She Will Rise

 We have all faced challenges in life. And while we don’t always get to choose what happens to us, we do get to choose how we meet those challenges.

As a child, I didn’t see my strength or resilience.

I was too busy surviving.

I was trying to navigate a world that often felt frightening and uncertain. I didn’t realize how much strength it took just to keep going.

But today, when I look back over my life, I see something I couldn’t see then.

I see a woman who has been through a great deal.

A woman who has faced addiction, loss, heartbreak, and physical pain.

A woman who has had to begin again more than once.

And a woman who is still facing challenges she never would have chosen.

To my surprise, I have that there is a very strong, determined woman living inside me.

She doesn’t always feel strong.

She has bad days.

She gets discouraged. She doubts herself. Sometimes she wonders how much more she can handle.

But there is something about her that I am learning to trust.

She keeps going.

Not always with certainty.

Not always with a plan.

And not always with the answers she wishes she had.

Sometimes she keeps going by resting. Sometimes by asking for help. Sometimes by simply getting through the day.

I’m beginning to understand that strength doesn’t mean I never struggle.

Resilience doesn’t mean I never fall.

And courage doesn’t mean I’m never afraid.

It means I can experience all those things without losing sight of who I am.

When I think about the little girl I once was, my heart fills with compassion. She had no idea what life would ask of her. She couldn’t have imagined the losses she would endure, the lessons she would learn, or the woman she would become.

She was simply doing the best she could with what she had.

And somehow, she made it here.

To this moment.

I wish I could go back and tell that little girl something.

You are stronger than you know.

You will face things you cannot imagine right now.

You will have days when you feel broken, and days when you wonder if you can begin again.

But you will discover strength you never knew you had.

You will learn to love yourself.

You will learn to ask for help.

And you will learn that you don’t have to be fearless to keep moving forward.

I don’t know what lies ahead, and I no longer need to pretend that I do.

But I know this woman who lives inside me.

She may bend.

She may stumble.

She may need time to rest and find her footing again.

But she has not given up.

And at the end of the day, no matter what life brings, there is something deep inside her that knows:

She will rise.

My First Answered Prayer

I’m sure I reached out to God many times before I came into recovery.

But if I’m honest, I think I often called on Him when I was in the foxhole—when things were bad enough that I needed help getting out.

My first truly sincere attempt at prayer came just a short time before I got sober.

By then, I had reached an emotional bottom so deep that I couldn’t see a way out.

I had tried so many things to make the pain go away. I had looked for comfort in relationships, in alcohol, and in anything that might help me escape what I was feeling inside.

But nothing worked.

The pain kept getting worse, and I finally reached a place where I knew I couldn’t keep living the way I had been living.

I didn’t have a plan.

I didn’t have an answer.

I didn’t even know what to ask for.

All I knew was that I needed help.

So I got down on my knees.

This time, something was different.

I wasn’t simply asking God to fix a problem so I could go back to doing things my way. I was reaching out from a place of genuine desperation. I had finally come to the end of what I knew how to do.

I needed help beyond myself.

And within a month of that prayer, I was sober.

Looking back now, I see that moment as the beginning of a relationship with God that would change my life.

I didn’t know then what recovery would bring me. I couldn’t have imagined the healing, the lessons, the people, or the spiritual growth that would become part of my journey.

I only knew that I had asked for help.

And somehow, my life began to change.

Was it an answered prayer?

I believe it was.

Not because everything suddenly became easy, or because I would never struggle again.

But because something opened inside me when I finally became willing to surrender.

For the first time, I was no longer trying to find my way out entirely on my own.

I had reached for a lifeline.

And I was willing to take hold of it.

That was my first answered prayer.

And perhaps it was also the beginning of learning that I didn’t have to do this life alone.

Letting Go of Storytelling

 There has been a storyteller in me for as long as I can remember.

Unfortunately, many of the stories that began in childhood were frightening. And without realizing it, I carried them into my adult life.

It took me a few years into recovery to recognize that I was hurting myself by continuing to tell those stories.

I would replay painful experiences from childhood, revisiting the hurt, the fear, and the unfairness of what had happened.

I believe deeply in examining our experiences so we can understand them, heal, and eventually let them go.

But there is a difference between looking at the past to heal it and reliving it over and over again.

One can help us move forward.

The other can keep us stuck.

To my surprise, I’ve recently discovered that my storyteller seems to live in my nervous system, too.

Even when I understand something intellectually, my mind can still return to old patterns. It wants to revisit the past, anticipate the future, and imagine all the things that could go wrong.

It wants to awfulize.

And some days, learning to interrupt that pattern is deeply challenging.

There is no question that I have experienced a great deal of difficulty in my life. I don’t need to deny it, minimize it, or pretend it didn’t happen.

My story matters.

But I’m beginning to understand that I don’t have to keep telling it to prove that it mattered.

I can honor what happened without continuing to live there.

I can acknowledge the pain without rehearsing it.

I can learn from the past without allowing it to determine how I experience today.

And when my mind begins creating frightening stories about the future, perhaps I can gently remind myself that I don’t know what is going to happen.

I don’t have to prepare for every possible disappointment.

I don’t have to keep reliving yesterday or worrying about tomorrow.

I can come back to this moment.

This breath.

This day.

I know this is not something I will master overnight. These patterns have been with me for a very long time, and I am learning to meet them with patience rather than judgment.

Perhaps letting go of storytelling doesn’t mean silencing the storyteller altogether.

Perhaps it means learning when her story has served its purpose.

I can listen to what the past has taught me without asking it to tell me the same story again.

I can be compassionate toward the little girl who needed to make sense of what happened to her.

And I can gently teach her that we are allowed to move forward.

The past deserves to be acknowledged.

The pain deserves compassion.

But my life is happening now.

And perhaps it is time to give the present the attention I have spent so many years giving the past.