the longer version. the true one.
i was a sick child - a strange allergy to the sun that kept me in bed for months at a time, sipping broth through a straw, the mirrors in the house covered because i couldn't bear to look. i learned early to look down. to wonder, quietly, if i was unlovable. that was the first prayer: just let me live.
i don't tell you this for sympathy. i tell you because if you've ever felt unlovable, or unseen, or like you had to hide - i have been there. all the way there. and i found the way home. so can you.
then, at twenty-one, the light came - and for six straight months i lived inside the most exquisite peace, unbroken.
and then it left. the clinical years of my doctorate came, the grace fell away, and i grieved it like the loss of heaven itself. all the old pain came rushing back at once. i even began to question my sanity.
so i went looking for someone who had the language - clergy, scientists, people with doctorates beside their names. not one of them had it. i read three hundred books in a single year, sometimes two or three a day, trying to find the words for what had happened to me.
and i walked it alone for a long time. that part i don't lead with - but it's true, and it's the exact loneliness so many of you are living right now. the one where there is genuinely no one to tell.
and then, years later, one conversation. someone who finally understood. my jaw dropped. i was not alone, for the first time in a very long time.
that conversation is the whole reason for all of this.
i'm making the thing i couldn't find.
