long enough. I can still smell the familiar scent of her house and her perfume. I can still remember exactly what it felt like to wrap my arms around her or curl up against her on the couch. I hate to admit this, but when she first died, I was terrified those things would disappear. I thought that as the year passed, her voice would fade, her face would blur, and eventually I’d forget what it felt like to be loved by her. 

But eleven years later, those memories are still startlingly alive. 

Sometimes it honestly feels like she was just here yesterday. 

I don’t think that’s an accident. 

I think it’s one of God’s sweetest gifts – that He has allowed those memories to remain so vivid. They have become little reminders that love doesn’t disappear just because someone does.

I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. 

I never wanted to know what life looked like without my mom in it. There isn’t a single part of me that was prepared for that kind of loss. The absence of her presence still breaks my heart in ways I don’t always have the words for. 

If I’m being completely honest, there have been seasons where I’ve pushed memories of her away because missing her hurt too much. I almost felt guilty for doing it, but sometimes grief is so overwhelming that your heart does whatever it has to do just to survive. 

Lately, though, something has changed. 

Instead of running from those memories, I’ve started welcoming them. 

They don’t just make me cry anymore. 

They comfort me. 

I find myself smiling through tears because for just a moment it feels like she’s close again. 

When I think about my mom, I don’t just remember her kindness or her laugh. I remember her faith. 

Her unwavering, immovable faith. 

Cancer took so much from her physically, but it never stole her trust in Jesus. I watched a woman whose body was failing continue to cling to the One who never does. She suffered with a strength that could only have come from Christ Himself. 

Now, standing in one of the scariest seasons of my own life, fighting my own physical battles, I find myself looking back at her. 

When I feel weak, I remember how strong she was. 

When fear tried to convince me in the hospital that I wouldn’t make it, I remembered the courage she carried. 

When life gets so heavy that I wonder how I’ll get through another day, I remember that she did. 

Not because she was extraordinary on her own. (Which in so many ways she was…) 

Because Jesus was faithful. 

I can still picture one particular day as though it happened this morning. 

I was sitting on the back porch of her house, curled up in one of our patio chairs, crying, listening to the same worship song on repeat. Just on the other side of the window, my mom was taking some of her final breaths. 

There should have only been devastation in that moment. 

There should have only been fear. 

But somehow… 

Jesus met us there. All of us. 

He brought a peace that still doesn’t make sense to me eleven years later. Not the kind of peace that erased the pain, but the kind that somehow carried us through it. The kind Scripture talks about that surpasses all understanding. 

He carried my mom. 

He carried my dad. 

He carried my siblings. 

He carried me. 

He carried our family through a loss so profound I still don’t think language exists to fully describe it. 

Looking back now, I can see His fingerprints everywhere. 

I can see His faithfulness in the smallest details. 

I can see that He never abandoned us- not for one second. 

And I believe something with all of my heart…

I believe the prayers my mom prayed while she was on this earth are still being answered today. 

I think about all the nights she prayed over her children. All the tears she cried. All the prayers she whispered when no one else knew.

I believe a faithful God continues answering the prayers of a faithful woman. 

What an incredible legacy. 

There are still days I wish I could call her. 

Days I wish I could hear her tell me everything is going to be okay. 

Days I wish I could hug her one more time. 

I imagine that ache will stay with me until Heaven. 

But today, as I write this, more than anything, I am grateful. 

Grateful that God gave me the privilege of being her daughter. 

Grateful that although their marriage didn’t work out, that she gave me a father who would stand by me, pray over me and love me through a moment that neither of us knew if I would live through. 

Grateful that I could see firsthand, a faith that still strengthens mine eleven years after she’s gone. 

Grateful that even death could not erase the impact she made on my life.  

And grateful that because of Jesus, goodbye was never forever. 

One day, because of the same Savior she trusted until her final breath, I will see her again. 

Until then, I’ll keep carrying her with me. 

In my memories. 

In my faith. 

In this blog that started as a continuation of what she started, and became an eleven year testimony of how incredibly faithful the Lord has been in my life. 

In the prayers she taught me to pray. 

In the courage she modeled. 

And in the quiet confidence that the same God who carried us through one of the worst days of our lives is still carrying me today. 

The worship song I had been playing on repeat that day, and have continued to play on repeat years after, has stayed me ever since: 

“Faith makes a fool of what makes sense.”

At the time, it didn’t make sense that peace could exist so presently in the middle of that kind of heartbreak. 

It didn’t make sense that God could feel so close while my world was falling apart. 

It didn’t make sense that one day I would survive losing my mom, let alone find joy again. 

It still doesn’t make sense that eleven years later I can miss her this deeply and yet be so certain that death was never the end of her story. 

But faith rarely makes sense. 

It simply believes that Jesus is who He says He is. 

And because of that, I know my mom is more alive today than she has ever been. 

I know I’ll hear her laugh again. 

I’ll hug her again. 

And by some miracle, I have to believe that heaven will in fact have an Olive Garden where we can continue to have our momma/daughter lunches, that the breadsticks are perfect, and all the food is free. 

And until that day comes, I’ll keep holding tightly to the same Jesus she held onto until her very last breath. 

Because eleven years later, I’ve learned, or am finally starting to truly believe, that faith doesn’t always explain the pain. 

Sometimes it simply carries you through it. 

Healing in Two Directions.

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ 1 Comment

There is a strange kind of grief that nobody really talks about.

It’s grieving a body that’s still very much alive.

I catch my reflection sometimes and think, “Who is that?” Not in an existential-crisis kind of way—although, admittedly, sometimes it is—but in a very real sense. Somewhere along the way, medications, seizures, blood clots in my lungs, weeks of inactivity, and a nervous system that seems to have a mind of its own introduced me to a body I don’t remember having.

