About me
When I was seven years old I told my father I wanted to be a brain surgeon.
Because I believed that people’s brains were broken, and I needed to operate and fix them so they could be happy.
I didn’t become a brain surgeon. But that little girl knew exactly what she was here to do. She just didn’t have the right words for it yet. She found them eventually. And she’s been finding them ever since.
My little sister says she doesn’t have a single childhood memory of me that doesn’t include me writing. Stories, poetry, essays, thoughts, plans, dreams. Anything I could put words to, I did. Writing wasn’t something I picked up. It’s something I came in with. It has always been as natural to me as breathing and nearly as necessary.
And it wasn’t just the writing. It was something underneath the writing. It was the need to reach people where they actually are. To say the thing that needed saying. To help them feel less alone in whatever they were carrying.
I’ve been that person my whole life. The one people call first when something falls apart. The one who sits with them in it, asks the questions nobody else thought to ask, and somehow helps them find their way back to solid ground. I didn’t advertise that. I didn’t plan it. It’s just what happens when you’re wired the way I’m wired.
But I want to tell you something else about me.
I have been in some very dark places.
Not metaphorically. Actually dark — the kind where you can’t see your hand in front of your face and you’re not entirely sure you want to. I have been the woman who held it all together in public and fell apart the moment the door closed.
I have been the woman who gave and gave until there was nothing left and then wondered why she felt so hollow. I have known betrayal. Violence. And grief so deep it silenced everything else.
When I lost my granddaughter, something inside me broke in a way nothing had broken before. I was furious. I couldn’t pray. I couldn’t pretend. For almost a year I stopped speaking to God. I didn’t have pretty words or spiritual platitudes. I had rage and silence and a faith that felt like ash in my mouth.
That was my dark night of the soul and I’m not going to dress it up for you.
What shifted wasn’t time. It was a question. I stopped asking why this was happening to me and started asking how I could use it to help someone else make it through. That question cracked me open. It didn’t erase the pain. It gave the pain a purpose.
It led me to healing work. To more than two decades of learning and practicing and walking alongside people as they found their way back to themselves. To writing that told the truth instead of performing wellness. To finally understanding that the little girl with the brain surgery plan and the teenager who never put down her pen and the woman who survived things she doesn’t talk about at dinner were all the same person, doing the same work, in whatever language she had available at the time.
I’m not here because I’ve figured it all out. I’m here because I survived it, and I remember what it felt like to wonder if I would.
I’m a writer. I help people heal and find their way back to who God created them to be.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
If something I’ve written found its way to you, it probably wasn’t an accident. Pull up a chair. You don’t have to carry it forever. And you don’t have to do it alone.
There is no greater battle in life than the battle between the parts of you that want to be healed and the parts of you that are comfortable and content remaining broken. ~ Iyanla Vanzant ~
