“Every authentic act of creation changes the creator before it changes the creation.”
—Karen Carmack
This quote came from my friend and teacher, Karen, after she taught me to shape a ceramic bowl. And ever since she said those words, I haven’t stopped thinking about how that moment has “shaped” me lately.
The last 45 days have been very creative for me. I've been writing, of course. But I've also been moving things around my home, seeing familiar spaces differently. I've worked with clay, lumber, screws, brackets, art, and photography. And every act of creativity has been an open process, with a fair amount of figuring-it-out-as-I-go.
I think the spark was ignited when I stood by my (SELF) and said out loud, “Hold on, because what unfolds next is going to be freaking extraordinary.”
At the time, I didn’t know any of these creative moments were connected.
Then I sat down with a lump of clay.
As I shaped that little bowl with my own two hands, I noticed something about myself.
I wasn't trying to make it perfect.
I pressed patterns into the clay without worrying whether they were evenly spaced. I let lines wander. I left crevices where they appeared. The bowl wasn't perfectly round or smooth, and I didn't keep working it until it was.
I just let it become what it was becoming.
There is a version of me who would have struggled with that.
She would have wanted the pattern uniform. She would have smoothed the rough places and evened the edges. She would have kept adjusting and correcting until everything looked the way she thought it should.
But sitting there with clay in my hands, I didn't feel the need to do any of that.
And it was incredibly freeing.
I don't even know how the bowl will turn out. It still has to be glazed and fired. Maybe I'll love it. Maybe I won't.
Who am I kidding? I will absolutely love it, no matter how it looks.
Because Karen's words helped me realize something: the bowl isn't the most important thing I was creating that day.
Something was changing in me.
Over the past month, I have stumbled upon all sorts of hidden creative treasures, not only in my writing, but in my home, on my deck, and in things I never would have thought of as particularly creative, like the process of making my London Fog tea.
And I think they all began with an openness.
A realization that has been slowly settling into me:
I am no longer living for someone else.
And I am no longer living solely from the parts of me that learned how to manage my survival for 56 years.
Those parts served me well. They learned to anticipate, manage, perfect, explain, accommodate, and control. They helped me create a life that felt safe.
But survival and creation ask different things of us.
Survival wants certainty.
Creation asks us to stay curious.
Survival looks for the “right way”.
Creation wonders, What if I tried this?
That is what has felt so different about this season of my life, Act III. I am giving myself permission to make things without knowing exactly what they will become.
And somewhere in the making of all of them, I am being made, too.
The bowl may come out of the kiln imperfect.
I hope it does.
And I will love it every time I see it sitting front and center on my table.
Displayed for all to see.
Peace,
J~

There are days when everything feels just right.
I wake up early, giving myself extra time to linger over coffee and my journal. A new audiobook keeps me company on my morning walk. My work flows effortlessly, and I accomplish more than I expected. I catch up with a friend on the phone, and the conversation leaves me feeling connected. Even dinner turns out perfectly.
As the day draws to a close, I settle into that familiar feeling I call GJP.
Then I notice it.
A slight tightening in my chest.
A whisper of anxiety.
What's happening?
Why am I anxious?
I've experienced this often enough to recognize the pattern.
Nothing has gone wrong.
No crisis.
No bad news.
Just an unexpected descent into searching for what must be wrong.
I've always called it spiraling.
Until I read this by Henri Nouwen.
"You can look at your life as a large cone that sometimes becomes narrower the deeper you go. There are many doors in that cone that give you the chance to leave the journey. But you have been closing those doors one after the other, making yourself go deeper and deeper into your center.  Every time you close another door... you commit yourself to go deeper into the heart and thus deeper into the heart of God."
I couldn't stop thinking about that image.
For years I’ve pictured myself spiraling downward into something dark, something to escape before I went too far.
But Nouwen offered me a different image.
A cone.
Instead of circling out of control, what if I had been moving inward? What if each return to the same questions wasn't evidence that I was stuck but an invitation to go a little deeper?
As I pictured the cone, I imagined small doors all along its sides.
The door of distraction.
The door of busyness.
The door of needing approval.
The door of immediate relief.
The door of certainty.
Some of those doors look harmless. Others even look wise. Harmless or not, each offers an exit from the inward journey.
Nouwen reminds us that healing comes when we stop hiding our weakness and allow our divided selves to become whole.
Perhaps that's why the inward journey can feel so unsettling at times.
But as I reframe my view, I see myself being gathered together, not falling apart.
As the cone became narrower, there was less room to carry everything I thought I needed.
The need to be understood.
The need for certainty.
The need to figure everything out.
The need for someone else's approval.
One by one, there simply wasn't room.
My life didn't become smaller. It became simpler.
Eventually there's only enough room for what has always been true.
At the center...
I am already beloved.
Maybe what I've been calling spiraling wasn't a sign that something was wrong.
Maybe it was an invitation to go deeper.
The next time I catch myself saying, I'm spiraling, I hope I'll pause before reaching for the nearest exit.
Instead, I want to ask:
Is this taking me away from myself... or toward my center? 