Some days I joke that I’d like to exchange it for the one I had a few years ago.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t come with customer service.

The weight gain has been one of the hardest parts.

Not because I believe smaller bodies are more worthy—I don’t. I truly don’t. But because I miss feeling at home in my own skin. I miss trusting my body. I miss moving without calculating the risk. I miss putting on a pair of jeans without wondering if they’ll fit differently than they did last week.

More than anything, I miss familiarity.

What’s strange is that while my body feels more unfamiliar than ever, my mind is finally beginning to feel like home.

For years, my mind was the battlefield. Anxiety. Addiction. Constant chaos. I spent so much of my life praying for peace that I honestly forgot what peace might even feel like.

Now, little by little, it’s arriving.

My thoughts are quieter.

My heart feels steadier.

I’m finding stability I wasn’t sure I’d ever experience.

Ironically, my body seems to have picked this exact moment to become a complete stranger.

For years, my body was capable while my mind was unraveling.

Now it feels as though they’ve traded places.

It’s a strange kind of healing to feel mentally more like yourself than you have in years while physically feeling less like yourself than ever before.

Healing, I’ve learned, isn’t always simultaneous.

Sometimes one part of you blooms while another is still learning how to survive.

I’ve also discovered something that has been incredibly humbling.

I need people.

As someone who has always been fiercely independent, that’s been difficult to admit.

I’ve always wanted to be the woman who could carry everything herself. Solve every problem. Figure everything out without asking for help.

Now I’m learning to let people drive me places.

To check in on me.

To carry things I physically or emotionally can’t.

Every instinct in me wants to apologize for needing them.

But maybe strength was never about carrying everything alone.

Maybe strength is allowing yourself to be carried when you need it.

That’s a lesson I never wanted to learn.

And one I’m incredibly grateful to be learning.

The biggest transformation, though, hasn’t been physical.

It happened in the quiet.

For years, whenever life became too loud, I knew exactly how to escape it.

Alcohol.

Relationships.

Sex.

Busyness.

Anything that could drown out the noise long enough that I didn’t have to hear what was happening inside my own heart and mind.

Now there is nowhere left to run.

Just me.

The silence.

And every feeling I’ve spent years trying to outrun.

I’ve spent so much of my life trying to escape discomfort.

Now I’m learning that healing isn’t the absence of discomfort.

It’s the willingness to stay present in it.

To sit with loneliness instead of numbing it.

To let grief have its say instead of silencing it.

To experience joy without waiting for the other shoe to drop.

To trust that I don’t have to run from every difficult emotion simply because it’s painful.

Some days I don’t know what to do with all of it.

So I just sit.

I cry.

I pray.

I laugh at the absurdity of it all every once in a while because sometimes that’s all you can do.

And somewhere in that silence…

I’m meeting myself.

Not the version fueled by alcohol.

Not the version searching for validation.

Not the version constantly trying to outrun her own life.

Just…

Me.

I’ve remembered parts of myself I forgot existed.

Old interests that had been buried beneath survival.

New passions I never would’ve discovered if life hadn’t forced me to slow down.

I’m learning that my worth was never found in my productivity.

Or my independence.

Or the number on a scale.

Or how much pain I could hide.

It was always there.

I’m still learning how to love this body.

Some mornings it still feels borrowed.

Some days I still grieve for the woman I used to be.

But maybe acceptance isn’t waking up one day magically loving everything you see.

Maybe it’s looking at a body that has survived addiction, trauma, seizures, medication changes, blood clots, heartbreak, and more grace than I can count…

…and deciding to stop treating it like the enemy.

Because this body may not look the way I want it to.

It may not move the way it used to.

It may feel unfamiliar.

I may even be scared of what it will do at times. 

But it has never stopped fighting to keep me alive.

Neither has God.

I’m still learning how to embrace the uncomfortable.

I’m still learning how to ask for help.

I’m still learning how to trust my body again.

Some days I’m grateful.

Some days I’m grieving.

Most days I’m somehow both.

But underneath all of it is this quiet truth:

I am alive.

And for the first time in a very long time, I’m not trying to escape my own life.

I’m staying.

I’m learning.

I’m healing.

And maybe this body doesn’t feel like mine because it’s introducing me to a version of myself I’ve never met before.

One who knows that strength isn’t found in self-sufficiency.

One who has learned that peace sometimes arrives before circumstances change.

One who is discovering that even in a body that feels foreign, there is still so much beauty to be found.

I don’t know exactly who I’m becoming.

But for the first time in a long time…

I’m excited to meet her.

Quiet Aftermath

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

People want breakup stories. Clean cause and effect. Something they can file away as “this is what went wrong.” At least I did. But the truth is usually messier than that. It’s layered. It’s timing. It’s emotional history colliding with a new connection that feels bigger than your nervous symptom can realistically hold. 

Before this relationship, I had already lived through the collapse of an engagement. Two, actually. 

That kind of ending doesn’t just disappear because time passes. It rearranges you. It changes what you expect from love, from stability, from yourself. After that, I got sober. I rebuilt slowly. Quietly. Away from social media and everything I knew. I tried to become someone who didn’t rely on chaos or intensity to feel alive. Someone who could sit with themselves without needing to escape. 

And I did manage to build something stable for a while. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a real effort. It was learning how to exist without numbing everything I felt. 

Then, I fell in love again. 

After 3 years of celibacy, connection hit differently. It wasn’t just attraction or companionship – it felt like a flood into a part of me that had been sealed off for a long time. I didn’t realize how starved I had been for emotional intimacy until I had it again. And once you feel that kind of connection after deprivation, it can become incredibly hard to separate love from survival. 

