Glimpses of Freedom

 For much of my life, it was emotional pain that held me captive.

As a child, I never learned to feel good about myself. The punishment I received became a voice inside my own head, and over time I turned that punishment against myself.

I was hard on myself as a teenager.

Hard on myself as an adult.

There were seasons when the pain felt so overwhelming that I didn’t want to be here at all.

I wanted relief.

I wanted escape.

I wanted peace.

Recovery changed that.

Slowly, through years of healing, I learned compassion. I learned forgiveness. Eventually, I learned something I once thought impossible:

I learned to love myself.

But as the emotional pain softened, physical pain stepped forward.

First fibromyalgia.

Then chronic fatigue.

Then the nerve pain in my knees.

And later, the pain in my bladder.

Today, I can see how deeply pain has shaped my life. It runs through my story like a thread, weaving itself through loss, fear, relationships, and healing.

Sometimes I wonder what life would feel like without it.

Do I know what true freedom feels like?

Only in glimpses.

A walk on the beach.

A moment of laughter.

A quiet connection with God.

A morning when fear forgets to visit.

But perhaps those glimpses are enough.

Enough to remind me that freedom exists.

Enough to remind me that pain is not the whole story.

And enough to keep moving toward the light.

And to honor the truth that lives within me.

Returning to My Inner Knowing

 I believe we are all born intuitive.

As children, we know what we feel. We know what feels safe and what doesn’t. We know when something is true, even if we don’t yet have words for it.

But then the world begins to teach us otherwise.

We learn to trust the adults around us, even when their version of reality conflicts with our own. For a child, there is little choice. Our caregivers are our first God-like figures, and our survival depends upon them.

When fear and punishment enter the picture, intuition gets pushed aside.

We learn to question ourselves.

To ignore our feelings.

To become who we think others want us to be.

At least, that was my story.

By the time I reached adulthood, I had become skilled at looking outside myself for answers. Other people’s opinions often carried more weight than my own inner knowing.

But healing has been teaching me something different.

Beneath the fear, beneath the conditioning, beneath all the voices that told me who I should be, there is still a quiet wisdom waiting for me.

I call it intuition.

I call it God.

To me, they walk hand in hand.

And as I move forward, I have made a promise to myself:

To listen.

To trust.

And to honor the truth that lives within me.

Seeing Her Clearly

 This morning, I saw something I had never fully understood before.

I saw how sensitive I was as a child.

Not weak.

Not broken.

Just deeply sensitive.

As the realization washed over me, all I could do was weep.

I spent much of my life trying to protect that tender little girl. I hid her behind control, behind relationships, behind the belief that someone else could keep me safe.

Especially men.

For years, boyfriends and partners became my shelter from fears I didn’t yet understand. Being alone felt frightening because the child inside me felt frightened.

Then my partner died.

A few months later, the bladder pain arrived.

The knee pain was already there, but this new pain brought something else with it—a wave of fear so deep it seemed to touch every part of me.

I began to see how much strength I had borrowed from others, especially from the man I loved.

And for the last two years, I have been learning to walk through fear without him.

I handed myself over to doctor after doctor, searching for someone to save me. But nothing they offered brought the relief.

Now, I find myself facing something that feels terrifying to that little girl:

Learning to trust myself.

Learning to trust my body.

Learning to trust God.

The fear is still here.

The pain is still here.

But so am I.

And each day, I sit beside that sensitive little girl and remind her of something she has needed to hear all her life:

You are not alone.

Looking for Safety

 I did not feel safe in the home I grew up in.

Without realizing it, I spent much of my life looking for that missing sense of safety in other people.

Sometimes I found it.

Often, I did not.

Because what is familiar can easily disguise itself as what is comfortable, I was drawn to relationships that echoed parts of my childhood. Not all of them, but enough that the pattern became impossible to ignore.

I confused connection with loyalty.

Proximity with trust.

Hope with reality.

Some friendships carried the same confusion I had known with my sister—mixed messages, disappointments, and truths that lived beneath the surface but were rarely spoken aloud.

I don’t blame them.

And I don’t blame myself.

We can only love from the level of understanding we have at the time.

The truth is, I didn’t know what genuine friendship felt like.

Not yet.

But life has been a patient teacher.

Over the years, many relationships have fallen away. A few have remained.

The women who are still in my life today offer something I once searched for but could not name:

Honesty.

Loyalty.

Safety.

The kind of love that does not require me to ignore my instincts or abandon myself.

It took me many years to recognize the difference.

But I know it now.

And knowing it has changed everything.

Breaking the Rules

 For most of my life, I have been a rule follower.

As a child, rules were tied to survival. If I was good enough, careful enough, obedient enough, perhaps I could avoid punishment.

That belief followed me into adulthood.

When fear appeared, I looked for the rules.

And I followed them faithfully.

This past year, fear led me into a world of bladder rules—restrictive diets, canceled plans, avoided activities, treatments, procedures, and endless attempts to fix what felt broken.

I did everything I was told to do.

Including invasive bladder instillations.

I followed the rules the best I could.

Yet nothing truly changed.

A few days ago, something inside me shifted.

I decided I was no longer willing to organize my life around fear.

I began eating foods I had avoided for months. I started drinking coffee again. I returned to my yoga mat. I met friends for coffee. I took evening walks.

In short, I started living again.

And almost immediately, my bladder grew louder.

The old fear whispered, See what happens when you break the rules?

But another voice—the wiser one—asked a different question:

Am I being punished?

The answer that rises from deep within me is no.

I think there is still a frightened little girl inside me who expects consequences whenever she steps outside the lines.

A little girl who learned that freedom could be dangerous.

Today, I sit with her gently.

I remind her that the rules are not God.

The doctors are not God.

Fear is not God.

And punishment is no longer her story.