I have experienced many life changes over the past seven years, but the most profound change began in 2023. And honestly, nothing really happened.
I moved into a new home.
I became a grandma.
I declared it my pivot year.
I chose myself.
There wasn't one dramatic moment that changed everything.
Just a slow year of pivot, surrender, and self-uncovery.
It felt as though a fog had begun to lift, drawing me into a deeper life of contemplation.
I believe we all enter the world with something uniquely our own. A temperament. A personality. A soul already known by God. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." — Jeremiah 1:5
Yet we also enter the world completely dependent on the environments that shape us. Long before we're old enough to choose, we're learning to belong. We discover which parts of ourselves are welcomed, which feel like too much, what earns approval, and what feels safest to hide.
As children, we don't consciously decide to do this. We adapt.
Those adaptations help us navigate the world we've been given. But over time, they can become patterns. Eventually, it's difficult to tell the difference between who we truly are and who we've learned to be.
For years, I fell into the self-discovery loop. Read a book, check off the list. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
But it was that year of deep self-reflection when I realized that I'm not on a quest to discover myself.
I'm on a quest to uncover myself.
The woman God created has never been missing. She has been layered beneath expectations, survival strategies, fears, and the quiet adaptations that once helped me belong. I don’t need to discover her; I need to uncover her.
By 2023, I thought I had already changed dramatically. Divorce had reshaped my life. I had rebuilt my home. I had begun healing.
But I had only scratched the surface.
It wasn't until 2025, while writing Untucked, that I went even deeper into my own self-uncovery.
Even now, I wouldn't say I've arrived. There is no final destination. It feels more like gently untucking another layer, then another, allowing the soul to keep unfolding. Which often returns me to the little girl I remember at five years old.
She was curious. A little sassy. Full of light. She talked with God as though He were sitting beside her. She hadn't yet learned to measure herself through someone else's approval.
Somewhere along the way, life began teaching different lessons. And it’s my body that remembers the lesson before my mind does.
It remembers the sting of criticism.
The fear of abandonment.
The feeling that love could be uncertain.
So I became very good at criticizing myself before anyone else could.
And I became the first to abandon myself before anyone else could leave.
Until eventually, I became whoever I thought I needed to be, depending on who stood in front of me.
And it wasn’t until recently that I found myself standing in my living room, looking around at the life I've slowly built. And almost without thinking, an old question surfaced.
What would they think of my life now?
Maybe for you, "they" is a parent.
A spouse.
A friend.
Someone whose approval once mattered deeply.
And in that moment, I realized the conversation wasn't happening in the room.
It was happening inside me.
My life has finally become mine. I no longer need to imagine their judgments or opinions in my mind. I don’t need to arrange my life so it makes sense to someone else.
I have nothing to prove.
These walls hold no secrets.
So I really do have to ask myself, where am I still creating a narrative around another person?
The gift of that moment wasn't the answer.
It was noticing the question at all.
I realized I wasn't actually answering to them anymore.
A pathway that had quietly existed for decades was simply closing.
I almost missed it.
I released the expectations that had quietly traveled through relationships and generations.
I released the belief that love must be earned.
I released the version of myself that was still asking for permission to become who I already was.
I don't write these words to diminish anyone's memory.
I write them because healing requires honesty.
Every person in my life has shaped me in some way. Every season has left its imprint. I wouldn't erase any of it. Even the hardest chapters became part of the story that formed me.
But there comes a moment when we must ask ourselves:
Do these patterns still belong in the life I'm creating?
The old patterns don't usually disappear all at once. Sometimes they return disguised as second-guessing, over-explaining, or quietly looking outside ourselves for permission. But now I recognize them for what they are, just familiar habits quietly asking whether they're still needed.
For me, that has become the deeper work of self-uncovery.
Uncovering the person who has been there all along.
The woman God knew before I took my first breath.
The woman who no longer needs to fit in because she already belongs.