I started reorganizing my life around that feeling. Not in one dramatic decision, but gradually- emotionally first, then practically. The relationship became a center of gravity without me fully noticing it happening. 

That’s something I understand more clearly in hindsight: it wasn’t one choice that changed everything. It was a slow accumulation of small ones made under emotional intensity. 

And intensity is where things get complicated, especially with Bipolar II Disorder. Because emotional states can come with a kind of certainty that feels absolute in the moment. Not because the compulsions are correct, but because they feel undeniable. Love can feel like fate. Hope can feel like instruction. Fear of loss can feel like urgency. 

Looking back, I can see how much of it was happening inside me: the attachment, the longing, the meaning I was assigning to everything, the way my nervous system latched onto connection after years of holding myself apart. 

When it eventually started to unravel, what hurt wasn’t just the loss of the relationship itself. It was realizing how much of my stability, identity, and emotional regulation had quietly become intertwined with it. 

And then I had to face everything underneath that – the grief from before, the sobriety I had worked for, the parts of myself I had been trying to protect – all still there, still unresolved, now fully exposed again. 

Not because someone took them from me. 

But because I had been carrying them alone all along. 

And I want to be clear about something I’m still learning how to hold without collapsing into shame or resentment. 

I’m not resentful. 

I don’t look back at this with anger toward a person, because that isn’t what this was. What I see now is 2 people trying to love each other without the tools or understanding to recognize what was actually happening underneath the surface. My symptoms would flare – my emotions would spike, my attachment would intensify, my fear would get louder than my logic – and what I needed in those moments was stability, grounding, and understanding. 

But neither of us really knew that at the time. 

So instead of support there was distance. Instead of clarity, there was confusion. Instead of naming what was happening, we both reacted to it. I can see now how easily that can look like pushing away and being pushed away, when in reality it was just 2 nervous systems trying to protect themselves without language for what was going on. 

I don’t believe that means what we had wasn’t real. 

I think it was real – just unsustainable in the way it formed, because it was shaped by intensity, timing and unrecognized mental health dynamics I didn’t yet understand myself. 

And I’m learning to hold that truth without turning it into a story of blame or failure. 

Just honesty. 

Just grief. 

And they understand that sometimes love isn’t enough when neither person knows how to speak the language of what’s happening inside them. 

And I’ve been thinking about how this doesn’t only live inside romantic relationships. 

It shows up in families too. In friendships. In anyone trying to love someone who is struggling with mental illness without having the language for what’s happening. 

Sometimes people don’t leave because they don’t care. 

Sometimes they leave because they don’t understand what they’re seeing. Or they don’t know how to stay close to something that feels unpredictable or overwhelming. And sometimes they disappear not out of cruelty, but out of their own fear, confusion, or emotional limits. 

And on the other side of that, it can be devastating. 

When you’re the one struggling, their distance can feel like abandonment. It can feel like proof that you are too much, too unstable, too hard to love. It can reinforce the deepest fears you already carry about yourself. 

Both things can be true at the same time. 

There can be real pain in being left. 

And there can be confusion and helplessness in the person who leaves. 

I don’t say that to soften what it feels like to be the one who stays behind – because that pain is real and heavy and it lingers in the body long after the moment is over. 

I say it because I’m learning that mental illness doesn’t just affect one person. It moves through relationships. It distorts communication. It creates gaps where language should be. And if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you can mistake symptoms for personality, or intensity for incompatibility, or crisis for rejection. 

I wish I had known that sooner – about myself, and about others. 

I’m still learning how to hold all of it without turning it into blame. Without turning it into shame. Without erasing the love that existed just because the connection couldn’t survive in its original form. 

Some things are real and still don’t last. 

And that truth is painful – but it’s also where understanding finally begins. 

There are 2 relationships that I keep thinking about when I try to make sense of all of this. 

One is my ex-girlfriend, who I loved romantically. One is my brother, who I’ve loved and looked up to my whole life.

And what connects them in my mind isn’t blame – it’s distance that formed during moments neither of us fully knew how to handle. 

I’ve been on the side of intense emotion, spiraling symptoms, and not having the right words to explain what’s happening inside me. And I’ve also been on the other side, watching someone I love disappear into something I didn’t understand, not knowing how to reach them without making it worse. 

Both experiences leave a kind of silence behind them. 

But I don’t see either of them as villains in my story. I don’t even see them as failures. 

I see people doing their best with the tools they had at the time. 

And I can finally say I’m trying to do the same. 

Not to rewrite what happened. Not turn it into something it wasn’t. Not to force it into meaning that erases the pain. 

Just hold it more gently than I did before. 

Because I don’t want the ending of these relationships to be resentment, or confusion, or self-blame. 

I want it to be understanding – even if that understanding arrives late, even if it arrives slowly, even if it takes everything I’ve been through to finally see it clearly. 

And maybe, that’s the only kind of closure that actually lasts. 

Swimming in Circles.

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

A title that would probably only make sense to who this was written about.

It’s getting late. My room is finally clean after weeks of being in complete disarray. (Bi-Polar will do that.)

Laying in bed, I’m getting pretty tired as I’m trying to get back into a consistent routine. I opened my phone to scroll for just a moment and I heard Walking Away by Justin Bieber.

It hit me like a gut punch so hard it nearly took my breath away. I swiped away immediately but 5 seconds was all it took. 

It’s kind of crazy how a song can completely unravel you in under thirty seconds. Especially as I’ve been actively avoiding any and all music that gives me even a fraction of that visceral response. One second I was fine – or at least pretending to be (let’s be honest, I haven’t been fine for a minute now) – and the next I felt this heavy, sick drop in my stomach like every memory of her came crashing back all at once. 

