My Story: How I Learned to Rise

There's a version of my life I could tell you that sounds like a highlight reel — author, business owner, single mum who "figured it out." That version is true, but it skips the part that actually matters: the years before it, when I didn't know if I'd ever get here at all.

I want to tell you the real one.

Where it started

I grew up in a home where raised voices, drinking, and tension were just part of the furniture. Nobody talked about it because nobody had to — it was simply how things were. I didn't have language for "dysfunction" as a child. I only knew what normal looked like in my house, and I carried that definition of normal with me into adulthood, the way most of us do without realizing it.

So when I got married and found myself in a relationship that echoed the same patterns — control, criticism, walking on eggshells, never quite knowing which version of him I'd get — I didn't recognize it as a warning sign. It felt familiar. Familiar isn't the same as safe, but it took me a long time to learn the difference.

The years I disappeared

I won't walk you through every detail, because the details aren't really the point. What matters is what it did to me.

I stopped recognizing myself. I gained weight I couldn't lose, not because I didn't try, but because my body was living in a constant state of stress. I was depressed in a way I didn't have a name for at the time. I lost touch with friends, one by one, until I realized I didn't really have anyone I could call. I had no money of my own, no space of my own, and some mornings, not even the freedom to get out of bed before I was "allowed" to.

The one thing I still had was faith — and even that, I had to hide. I used to wake up early and pray quietly, before anyone else was up, because open faith made me look "suspicious," like I was up to something. So I prayed in secret. I read scripture in secret. It became the one room in my life nobody else could enter.

Looking back, I think that secret room is what kept me alive.

The business that saved me before I knew it was saving me

Somewhere in those years, almost by accident, I started a small cleaning business. It wasn't meant to be anything — just something to fill time and bring in a little money while I chased a different dream someone else had picked out for me.

But that little business became the first place I could just be a person again. Nobody there needed me to be anything other than reliable and good at my work — and I was. Word of mouth carried it further than I expected. Every job was a legitimate reason to be out of the house, a few hours where I didn't have to explain myself to anyone.

I didn't know it then, but I was quietly rebuilding a life underneath the one I was living.

The season that finally broke it open

Loss has a way of revealing things. In the space of a short stretch of time, our family went through devastating grief, and I was also walking through years of fertility struggles that took an enormous toll on me — emotionally, physically, all of it. I needed support I never received. Instead, I was expected to provide it, on top of everything else I was already carrying.

I remember one night clearly: a twelve-hour work day, then a full evening of housework, meals, and being available for everything except myself. It became the breaking point of years building up. Something in me finally said, clearly, for the first time: I cannot live like this anymore.

One person saw it before I could admit it out loud. My mother-in-law — someone I loved, and who loved me — told me, gently, the day before she passed away, that she wouldn't blame me if I left. She had watched, and she understood. I've never forgotten that.

Not long after, I did leave.

Leaving was the easy part

People sometimes assume leaving is the hardest chapter. For me, it wasn't. Leaving was a decision I made in an instant, after years of building up to it. What came after was harder: learning who I actually was, outside of surviving someone else.

I didn't know what I liked. I didn't know my own opinions half the time — I'd spent so long managing someone else's moods that I'd lost track of my own. Rebuilding an identity from nothing is slow, humbling work, and I did a lot of it alone.

What rebuilding actually looked like

Nobody tells you that healing isn't one big moment — it's hundreds of small, unglamorous ones. For me it looked like sitting in a coffee shop by myself and realizing I had no idea what to order, because I'd spent years ordering what someone else wanted. It looked like learning to make small decisions again — what to wear, what to eat, what to watch — because even those had quietly stopped being mine. It looked like journaling questions I couldn't yet answer: What do I actually believe? What do I actually want? Who am I when no one is grading my performance?

It took months before I could answer any of those with confidence. It took longer to trust that the answers were allowed to change.

A second test I didn't expect

Not long after I left, while I was still in the middle of figuring myself out, I met someone new — and for a while, I believed he was different. It didn't take long to learn otherwise. When I told him I was pregnant, everything changed. He wanted me to end the pregnancy. I couldn't, and I wouldn't — this was a child I had wanted for a long time, through years of trying. When I chose to keep my baby, the pressure that followed felt painfully familiar: the same tightening, the same anxiety I thought I'd already escaped.

That was when I made the clearest decision of my life. If I was going to raise this child, I was going to do it as myself — on my own terms, without asking anyone's permission to be safe. I chose to become a single mother, by choice, rather than build a home for my son inside someone else's dysfunction. I had already done too much work pulling myself out of that pattern to let my son grow up inside it.

Where faith met me

Right after I left my marriage, I found faith in a way I hadn't experienced before — not hidden, not secret, but mine. That season of starting over, terrifying as it was, is where I came to know God more deeply than I ever had. It became the strength that carried me through the hardest years of my life, and it's still the foundation everything else is built on.

Why I'm telling you this

I'm not sharing this for sympathy. I'm sharing it because I know I'm not the only woman who has lived a version of this story — who has felt herself disappear inside a life that was supposed to be safe, who has had to rebuild an identity from almost nothing, who has had to choose her child and her faith over what was easier.

If that's you, in any season of it — I see you. Your story isn't finished, and the chapter you're in right now doesn't get the last word.

Everything I create now — the books, the resources, the practical business tools — exists because of this road, not despite it. I wanted to build the thing I needed and couldn't find when I was living it.

If any part of this resonated, I'd love for you to stick around: browse the blog, join the email list for weekly encouragement, or take a look at the resources in the shop, built specifically for women rebuilding.

If you want to go deeper into this journey, my upcoming book, The Hagar Generation, tells more of this story — and the biblical parallel that gave it a name. Explore the book →