Peace,
​J~

​Making Room
I hadn't planned on redecorating my home this summer.
It all started with a chair!
When you are short like me, finding the perfect chair becomes a quest because furniture, like many things in our world, is not designed with shortness in mind.
That quest turned into moving bookshelves, pictures, and mementos I had carried from one home to another because they once meant something to me or had been passed down over the years.
Some held beautiful memories.
Others quietly belonged to a life I no longer live.
Letting Go…
I love objects around me that tell stories. A vase full of stones from hikes and travel, an old photo, a book from my childhood. These things remind me of where I've been. I’m sentimental like that.
But now, I find myself asking, do these things still belong in the life I'm creating?
Healing has a funny way of showing up in ordinary moments.
Like standing in the middle of my living room, holding something I’ve looked at every day for years and realizing it no longer needs to occupy my space or my attention.
Over the past few weeks, I've donated furniture, rearranged rooms, replaced pieces that no longer felt like me, and welcomed more openness into my home.
And in that feeling of openness, I see why I kept parts of my past within eyesight. They were familiar. But it wasn’t about the item; it was about the version of myself it represented.
In the past seven years, I've redesigned so much of my life. I’ve spent time discovering what matters to me and how I want to live my most authentic life. So why was I still making space for pieces that belonged to someone I’m no longer?
It was a recent EMDR session that seemed to unlock something in me. I found myself standing in my quiet living room imagining the opinions of people who are no longer part of my life. Some have passed. Others have simply moved on.
The conversations weren't real. But the feelings were.
It made me think of how often we continue decorating our lives around voices that are no longer in the room.
And that felt like another level of growth…
Recognizing that the people who shaped us don't have to continue shaping every decision we make.
We can honor them without living beneath the weight of their opinions or expectations.
We can love them and still choose differently.
The Quiet After…
As my home has changed, I've realized something else has been changing too.
The constant hum inside me has grown quieter.
For much of my life, I lived in survival mode. I didn't know what it felt like to move through the world with a settled nervous system because I'd rarely experienced it.
Now I catch myself simply being.
I can't seem to stop looking around my home.
For the first time, the space around me feels like it reflects the life within me.
Every piece feels like it belongs.
So do I.
Peace,
J~

I've begun to notice that when life becomes quieter, different questions emerge.
The past few weeks, I've found myself wondering how much of our lives is part of a divine design and how much is shaped by circumstance, choice, and free will. Are we born with a purpose already woven into our souls? Are the people who cross our paths placed there long before we ever meet them? Or are our lives simply the unfolding result of countless decisions made by ourselves and others?
I thought about the people who have shaped my life. My parents. My former husband. Friends who appeared at exactly the right moment. People whose lives unfolded in ways entirely different from my own, yet somehow our stories intersected. How many events had to occur for our paths to cross? How much was chosen? How much was given?
Of course, I don't expect to solve a mystery that theologians and philosophers have wrestled with for centuries.
But as I sat with the questions, I noticed something more important than finding an answer.
The questions themselves have changed for me over the years.
There was a time when my questions were born out of survival.
How do I get through today?
How do I keep everything from falling apart?
What do I need to fix next?
When the nervous system lives in a constant state of vigilance, there isn't much room for contemplation. Every ounce of energy is devoted to getting through the next hour, the next day, the next crisis.
Lately, though, I've noticed something unfamiliar.
A quiet within me.
My nervous system no longer seems to believe that every moment is an emergency.
From that quiet emerged not only different questions, but a different way of inhabiting my life.
What is life inviting me to notice?
Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of healing.
The spaciousness to wonder again.
I do believe that some of the story was written long before I arrived. Maybe certain scenes were always going to unfold. And maybe there is more improvisation than I will ever understand.
I don't know. And that’s the beauty of it. I don’t have to know.
My calling is not to read the entire script.
My calling is to be fully present for the scene I'm in.
To deliver my lines honestly.
To love the people who share the stage with me.
To trust the Director even when I cannot see the next act.
For so much of my life, I was simply trying to survive the performance.
Now, I find myself awake within it.
And as I sit on my porch in the quiet of the evening, watching the sun set after the rain, and feeling the peace that has slowly settled into my nervous system, I notice something else has changed.
I'm no longer asking, Who do I need to become?
Instead, I find myself becoming more aware of the One who has been present all along.
Transformation doesn't happen when I finally convince myself that I am enough, worthy, healed, or whole.
It happens when I stop trying to define myself at all.
Identity isn't something I achieve; it's something I receive.
Life doesn't begin with a declaration of who I am.
It begins with the quiet realization that I have always been seen... always been known... always been loved.
The more I rest in that Presence, the less I feel compelled to define myself by labels, achievements, failures, or even healing itself.
Perhaps this is why the questions have changed.
The need to know has slowly given way to the freedom to wonder.
To trust that whether my life is a sacred contract, a tapestry of countless choices, or some beautiful mystery of both, I do not walk it alone.
I simply have to be present.
Present to this moment.
Present to the people before me.
Present to the quiet whisper that has been there all along.
And perhaps that is what it means to live Untucked. Not finally knowing who I am, but resting in the One who has always known me.
 Peace be with you,
J~