And that’s the part that nobody really wants to talk about or deal with when you’re trying to move on… or at least I don’t. Time passes. Life keeps happening. You go to work, answer texts, laugh at things, pretend you’re healing. But then life gets quiet for a second. A song comes on. A smell hits you. A memory slips through the cracks. And suddenly you’re right back inside the grief like you never left. (Which maybe you didn’t because you’ve been avoiding it all together.) 

Tonight, I see her everywhere. 

In every lyric. Every silence. Every memory I’ve been trying so hard to outrun. 

I think what’s hardest for me, what really breaks me, is knowing I burned that relationship to the ground almost by myself. There’s no comforting version of the story where I can blame timing or distance or fate. I can’t even say I walked away. I hurt someone I loved deeply, and now I have to live with the weight of that every single day. 

Some regrets don’t stay in your head – they live in your chest. In your stomach. In your throat. They follow you around like ghosts. 

I keep replaying everything. Every moment I should’ve been better. Softer. More patient. Sober. More honest. Less afraid. I keep wondering if there was one conversation, one choice, one version of me that could’ve saved everything before it all collapsed. 

And even though deep down I know we weren’t meant to work, and even though I know staying together undoubtedly would have kept hurting both of us, I loved her so deeply that I genuinely don’t know how to picture a life without her in it. And tonight, that’s sitting on me like a thousand pounds directly on my chest. 

So many of my decisions after losing her were made out of hurt. Out of rejection. Out of desperation to distract myself from the reality of what I lost. I kept trying to convince myself I was okay. Trying to move on too quickly. Trying to numb myself with anything and everything. Trying to fill silence with noise so I wouldn’t have to sit alone with what this actually feels like. But the more days go by, the harder it becomes to pretend this doesn’t break my heart. 

I’ve tried to move on in all the wrong ways. 

Distractions that didn’t last. 

In people who were never her. 

In pretending I was fine when I wasn’t. 

In convincing myself that if I just stayed distracted enough, I wouldn’t feel it anymore. 

But grief doesn’t disappear just because you ignore it. It waits. It lingers. It finds you in the quiet moments and plays everything back in high definition when you least expect it. 

And in all honesty, there’s a part of me that hates myself for how long I’ve been running from that truth. 

I don’t know how to rewire my mind after years of loving someone. I don’t know how people just wake up one day and stop carrying another person inside of them. She became everything. The biggest part of my day, my future, my understanding of love itself. And now I’m standing in the middle of the aftermath trying to figure out who I even am without her, or who I was even before her. 

And maybe that’s the hardest truth of all is that I’ve finally accepted that it’s over. 

Not in the dramatic way movies portray heartbreak. Not all at once. Just slowly. Quietly. Painfully. Like something sinking to the bottom of the ocean. 

I think part of me kept believing there would be another conversation. Another chance. Another version of us someday in which it could work. But I know that’s not reality. 

There’s this unspoken idea that you’re not supposed to talk about something if it didn’t work out- like if it ends, it somehow becomes less real, less meaningful, less worth saying out loud. But I don’t adhere to that in the least. Because whether it was right or not, whether it was meant to work or not, it meant everything to me. 

She meant everything to me. 

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? 

Because when you love someone while still being deeply broken yourself, you don’t just love them – you lean on them in ways no one person can carry forever. You start needing them for more than they can realistically give. And when life really bears down on you, it requires a kind of love that doesn’t flinch, doesn’t fracture, doesn’t leave when things get heavy. 

And unfortunately for me… I didn’t always know how to stay fully present in it. I may not have physically walked away from the relationship, but I escaped in other ways. I numbed myself. I lost myself in addiction and avoidance and everything I thought would make it hurt less. 

And in doing that, I lost her. And I lost myself too. 

I don’t know how to begin grieving something that once felt like home. 

I used to tell her I’d see her on the other side of healing – like we would both become whole again and somehow find our way back to each other in a better form, in a better time.  

But now I don’t think that’s what this is. 

I don’t think I’ll see her on the other side of healing anymore. .

Because some things don’t come back around. Some loves don’t circle back to each other. Some endings don’t reopen into beginnings. 

And I think I’m finally starting to understand that this isn’t something I’m supposed to hold onto until it turns into something else. It’s something I’m supposed to put down, even if my hands still shake when I do it. 

I loved her. I really did. Not halfway. Not temporarily. Fully, messily, imperfectly. With everything I had at the time – even when I didn’t know how to give it properly. In so many ways I still do – I don’t know if that ever goes away, and I don’t know if I would ever want it to.

I think I’m finally at the place where loving her doesn’t mean keeping her anymore. 

It means letting her go. 

Not because she didn’t matter. Not because what we had wasn’t real. But because it was. Because it shaped me. Because it hurt me. Because it changed me. Because it deserves to stay what it was instead of being dragged through what it can no longer be. 

So this is where I stop reaching for her in the dark. 

This is where I stop turning memory into something I can live inside. 

And if she ever comes across this… 

I don’t need anything from her. I don’t need a response. I don’t want to reopen anything that life has already closed. 

I just hope she knows she mattered. Not briefly. Not conditionally. Not quietly. 

She matters to me in a way that doesn’t end just because we did. 

She will always matter to me. And for that, I’m extremely grateful.

There was no way I was going to be able to go to sleep with that all sitting with me, so I’m leaving all the thoughts, all the heartache, all the memories and all the tears here, at least for tonight. 

On Choices.

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

Running. 

Ironically, I hate running when it comes to physicality and I love it when it comes to my circumstances. Unfortunately for me, I do both. 

Typically, if I’m in a good place holistically, I’m doing the one I hate and when I’m in a really bad place holistically, I’m running away – from everything and everyone. To those who know me, I’m known for it.

