Heart and Soul

 For me, there are only two things that cannot be changed:

What resonates in my heart

and the truth in my soul.

Fear has often tried to step into my life.

I was raised on fear.

I learned early how easily fear can change our choices,

steal our peace,

and take things from us that matter.

But I’m learning something different now.

Fear may speak loudly,

but love is steady.

Fear can create doubt.

Love creates knowing.

Fear can make me question myself.

But my heart knows what is true,

and my soul knows the path.

I don’t need to understand every step.

I don’t need to know what comes next.

I only need to listen.

To what resonates in my heart.

To what is true in my soul.

Because fear may visit me,

but it doesn’t have to lead me.

Love does.

And I trust that love knows the way home.

When It’s Hard to Let Go

 There are times in life when we are called to let go.

Sometimes we know it long before we are willing to do it.

Two moments stand out to me.

The first was just before I got sober.

I had tried many times to quit and failed.

But eventually, I reached a point where the pain of continuing was greater than the pain of letting go.

That moment was a blessing.

Nothing short of a miracle.

The other time was with my daughter.

For eight years, I held on tightly while she struggled with addiction.

There was no way I was going to let go.

I was determined to find a way to save her.

I’m not sure that was what she wanted.

But I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Until one day, the pain of holding on became too much.

I had become spiritually, emotionally, and physically sick.

I had tried everything I knew to try.

There was simply nothing left.

I had to make the most unselfish decision of my life.

I had to stop rescuing my daughter.

Two weeks later, she was gone.

Forever.

I don’t think there is a harder kind of letting go than that.

But letting go doesn’t mean I stopped loving her.

It meant I finally understood that I could not save someone who didn’t want to be saved.

Sometimes love holds on.

Sometimes love releases.

And sometimes the hardest act of love is opening our hands when every part of us wants to keep holding on.

Pain Management

 I think I learned to manage pain at a very young age.

I could get lost in my crafts, playing with my dog, or with my dolls.

They were more than things I enjoyed.

They were distractions.

Little places I could escape to when the world around me felt too much.

As I got older, I still loved creating things.

But I discovered another kind of distraction.

Helping people.

Taking care of others.

Caretaking became a way of life for me.

Practically my entire career was built around serving others.

And there was nothing wrong with that.

I genuinely loved helping people.

But I wonder now what was underneath it all.

Was there a little girl who had learned that focusing on everyone else was a way to escape herself?

A child who longed to get away from the world she lived in?

Maybe helping others became more than my purpose.

Maybe it also became my hiding place.

I could focus on their needs instead of my own.

Their pain instead of mine.

Their problems instead of the feelings I didn’t know how to face.

I don’t judge that little girl for finding ways to cope.

She was doing the best she could.

She found places where she could breathe.

And perhaps that is where my journey with pain management really began—not with learning how to make pain disappear, but with learning how to find somewhere safe to go when life hurt.

Seeing the World as Soft and Kind

 For much of my life, fear won.

It controlled my choices.

It kept me small.

It convinced me that something bad was always waiting around the corner.

But today, even when fear tries to bully me, it doesn’t get the final word.

I have learned about neuroplasticity—the way the brain and nervous system can influence both emotional and physical pain.

For the first half of my life, the pain was mostly emotional.

I had to dig myself out of the trenches of self-hatred again and again, until I slowly learned to love myself.

Then came the physical pain.

That journey has not been easy either.

I still have difficult days.

But something inside me has changed.

I know now that fear doesn’t win.

Only love wins.

Everything else is the story fear has been telling me.

Perhaps much of it was created by the mind of a little girl who learned very early to be frightened.

She believed the world was dangerous.

She believed she had to protect herself.

She believed she wasn’t enough.

But She is learning that she doesn’t have to live in fear anymore.

She can choose love.

And so can I.

Again and again.

No matter what the day brings.

Love wins.