What Is This Costing Me?
Lately, I have been thinking about consumption.
Not only in the monetary sense, though budgeting certainly comes to mind. I have been thinking about how I spend my time, calories, energy, attention, dollars, relationships, work, and even my thoughts.
As I have begun tracking my heart health more closely, I am paying closer attention to what I eat. It is not about restriction. It is about awareness. A meal may fit within my calorie goal yet still leave me hungry an hour later. Another choice may provide protein, energy, and nutrients my body can actually use.
That same awareness has begun to show up everywhere else.
What am I giving my time to?
What am I allowing to take up space in my mind?
What leaves me depleted?
What actually nourishes me?
And perhaps the question underneath all of it is this:
What is this costing me?
The other day, I drove through a nearby neighborhood in search of a house I had visited more than ten years ago. I remembered it as uniquely beautiful. The backyard had been a true oasis, with ponds, lighted paths, beautiful foliage, and multiple seating areas. My friends moved several years ago, but I found myself wondering what had become of the house. Was it still lovely? Was it for sale? Would I want to live there?
As I drove through the neighborhood, I felt something sink in me.
Cars filled driveways and lined the streets. Yards were unkempt. There was clutter, junk, and a sense that what had once been cared for had simply been left behind. It hurt my heart more than I expected.
Maybe it was not only the neighborhood itself that bothered me. Maybe it was what it seemed to represent.
We live in a culture of excess.
More things. More tools. More upgrades. More noise. More messages telling us that whatever we have is not enough and that the answer is always one more purchase, one more move, one more distraction, one more thing to consume.
And I am not immune to it.
I can be influenced by the next best thing too. The supplement, the program, the device, the expert, the promise that something else might help lower my blood pressure, give me more energy, quiet my mind, or help me feel more in control of my body.
Sometimes those things are helpful. Sometimes information and tools truly do support us.
But I have to be careful not to hand over my own wisdom in the process. Not to believe that my well-being is always one purchase, or one new promise away.
Because the more I chase what is outside of me, the easier it is to forget what is already asking for my attention: rest, nourishment, movement, quiet, boundaries, connection, and care.
And somewhere in that endless reaching, we have forgotten how to care for what is already in our hands.
We do not repair what is broken because replacement is easier. We do not sit with discomfort because there is always something available to numb it. We do not protect our attention because everyone wants a piece of it.
We are overstimulated, overmarketed to, and often living so far outside ourselves that we no longer know what we actually need.
I feel this most sharply on social media. Thoughtful words can disappear without a trace while nonsense, outrage, and performance are rewarded. It can make a person wonder why they bother sharing anything meaningful at all.
But I don’t believe the answer is to become louder.
It is to be still and notice.
To notice what is costing me my peace.
To notice what is costing me my attention.
To notice what is costing me my health, my creativity, my joy, and my ability to be present in my own life.
Not everything that drains us is wrong. Some things are worth the cost. Loving people is worth it. Creating something meaningful is worth it. Building a life that reflects who we are is worth it.
But there is a difference between being spent on what matters and being slowly drained by what does not.
I want to live with more intention than consumption.
I want to care for what I have.
I want to be present in my home, my body, and my life.
I want to invest my energy where it can grow something.
Before I say yes, before I scroll, before I buy, before I give another piece of myself away, I want to pause long enough to ask:
What is this costing me?
And perhaps even more importantly:
Is it worth it?
 