But regardless, it’s something I always end up doing one way or the other.

It’s extremely rare that God ever forces my hand in anything. I can count on one hand the number of times He’s done it. Usually, if He’s leading me somewhere and I’m running away from it, He just lets me make enough mistakes to pile up to ruin whatever plans I’ve made for myself until I begrudgingly run back to Him, only to do the bare minimum to make myself feel better.

It’s usually only a matter of time before I’m off doing my own thing again. 

It’s been about a month(ish) since God took my entire world and flipped it upside down, very much forcing my hand this time. 

I was running way too fast in the wrong direction, again, and I believe He had had enough. Both because I was gambling with my life and also because He’s given me about 4 years now of doing things my own way. 

I was dabbling in substances, spending time with people that I had no business being around and drinking myself into oblivion in a very short amount of time. All the while, crying out to Him and wondering why I felt like I was quite literally losing my mind and had NO peace. 

My behavior was completely unhinged, compulsive and destructive and I no longer cared. I was willing to do whatever it took to just not feel the emptiness that was consuming me. 

When I finally came out of the bender I was on, my first thought was to run. To run back to rehab. To run back to my hometown. To run to somewhere new. To run literally anywhere that would get me away from the environment that I had built and demolished in as little as a few weeks. (Realistically, this was a long time coming…) 

The thing I’ve learned about running away is that everywhere I’ve ever ran to, I was still there. I couldn’t outrun myself however, I was arrogant enough to think that I could outrun God. Never happened. 

In my trying to figure out what I was going to do and where I was going to go, God made it quite literally impossible to not stay where He had me. Nothing panned out and nothing pulled through, when usually it happens pretty easily. He made my circumstances so impossible in fact, that for a time, I couldn’t even leave my apartment if I wasn’t leaving on foot. 

For lack of a better term, at 33 years old, I was very much grounded by my Father (God, not my Dad to clarify!) . He had taken away my car, my safety nets, my sources of comfort (numbing) and my ability to choose where I went next. Again, He had enough. 

God gave me a choice. 

Either I allow Him to do what He wanted to do with my life or I could continue in the same loop of insanity and take my chances with my life. I know that His grace is sufficient and I know that He is rich in mercy, but I suddenly got the sense, and I felt it to my core, that there would come a point when His grace runs out and where would I be when it did? 

This question changed everything for me. 

It wasn’t just about getting sober anymore. It wasn’t just about whether I can be a lesbian or not. It wasn’t about just redeeming my reputation or trying to salvage relationships that had been strained. It wasn’t about going to church or AA or not sleeping around or getting my life back on track. 

It was about realizing that I had a choice. And that choice was a mark of His grace all in its own right. Not everyone gets that. Not everyone is given the opportunity to try again or to get right with Him. I’ve watched it over and over again in the lives of people that I loved dearly that I’m sure that not one of them ever thought that the choice they made would be their last on this earth. 

God has given me more grace than I could ever put into words. More than I could ever write down or document. I’ve gambled with His grace more times than I can count and in my pride, truly thought that I could just continue to live however I wanted and do whatever I wanted, with whomever I wanted, and still be right with Him. 

In this past month of God disconnecting me from everything I leaned on and filled my life with, I started to question whether that was true or not.

I wanted to believe God was who I wanted Him to be, not who He is. He is gracious yes, but He requires much from those who call themselves followers. I said the words, claimed I loved Jesus, yet nothing in my life would have reflected that. In fact, I had posted a picture of a bible study I was doing, and a good friend of mine messaged me saying “oh the lesbian is now super religious?” He was completely kidding and didn’t mean it with any ill intent, however for someone who has claimed to love Jesus with all of her heart her entire life, it was jarring to hear how others saw me vs. how I saw myself.

Nothing in my life would have told you that I’ve given up everything to deny myself and follow Him. If anything, I was living in complete hypocrisy – praising Him with my mouth and denying Him with the rest of my life. 

I will say, He may have forced my hand to some extent, but he has been so patient and so kind to me over these last few weeks. He reminded me of who I was before I walked away. I had forgotten and have been on a completely unsuccessful mission to figure out who I am now. 

And Thank God. 

I was trying to find myself in the world when I was never called to that. He had called me to ministry. To discipleship. To learn a completely opposite way of living than what’s comfortable. He called me to trust that if I kept my eyes on Him, who I was wouldn’t matter anymore, because it was never about me. And that without Him, I will always be lost and searching.

I remember when I decided to up and follow my own path about 4 years ago, a dear friend and spiritual mentor that’s known me since I was little, pulled me aside and warned me. She sat before me with tears in her eyes and said “ If you decide to walk in this, if you decide to walk away from Him and everything He’s brought you out of, your words won’t matter, the world will love you and you will sacrifice having Him.” 

My heart was so hardened at the time, it just made me mad and honestly, I think I ran away faster. I had made my choice. I chose myself. I chose the life I wanted. And my life has never been the same. Another failed relationship that I banked everything on only to feel like I was never enough and completely unloveable in the end, heartache, addiction, legal issues, broken friendships, broken trust, the inability to move on from things that were hurting me… the list goes on. Just brokenness in every way.

Years later, the Holy Spirit brought those words back to my memory, and I wept over them. 

Not because I was sad entirely, but more so because I was so grateful that He didn’t let me die in that, when I could have several times over. That He gave me yet another opportunity to turn my life back over to Him. That my life didn’t end in rebellion, brokenness and addiction.

Choosing Jesus, and I mean truly choosing Him, isn’t the easy choice. It’s excruciating at times. It will cost you everything. It will mean changing the way you think, changing the way you speak, changing the way you respond to circumstances and people, changing who you surround yourself with, changing what you allow into your space and who has access to you, changing what you listen to, changing what you watch, changing what you talk and joke about… I mean the list is endless. He requires much of those who say yes to Him, and honestly it’s never convenient. 

