Not long after writing my last post, life did something it has done many times before. It went from stillness to motion. One friend laughed and said, “You always go from zero to sixty.” She is not wrong. I have often lived that way. Full stop to full speed. Silence to song. Nothing to everything. But this time felt different. Perhaps because I was not running alone. My husband was beside me. My children were beside me. And somehow, without either of us planning it, we found ourselves standing before an open road.

I need to make a confession: my house is a mess.

Perhaps, if you have read my carefully chosen words, you have imagined a home to match them. Something soft and candlelit. Something swept and settled. Something with linen curtains breathing in the windows, flowers on the table, a porch that welcomes, a yard that says, “Here lives a woman who knows how to keep beauty. But that is not the house I am living in.

I am sitting here in front of my computer, sipping a cup of chocolate tea—the most delicious chocolate tea I have ever tasted. Granted, I have only ever tasted one chocolate tea, and it is this one. But still, it is the most delicious one I have ever known. If you must know, it is Nutcracker Blend: black tea with chocolate, almond, and hazelnut flavors. Exquisite. And as I sip, I look around me. The house is quiet. It is 8 p.m., after all, and the children are in bed.

She visits often, and today she speaks again, louder than before. Beneath noble intentions lingers a disapproving tone—one that exposes even the deepest corners of my soul to “correction”.

Her aim is protection—I know this— and yet she is wrong.

Walking in the wake of suffering, guided by old wounds, she intends to shield me from pain once more, blind to one grave truth—for I ward off less than I lose—survive more than I ever live.

I wrote a prose poem recently. It was raw enough that I thought perhaps it had finally reached the hidden places. Someone told me it touched a depth most people spend their lives avoiding. And for a moment, I wondered if perhaps words had finally done what I had quietly hoped they would do.

And still—I felt unseen. Still unmoved. Still burdened. Because the critic still lives. Still breathes. Still speaks in my own voice.

You may know him too. He appears with an odd sort of devotion, carrying correction in his hands as though it were mercy. He studies every crack in the mirror. He circles every weakness. He promises improvement but somehow leaves only heaviness in his wake.

I am learning so much about myself lately.

Today, I learned that there are so many parts that make me me—and each one, at different moments, takes a turn in the driver’s seat.

Some parts carry me down winding roads.
Some find steadier paths.
Some drive straight ahead.

And sometimes the ride is smooth. Sometimes it is terribly bumpy.

But I am beginning to see that it is not each part’s fault.

I want to tell you a story. It began in someone else’s living room—but it’s still unfolding in mine.

A while ago, a woman I love and trust looked me in the eye and told me many things I didn’t know how to receive. I nodded, I smiled, I listened politely. But inside, I wrestled. I wasn’t sure I believed her. I came home with her words tucked away, not discarded—but not wholly embraced either. Still, they stayed with me. They visited me in quiet moments, like seeds tucked into the soil of my heart. I didn’t know they were growing. But they were.

There are days when Heaven brushes against earth so softly we almost miss it. Days when grace arrives quietly, like sunlight slipping beneath a doorway or wind moving through leaves. And then there are other days—days when Heaven seems unable to contain itself. Days when it does not merely whisper. Days when it sings.

May 20th, 2025, was such a day.

Someone told me today, “We all grow at different times.” And though my lips said yes, my heart quietly whispered another response:

But what comfort is that?

I know those words are meant to soothe. They are offered with kindness, with gentleness, perhaps even with hope. And yet if I am honest, they landed heavily inside me. Because there are days when I do not merely feel as though I am growing slowly. There are days when I feel late. Late to adulthood. Late to healing. Late to becoming.

Yesterday, I was intrigued. Today, I am undone—both by the same simple, soul-stirring thought. I sat by the riverbank, where the Mayo spills its song through Mayodan, North Carolina. The sand curled cool around my toes, the current whispered softly, and beside me, my church sisters leaned into the moment—pondering eternity in the shape of water and time. What could be more spiritual than life itself?