This past week, I was led back to my journal entries from August of 2025.
I rarely read old journal entries. Once I've written something, I tend to leave it on the page and keep moving forward. But after a conversation with a friend that invited reflection on where I was ten months ago, I found myself turning the pages and revisiting a season that followed my Camino.
What I discovered wasn't what I expected.
The journals weren't filled with grand plans or specific prayers for what would come next. Instead, they were filled with gratitude. Gratitude for waking up. Gratitude for the sunrise. Gratitude for being on the journey.
I wrote that God was calling me toward something more, though I had no idea what that “more” would look like. At the time, I had begun shifting from writing Tuck the Fringe to writing Untucked. The stories and reflections seemed to flow from a deeper place. I sensed that the healing journey I had been writing for myself was becoming something I might eventually share with others.
As I reflected on that season, another realization surfaced.
I still find places where I am tucked.
In the quiet whispers.
The ones that tell me I am not enough.
How quickly the voices of the past can feel more powerful than the truth we have spent years uncovering.
As I sat with those thoughts, one of my devotionals guided me to the story of Hagar in Genesis. I had never really read it before, just a few short verses with an amazing impact.
Hagar finds herself alone in the wilderness, caught in circumstances she did not create and carrying wounds she did not deserve. And yet God meets her there.
And after the encounter, Hagar gives God a name:
“You are the God who sees me.”
That phrase has stayed with me all week.
Because the deepest longing of the human heart is not to be admired, validated, or even understood.
It is simply to be seen.
Not for what we accomplish or how we appear to others.
But for who we really are.
As I sat with that story, another thought emerged.
For years, I have carried the voices of people who told me, directly or indirectly, that I was not enough. I have spent much of my life trying to prove those voices wrong.
But what if that was never my job?
What if I do not need to prove they were wrong?
What if they were never qualified to judge me in the first place?
That feels like a threshold worth crossing.
Because I no longer need to build my life around overturning someone else’s verdict of me.
Maybe that is what this season is teaching me.
The God who sees me is not asking me to earn my worth.
The God who sees me is inviting me to trust what He already sees in me.
And that truly is enough.

​This is for anyone healing from something difficult.
It comes from a journal entry I wrote after a recent EMDR session. I have shared it with a few people who encouraged me to offer it to others who may feel lost or wonder why healing seems to take longer than expected.
This is an adaptation of what I wrote the next morning.
"I have loved you; now remain in my love."
God, thank you for these words.
Rescue me and all my parts that have grown weary of vigilance over the years. When I begin to drift from my truth, my worthiness, Jesus, show me the Father.
Rather than revisiting old wounds, I found myself moved into the protection of all the women I have been.
Here I am now, the wiser version of myself, able to comfort and mother the younger versions of me. I am the inner mentor to those younger selves, just as my older self will one day be to the woman I am now.
How amazing that is.
That girl was tired.
She had been beaten down by life more than once, and yet she kept getting back up.
I see her standing at different thresholds in her life, carrying burdens never meant for her to bear alone. She held fear. She held uncertainty. She held pain. She learned to stay vigilant, always watching for the next storm.
And now I am here to bring her rest.
One memory comes into focus.
I see her sitting quietly on a couch, wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, stunned by words that cut deeper than anyone could see. Her heart races. Her body freezes. She struggles to understand how love and hurt can coexist in the same space.
For years she carried that moment.
For years she carried many moments.
But in this vision, something changes.
I place her here and now, in my beautiful, peaceful home.
I wrap my arms around her, and she melts into my chest.
I tell her that I love her.
More importantly, God loves her.
I take her by the hand and walk her into the guest room. It is quiet. Safe. Comfortable.
She sits on the bed and studies the photographs displayed around the room. Images of herself from childhood to womanhood. She reaches for the angel music box she received at birth and slowly winds the key.
A familiar melody fills the room.
"Lullaby and Goodnight."
She listens.
She smiles.
And for the first time in a very long time, she rests.
"You are home, sweet girl," I tell her.
"You are safe."
"You are loved."
"And we never have to go back there."
 

The Human Need to Matter
One of the earliest human instincts we have as infants is to reach for connection. A newborn can grasp a parent’s finger immediately after birth. It is involuntary yet an instinctual survival response, ingrained in each of us.
​
​Of course, we cannot remember that feeling as infants, but if we are parents or grandparents, we have surely experienced this special moment.