BUT… 

There is peace. There is joy. There is contentment. There is faith. There is hope. There is freedom. There is knowing that you are not alone. There is HIM and I promise you, that is everything. 

I have often fallen into wanting the things Jesus could give me more than I actually wanted Him. As He’s brought me into this place of what I can only refer to as anonymity, he’s stripped me of everything. My identity. My desires. My plans and my wants for my future. 

But in exchange, as I’ve chosen obedience, He’s given me Himself. His presence. His wisdom. His strength that I certainly don’t have on my own. 

In a world that focuses so much on I and me and making it happen for myself I’ve had to allow Him to reframe everything. I’ve had to let Him teach me His way.

For me it looks like choosing no contact when I desperately want to text them. It looks like staying off of social media (for the most part) instead of scrolling for hours. It looks like surrounding myself with a Godly community even when I’m aggressively uncomfortable. It looks like giving up music I’ve loved for years. It looks like waking up early every day and opening my Word instead of turning on my TV. It looks like saying no to sex, alcohol, binging, isolating, numbing and instead getting on my face before the Lord and feeling everything as He breaks my heart wide open. It looks like deleting photos and phone numbers. It looks like staying exactly where He has me instead of running away even when I’m crawling out of my skin with restlessness and anxiety. It looks like walking/running down to the beach everyday even when I’m too tired and would rather stay on my couch. It looks like worshipping Him through the tears and the temptation instead of choosing the immediate gratification. It looks like discipline and routine. It looks like praying about everything and allowing trusted voices in my life to help me because I can’t be trusted to make healthy decisions on my own yet. It looks like having to accept the decisions I made even just weeks ago and choosing to thank Him for saving me instead of condemning myself and worrying about what other people are going to think. It looks like letting my life speak for itself moving forward instead of trying to prove myself.

My prayer is that in time, I will be unrecognizable to the people who knew me even up until about a month ago. That was a lesser and far crazier version of myself than who God ever intended me to be. That person was selfish, a liar, a manipulator, a controller, an addict and a hypocrite. I was an extremely broken person who lacked boundaries and who thought love was ultimately about myself.

As far as I’m concerned, that person doesn’t exist anymore. Not because I’m some self-righteous person sitting on her high horse or just choosing to ignore everything I’ve done and said, but because an extremely loving God saved my life over and over again, and in the light of what He’s done for me, radical change and everything I have is the only appropriate offering I can give Him. 

I’m so grateful He gave me the choice to do things differently. I’m so grateful that I found a wonderful little church and godly people to walk beside. I’m so grateful for the desire to know Him. I’m so grateful for a beautiful place to live for the time being. I’m so grateful He never turned His face from me and never lifted His grace off of me. I’m so grateful He ruined all of my plans and gave me a new life. Certainly not an easier one, but one that doesn’t have darkness hanging over me to the point where I don’t even want to live it anymore. 

Voddie Baucham, one of my favorite Pastors, said it like this, and it resonates so deeply at this point in my life… 

“I may not be where I want to be, but Hallelujah, I’m not where I was.” 

Still Becoming…

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

I wake up and I already know. 

Not because I remember everything clearly – but because of the weight. It’s sitting on my chest before I even open my eyes. Heavy, familiar, impossible to ignore. 

My mouth is dry, my head is dull, and there’s this quiet dread creeping in like it’s been waiting for me to wake up so it can fully settle. 

I check my phone. 3:07 p.m. 

What day is it? I’ve completely lost track. I’m sure it’s only Friday… It’s Tuesday. 

Of course it is. 

Half the day is gone and I wasn’t even living it. Just hiding from it. Sleeping doesn’t even feel like rest anymore – it feels like avoidance. Like I knocked myself out just to not be conscious inside my own head. 

I lay there longer than I should. Staring at nothing. Thinking about everything I don’t want to think about. 

What I did. 

How easy it was. 

How fast I folded. 

It replays in flashes, not even full memories – just enough to make my stomach turn. And the worst part? There’s this sick, quiet voice in the back of my head that’s not even surprising. As if to say, yeah…. This is what you do. It was only a matter of time. 

I hate that voice. Because it sounds like me. 

Getting out of bed feels pointless, but staying in it feels worse. So I just sit there, stuck in between, scrolling my phone like I can outrun the feeling. I can’t. It’s in my body now. It’s in the way my chest feels tight, the way my thoughts won’t land anywhere without turning dark. 

I start doing that thing where I bargain with reality. 

Maybe it wasn’t that bad. 

Maybe I can just reset tomorrow. 

Maybe no one has to know. 

Maybe someone DID hack my instagram and phone and messages and phone calls…

But underneath all of it is the truth, loud and steady: 

You knew better. And you did it anyway. Not once at this point, but for days in a row now. 

That’s the part that cuts the deepest. Not the act itself – but the awareness. The fact that I watched myself cross the line a long time ago and said nothing. That the last relapse wasn’t that bad. Like I was split in two – one part screaming, the other part already too far gone to care. 

At this point, as Brad Pitt once described it, this thing had me on my back.  

Basic things feel hard now. 

Showering feels like a chore. Eating feels like something I have to force, if I even can. Texts go unanswered because I don’t even know how to pretend to be normal right now. Everything in my life suddenly feels slightly out of reach, like I’m behind glass watching it instead of actually living it. 

And there’s shame. 

Not the soft kind. Not the “I messed up, I’ll do better” kind. The kind that makes you want to disappear and draw completely into yourself. 

The kind that says if people really saw this version of you – the one who caves, who lies to themselves and everyone around them, who keeps going back to the same thing – they wouldn’t recognize you. Or worse, they would. 