In the hush of that hour, the old phrase rose again like mist: Life is short. "YOLO," laughed a friend, a flicker of mirth in her eyes—but also something more fragile beneath. "You Only Live Once," she explained, and I nodded—but inwardly, I winced. I’ve wrestled with that phrase before.

I have never believed suffering was optional. I have never thought myself uniquely burdened, as though grief somehow singled me out among the living. I have always assumed suffering was simply part of the landscape of this world—a world fractured by sin, where sorrow has somehow worked itself into the dust beneath our feet. And yet lately I encountered a thought that followed me home and refused to leave quietly…

I have been thinking again about the words my aunt once gave me—words simple enough to pass quickly through the air, but sharp enough to lodge somewhere deep inside me: “Honey, you are trying to put together a puzzle without having the picture.” And I knew, the moment she said it, that she was right. Because there is supposed to be a picture. There is supposed to be some image of wholeness, some vision of a life ordered by love, of a family held together by tenderness, of a world where the pieces do not always cut your hands when you try to make them fit. But mine came scattered.

I am a terrible mother. Oh, what a terrible mother I am. Today, the words are not merely knocking. They are pounding. They are relentless. They are loud enough to rattle the hinges of my mind. And I am angry—not only sad, not only weary, not only ashamed, but angry. Furious, really, that I am here again. Furious that the same old voices have found the same old door. Furious that I can know better, pray better, speak better, even write better, and still feel my hand hovering near the lock. I am sick of it.

Today, I came across the words of another pilgrim—though perhaps I should simply say another human being, because sometimes that is enough. His words were raw and aching, heavy with the terrible fear that he was not growing better, but worse. That he was not walking toward the Light, but drifting from it. That no matter how hard he tried, he would never become what he was meant to become. And I felt his sorrow. Not from a distance. Not as one who studies pain from the safety of a clean room. I felt it because I know that ache.

Today was a good day. Not extraordinary. Not triumphant. Not the kind of day that announces itself with trumpets or proves, once and for all, that everything has changed. Just good. And for that, I am grateful. Because the week before it had been heavy. Sickness moved through our home like a gray weather system, settling over bodies and rooms and rhythms. There was coughing, aching, weakness, undone laundry, tired children, and the particular kind of exhaustion that makes even ordinary tasks feel like mountains.

It is no easy thing to do what is good for me. Not because I do not know what would help. In many ways, I do know. I know the skills that steady my hands, clear the fog, and place my feet again on the narrow middle path—the one that leads me back to peace, back to truth, back to God. I know I should pause. I know I should breathe. I know I should ask wise questions before letting woundedness answer for me. And yet, when sorrow settles over the heart like a heavy gray coat, when grief sits in the chest and anger begins to hiss, “Forget the skills,” it becomes strangely hard to reach for the very things that might save me from myself.

Today, I feel a sacred season drawing near, and I do not feel prepared. I want to enter it awake. I want my heart, my mind, my soul to be immersed in whatever God has waiting for me there. I have the books. I have the prayers. I have the traditions within reach. And still, I wonder: will I truly live it? Will I come through it more whole, more steady, more alive to the work of God in me? I want to. Oh, I want to.

I have spent so much of my life wondering what it means to be good or bad. For a long time, I could not imagine myself as anything but bad. The echoes of my past, the weight of my sins, the strange ache of mental illness—all of it gathered together like witnesses in a courtroom, pointing toward the same terrible conclusion: something in me was fundamentally wrong. Not simply wounded. Not simply struggling. Wrong.

I have found myself standing again at the edge of pain and renewal, looking out toward that thin place where darkness begins, slowly, to surrender to dawn. The road behind me has been long. The burdens have been heavy. And yet today, beneath all the ache, I sense something small stirring in me—not triumph, not certainty, not some sudden shining wholeness, but hope. A whisper of it. A fragile, almost unbelievable thing. After years of wandering through the fog of wounds I could not name, I finally have words for them: Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.