This past week, I attended the Senior Market Sales “Sales Force Conference” in Omaha. While the event primarily focused on Medicare and serving the senior market, one keynote message stood out to me. 
It was about mattering.
The speaker, Zach Mercurio, shared his own story of his newborn son grasping his finger.  In those first moments of life, a baby reaches out, and someone reaches back. Long before we have words, we are learning something about ourselves and the world around us.
If I reach out for connection, will someone reach back?
As I listened, I found myself thinking about the journey I've been writing about in Untucked.
So many of us spend years tucking away pieces of ourselves in order to fit in, avoid criticism, or gain approval. We learn to become who others need us to be, and somewhere along the way, we lose sight of something essential:
We matter just as we are.
Not because of our titles, achievements, or social status.
We matter because we are here.
Unfortunately, according to Zach’s research, we are living in the midst of a "mattering deficit." Loneliness is rising. Engagement is declining. More people feel unseen, unheard, and disconnected. More than ever, we are questioning whether we truly matter.
When I reflect on my own journey and on times when I felt lonely, the deepest ache wasn't the absence of people. It was the feeling that my presence made little difference to the people around me.
Zach defines mattering as the fundamental human need to feel seen, heard, valued, and needed. He suggests that we experience mattering in three ways:
To be noticed.
To be affirmed.
To be needed.
Noticed. Affirmed. Needed.
Simple words. Life-changing experiences.

I began writing this reflection four days ago when I returned from the conference, intending to publish it on Sunday. The subject of mattering felt very Untucked to me, and I resonated deeply with what Zach shared.
And then something unexpected happened.
At church this morning, the reflection expanded.
We had a “fill-in” pastor today and she shared a sweet story about watching her six-year-old granddaughter play soccer. As anyone who has watched a group of young children play sports knows, there is often more enthusiasm than strategy. At one point, her granddaughter became confused about which goal was hers. She stopped, looked toward the stands, and found her father.
He simply nodded in the direction she needed to go.
Earlier, he had told her, "If you ever get confused, just look over at me, and I will guide you."
That stuck me deeply.
A newborn reaches for a parent's finger.
A little girl looks to her father for direction.
Both are seeking the same thing: connection. The comfort of knowing someone is there.
Perhaps that is why being noticed carries such power. It touches something ancient within us. Something that has been asking since our very first day on earth whether our presence matters to another person.
At the end of the service, our lead pastor closed in prayer, reminding us that when we feel confused, lost, or unseen, we can simply look up.
And suddenly, the keynote and the sermon felt connected.
The question is not only, "Who truly sees me?"
The deeper question is:
Who do I need to notice?
Who do I need to check in on?
Who do I need to remind that they matter?
In many ways, the journey of becoming untucked is the journey of remembering this truth. Beneath all the roles we play, the expectations we carry, and the parts of ourselves we have hidden away, there is a person who has always been worthy of being seen.
You matter!
J~

My Sweet Little Girl,
I want you to know that I cherish you and hold you safely in my heart. You are a perfect expression of love, exactly as God created you to be.
For so many years, I kept you tucked away because I was afraid of others’ criticism and judgment. I thought I was protecting you, but I understand now that hiding you only made life harder for us both. You were never the problem. Your light was simply too honest for people who had forgotten their own.
I am sorry for the times I neglected your need for safety, softness, and love. I’m sorry for the moments when I silenced your voice or made you feel you had to shrink in order to belong.
But look at us now.
These years have tested, stretched, and reshaped us, yet somehow you have remained faithful. Hopeful. Still reaching toward beauty.
You are unique. So unique that many people tried to quiet your spirit and dim your sensitivity. But I know now that God placed something extraordinary within you from the very beginning. You came into this world carrying a special gift.
I am so happy to hold your hand and protect your heart with a new promise: you are free to be. Free to laugh loudly. Free to create. Free to rest. Free to play and experience all the joy a child should know.
You no longer have to carry the weight of survival alone.
I can care for you now by showing you that we are safe, blessed, and deeply loved. You only need to show up fully as yourself and enjoy this beautiful life we’ve been given.
You are extraordinary.
And I am so sorry you did not hear that nearly enough.
But you will hear it now.
Always.
Love,
​Me
​
**This photo was AI generated from a current photo of me at 56 and a photo of me at age 6.**