I sit with that for a while. Too long, probably. 

Because the truth is, this isn’t just about one relapse. 

It’s about the pattern. The cycle. The part of me that keeps choosing something that wrecks me and then has to wake up and live in the aftermath like this. 

3 pm. Alone. Heavy. Trying to figure out how to exist in my own skin again. 

And the scariest thought isn’t even “why did I do it?” 

It’s – 

What if I do it again? 

This brings me to today. 

A few days sober, technically. But it doesn’t feel clean or triumphant – it feels like I’m walking through fog and I can’t see where I’m going or what’s on the other side. Like everything is slightly muted, slightly off, like I’m here but not fully in anything.

My brain is slow, my emotions are unpredictable, and there’s this constant low hum underneath it all that I can’t shut off. It’s not loud enough to name, but it’s there. 

This is the part no one celebrates. 

The in-between. The early days where nothing feels fixed, just exposed. 

And I’m writing this because I’m too good at hiding. Too good at smiling just enough, responding just enough for people not to worry, showing up just enough that no one keeps asking me deeper questions. I know how to disappear without actually leaving. I know how to shut people out in a way that’s almost scary. 

And that’s exactly where this thing has always grown – in the quiet, in the isolation, in the spaces where no one can see me clearly. 

I think that’s why I refuse to keep being silent about it. Why I refuse to keep sitting in denial and just waiting for my character to suddenly change. 

Because when people picture someone struggling with this, they often picture something obvious. Something messy and visible and easy to label. (I’ve been there before too). But a lot of the time, it looks like me – functioning just enough, hiding really well, slowly unraveling in private. 

And no one likes to talk about that. 

Or if they do, they soften it. They make it more palatable and easier to swallow. Less uncomfortable. 

I don’t want to do that. Not this time. 

Someone recently asked me if putting such vulnerable things about my life out there is even a good idea. What if it makes people uncomfortable? What if it upsets or embarrasses someone? 

And honestly – yeah. It might. 

But hiding hasn’t done me any favors. Silence hasn’t protected me. If anything, it’s protected the addiction – even when I wasn’t drinking. It’s giving it space to grow without resistance, without exposure, without consequence. 

I’m over that. 

I might be someone who has relapsed more times than I can count. Someone who has fallen on her face, made the same mistakes, sat in the same shame over and over again. 

But there has never been a time I didn’t get back up. 

Not once. 

Bruised, embarrassed, exhausted – yes. But I get up. 

And I’m not sharing this because I’m proud of the mess or because I need anyone to tell me I’m strong. I’m sharing it because I know exactly what happens when I don’t. 

My addiction thrives in secrecy. 

It survives in isolation. 

But it does not survive in vulnerability. 

And I’m done giving it somewhere to hide. 

So I will keep writing. 

Not just when things are messy. Not just when I’ve fallen apart. Not only when everything feels like it’s burning and I need somewhere to put out the smoke. 

But also when it’s quiet. 

When it’s uncertain. 

When nothing dramatic is happening and that’s exactly what makes it hard – the in-between days where I don’t know if I’m healing or just pausing, where I can’t tell if I’m moving forward or just standing still in the thick of the fog, unsure of where I am, and hoping it counts as progress. 

Those are the moments that usually get lost. The ones no one really documents because they don’t feel important enough. They’re either too painful, or not painful enough to be compelling, not joyful enough to celebrate. Just… existing. Floating. Unclear. 

But I think that’s where most of life actually happens… Especially for me right now. 

So I want to write it all. 

I want to write about the mornings where I still feel heavy but I get up anyway. The days where I don’t feel fixed, but  I don’t fall apart either. The quiet decisions no one sees – choosing not to isolate, choosing not to spiral, choosing to stay present even when everything in me wants to disappear and hide. 

Because healing isn’t just the big turning points. It’s not just the relapse or the breakthrough or the dramatic before and after. 

It’s the slow stitching in-between. 

And I don’t want to only remember my life as a series of extremes – broken, then better, then broken again. I want the full thread. The continuity. The small, almost invisible moments where something in me shifted and I didn’t even have language for it yet. 

Maybe that’s what this becomes. 

Not just a record of what I survived – but a testimony built in real time. Not polished. Not edited for comfort. Just honest enough to hold the truth of who I was in each version of it. 

So that one day, when I’m further on the other side of this,  I can look back and see it clearly. 

Not just the falling apart. 

Not just the getting back up. 

But everything in between that quietly made me someone who stayed. 

Here Again

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t plan to be here again. 

That’s the part I keep circling back to – the quiet confidence I had this time felt different, that I had it under control – or at least was well on my way to. And then something shifted, or maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was always there, just waiting. 

I replasped.

Hard enough to make my heart sink as I write this. And even typing that feels heavier than I expected, like the words themselves carry shame I haven’t figured out how to put down yet. 

Anyone who knows me and knows my journey of the past 7 or so years of trying to get sober, of trying to figure out how to live sober, knows that relapse is not unfamiliar to me. In fact, it’s been more consistent than my actual sobriety. That’s a hard truth to have to swallow and come to terms with. Yet, it hasn’t stopped me most times from going back. 

In fact, a lot of times, I think it’s what drives me back. The shame of it all. 

It feels like it escalated so quickly – like one moment I was steady and the next I was right back in it, full force. Addiction raging and suddenly I couldn’t see the way out. But if I’m being honest, I don’t know if that’s true. I think I want it to be sudden because sudden feels easier to forgive. 

If it “just happened”, then I don’t have to look too closely at everything that came before it. But there were signs, weren’t there? Subtle shifts in my thinking, in the quiet justifications, the moments I chose not to pause and check in with myself or anyone else. 

