Category: soul discovery

  • Breaking Down the Barriers to Love

    “I spent almost half a decade looking into the mirror and seeing someone else. Who did I see? Someone who everyone else expected me to be. People-pleasing doesn’t give your true self the opportunity to be loved—and it doesn’t give someone else the opportunity to be loved by your true self.”

  • When the Shell Cracks: Finding Truth Beyond Religious Performance

    Truth always finds a way to surface. Our ego tries to keep everything together, but eventually the shell cracks and what’s inside starts leaking out. If we’re brave enough to look at what seeps out instead of frantically patching the holes, we might find what we’ve been searching for all along.

  • The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Finding Truth Beyond Collective Narratives

    We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote. But what happens when those shared stories—our collective narratives—become barriers to the very connection they promise to create? Growing up with parents whose lives were like apple carts filled to capacity, I learned early how fragile our shared stories can be. One uncomfortable truth…

  • Why Systems Choose Silence Over Survivors

    When you’re a survivor and hardly anyone believes you, it becomes almost impossible not to question yourself. Even with a therapist saying over and over “this isn’t your fault,” even with the friends and family who stuck around telling you the same thing, that part of me that was wired to believe I needed the…

  • Walking in Shadows: A Journey from Darkness to Light

    The toxic faith I grew up with convinced me that looking inward was dangerous—that if I dug beneath the surface, I’d discover nothing but the rot of an irredeemably sinful heart. But what happens when someone already drowning in that internal darkness looks outward and sees nothing but more of the same? When it finally…

  • When Stars Fall: Finding the Light Within

    “Sometimes life feels almost too heavy to bear. I find myself turning off the news or closing social media after yet another story of a bright star crashing into darkness—someone whose light had guided so many of us through our own difficult days. But why do their lights go out? Why do they sometimes choose…

  • Finding My Way Back to Myself

    Why did I so readily follow a dangerous man wherever he went? Why did it all feel like the right thing to do? Looking back on my time in church, I’m still trying to understand what made me believe a rigid belief system and a broken pastor could fill the gaps in my life. The…

  • Being Yourself in a World That Doesn’t Want You To

    Last night I watched the movie Sinners, and it left me thinking about the true power of our emotions. This film ranks among the best I’ve seen in a theater recently. If you enjoy vampire stories with rich storytelling, beautiful mythology, and deep historical context, you should definitely see this movie. What struck me most…