I keep asking how I got here again, like it’s a mystery, but part of me knows it wasn’t one step – it was a series of small ones I didn’t fully notice, or maybe didn’t want to acknowledge. 

I think the hardest part to admit is that it doesn’t feel like I just slipped- it feels like I’ve been slowly giving up on myself for awhile now. Little ways, quiet ways, choosing what’s easy over what’s right, telling myself I’d try harder tomorrow.

And now it feels like that’s caught up to me, like the people around me can see it too, and maybe they’re starting to give up in their own ways. And I can’t say that I blame them. 

That’s what hurts the most I think – that this doesn’t just live inside me. It spills out onto everyone who cares about me, and somehow I feel like I’m the one causing the damage while also being the one stuck in it. 

I feel alone in a way that’s hard to explain, like even when people are there – reaching out, trying to support me – I’m separate from them, watching myself disappoint them in real time. And I want it to get better so badly, I want to feel different, to be different – but the work it takes to actually change feels so overwhelming that I don’t even know where to start. (Or start over again, I should say.) 

And that’s the trap isn’t it? Because picking up a drink cuts through all of that for a few minutes. It softens the edges, quiets the noise, makes everything feel manageable – until it doesn’t. Until those few minutes get shorter and shorter, and I’m left chasing something that barely even works anymore. Something that not only doesn’t work, but is intent on destroying my life. 

Even though it doesn’t feel like there’s hope right now, I know – somewhere deeper than my emotions – that there is. Because God has never been dependent on how I feel. He isn’t a God of fleeting comfort or temporary relief; He’s a God of promise. 

And I’ve lived that before. I’ve walked through darker, heavier seasons than this and somehow, every single time, He’s been steady when I wasn’t. Faithful when I drifted. Present even when I couldn’t feel Him at all. So I know He’ll do it again – I just don’t know how to hold on in the meantime, and that’s the part that feels almost unbearable. 

Maybe that’s where surrender comes in. Not the kind that feels peaceful or resolved, but the kind that costs everything. 

Letting go of the person I thought I loved. Letting go of the life I was trying so hard to build and control. Letting go of the version of myself I keep trying to force into existence. And trusting – really trusting – that maybe everything needs to be undone before it can be rebuilt the right way.

That maybe, I need to step back and let Him rearrange what I’ve tangled, rebuild what I’ve broken, and carry what I was never meant to hold on my own…. Even if it means starting all over again.

I don’t write any of this to impress anyone or to turn it into something meaningful for other people. If anything, it’s the opposite. I write because I need somewhere to be brutally honest with myself, somewhere I can come back to years later and see the bigger picture I can’t always see in the moment. 

Because when I look back over the years, over entries written in completely different headspaces, I can’t ignore the pattern – God has been faithful even when I’ve been completely lost and out of my right mind. 

It hasn’t been random.

It hasn’t been pointless.

Even when everything felt chaotic, He was still doing something underneath it all. And if I’m really honest, the times my life has gone the most off track are the times I stepped out of where He had me and decided I knew better. I chased my own way, my own timing, my own desires and my own control- and it’s never once ended well for me. And still, I keep going back to that, like I forget every lesson as soon as things start to feel okay again. 

So I write because this is the only place, outside of numbing out, where things get quiet enough for me to actually think. 

Where I can sit with the confusion instead of running from it. Drinking makes everything go silent for a moment, but this – this is different. This is where I try to make sense of things that don’t make sense to my very human, very limited mind. 

Where I can be messy and unsure and still somehow feel like I’m not completely lost in it. Where I can remember, even faintly, that there’s something bigger happening than what I can see right now. 

Right now I don’t feel strong. I don’t feel redeemed or even remotely put back together. I feel like something in me has been scraped raw – like I can still feel the damage in my chest, in my hands, in the way I keep replaying everything I wish I could undo. Everything I wish I could unsay. 

There’s a heaviness that sits in my body like I can’t outrun it, no matter how much I want to disappear from it for a while. And I hate that I did this again. I hate the version of me that reaches for something that destroys me just to stop feeling things for a few minutes. I hate how quickly it becomes a cycle I recognize and hate, but still step into. 

But if I stay here long enough – past the shame, past the spiral, past the urge to shut it all down – I know the only way forward is through honesty and small, deliberate steps back toward life. Not fixing everything at once. Not becoming someone new overnight. Just stopping the bleeding where it is, one choice at a time. 

Reaching out instead of isolating. Telling the truth instead of hiding it. Letting the discomfort exist without feeding it. And trusting that even now, especially now, I am not beyond repair. I don’t have to feel ready. I just have to not disappear from myself again. 

If this is the version of me the world sees right now – struggling, messy, trying and failing and trying again – I don’t want that to be the whole story to my life. I don’t want to be remembered for the nights I gave up on myself or the ways I numbed out when things got hard. I want to be remembered as someone who kept coming back. 

Someone who fought for her life even when it felt impossible. Someone who loved deeply, who cared, who didn’t stop believing that God could still make something beautiful out of the broken pieces. 

I want to be remembered for choosing to get back up, over and over again, even when no one saw it, even when it felt pointless. Not because I did it perfectly – but because I didn’t stay down. 

So this is where I am. 

No clean ending, no neat redemption arc – just me, sitting in the wreckage of my own choices, telling the truth about it. I don’t have a breakthrough to wrap this up with. I don’t feel fixed. I feel exposed, tired, and painfully aware of how easily I can lose myself. 

But I’m still here. 

And maybe that’s the only honest place to start again – not with confidence or clarity, but with nothing left to hide. If there’s any way forward, it has to begin here, in the mess, with me choosing – however weakly, however imperfectly – not to run from it this time.

To be continued….