I am not just what I’ve survived - I am what I kept creating, loving, and becoming anyway.

There is a version of me people think they know.

It is the version that keeps going. The version that handles things. The version that pushes through, stays quiet when necessary, carries more than she should, and somehow still gets things done. It is the version people see when they catch me functioning.

But functioning is not the same thing as being known.

The truth is, most people do not know what shaped me. They do not know what hurt me, what softened me, what hardened me, what I had to unlearn, or how many times I have had to put myself back together in silence. They do not know how many pieces of me have been built from grief, creativity, survival, stubbornness, faith, motherhood, longing, and the quiet refusal to let life turn me into someone smaller than I was meant to be.

So this is that version.

The real one.

The one I wish more people understood before they decided they had me all figured out.

Music is not background noise to me. It is medicine.

Music has never just been something I play in the background. It is therapy when I do not feel like talking. It is comfort when life feels too heavy. It is memory, release, truth, and sometimes even survival.

I absolutely love country music, and some of my current favorite artists are Morgan Wallen, Kelsea Ballerini, Alexandra Kay, Chris Young, Drew Baldridge, Carly Pearce, and Josh Ross. But my love of music does not stop there. I also love classic rock, R&B, hip hop, pop, gospel and Christian music, as well as songs by AI music creators like Whiskey Circuit and Sweet Yankeebelle.

Some of my favorite songs by Sweet Yankeebelle are She Gets Up Anyway, She Knows Who She Is, She Chose Herself First, and I’m Not Mad, I’m Done. And honestly, I do not think that is random. I love songs that say something. I love songs that feel like truth with a backbone. I love songs that sound like a woman refusing to disappear just because life hurt her.

Maybe that is why music stays with me the way it does. It reaches parts of me that words alone sometimes cannot.

Some things don’t just sound good to me - they sound like survival, truth, and self-respect.

I love art because it proves beauty and pain can exist in the same place.

I have always loved art, and not in a casual way. I love it because art says things without asking permission. It can hold grief, beauty, longing, chaos, tenderness, and truth all at once without needing to explain itself. That has always meant something to me.

Some of my favorite painters are Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, and Pablo Picasso. I absolutely love Starry Night and Sunflowers by van Gogh, the Mona Lisa by da Vinci, Picasso’s Self-Portrait, and Monet’s Woman with a Parasol and The Water Lily Pond.

I think I love art so much because it reminds me that even the heaviest emotions can become something meaningful when they are expressed honestly. Maybe that is part of why I create too. Maybe I have always been trying to turn feeling into something I can hold.

And yes, I also love museums. I love walking through places filled with history, creativity, and stories that mattered enough to preserve. I love learning new things. I love feeling connected to something bigger than my own pain, my own timeline, or my own life. Museums remind me that human beings have always been trying to make sense of beauty, loss, identity, and meaning. I understand that deeply.

Creativity is not just something I do. It is part of how I survive.

I love painting, writing, and crafting. I am really good at making things with Rainbow Loom, and I also love making bracelets and keychains out of paracord. I have always loved taking separate pieces and turning them into something whole, useful, or beautiful.

That probably says a lot about me.

Because if I am being honest, I think I have always been trying to do that with my life too.

That same part of me is probably why I love designing and playing in The Sims 4. To some people, it is just a game. To me, it is another way to build worlds, shape beauty, and create spaces that feel intentional. I love designing places that feel peaceful, warm, expressive, and healing.

I think part of me has always wanted to create the kinds of spaces that feel safer than some of the emotional spaces I have had to survive in real life.

I am more introverted, guarded, and hard to read than people realize.

I can be warm, expressive, funny, and deeply loving, but that does not mean I trust easily.

The truth is, I have a really hard time trusting people, and that did not happen for no reason. It came from hurt. It came from life experience. It came from learning the hard way that not everyone who says they care about you knows how to handle your heart gently.

Once you have been wounded enough, trust stops being automatic.

You start listening harder. Watching more closely. Holding parts of yourself back. Not because you want to be distant, but because you know what it costs when the wrong people get access to the softest parts of you.

Grief has rearranged me in ways most people will never fully see.

I am still not completely over losing my half-sister, and I am definitely not over the way she died. Some losses do not just break your heart once. They keep breaking it in waves, in memories, in anniversaries, and in random quiet moments when the world slows down just enough for the ache to catch up with you.

I am also still healing from losing my grandparents and my uncles.

That kind of loss changes you. It does not just hurt you. It rearranges you.

I also had another half-sister who passed away at just two and a half years old, before I was born or even thought of. And yes, sometimes I think about how strange life is, because if she had not died, my parents’ story might have unfolded differently.

The same goes for my parents’ divorce. As painful as that was, the truth is that if my parents had never gotten divorced, my mom never would have met my stepdad 31 years ago, and I never would have gained two more siblings.

That is one of the strangest things about life. Sometimes the same events that break one version of your world are the very things that build another. That does not make the pain good. It just means life is layered, complicated, and rarely as simple as people want it to be.

I also have an older half-brother in New Zealand that I have never met, and I did not even know he existed until I was twenty-five years old. Along with having three half-siblings, two of whom are now in heaven, I also have a younger brother, a stepsister and a stepbrother. Although now, I think of them as siblings instead of stepsiblings, because sometimes there is no such thing as step, especially when they’ve been a part of your family for so long.

I am still learning how to love myself again.

Again is the important word there.

Because self-love after pain is not cute, aesthetic, or easy. It is not a tidy little healing journey wrapped in affirmations and candles. It is harder than that. It is unlearning damage. It is questioning the lies that were spoken over you. It is trying not to let cruel voices become your inner voice.

It is rebuilding a relationship with yourself after life taught you to doubt your worth.

I have been emotionally abused, verbally abused, and at times mentally abused too. I have been called names that cut deep and stay there long after the moment is over. I have been called a bitch, a bad mom, lazy, and worse. And the hardest part about that kind of pain is that people do not always see it.

Visible bruises make sense to people.

Quiet bruises do not.

But they are real. They live under the surface. They affect the way you see yourself, question yourself, and move through the world. And sometimes they take much longer to heal than anything people can point to with their eyes.

That is probably one of the reasons I hate being controlled. I hate being told what to do. I hate feeling watched, managed, cornered, or treated like I do not belong to myself. I am stubborn as hell, extremely independent, and I rarely ask for help. Maybe that is the Taurus in me. Maybe it is survival. Maybe it is both.

All I know is this: control has never felt like love to me, no matter how nicely someone tried to package it.

I am proud of what I have done, even if I built it while exhausted.

I completed a Bachelor’s degree online, from home, while raising four children.

And I did not do that in perfect conditions.

I did it in the middle of real life. Motherhood. Exhaustion. Responsibility. Stress. Survival. I did it while still being needed by other people every single day. I did it while trying to hold together parts of myself that were already stretched thin.

And I am proud of that.

Because I earned it.

My children are the center of my heart. I love them more than anything in this world. I would die protecting them. I would fight for them, break for them, rebuild for them, and keep going for them even on the days when I feel like I have absolutely nothing left.

Even if they do not always understand me, that love has never once been in question.

Not once.

I am changing, and some of that change has been visible.

I started taking Ozempic near the end of November when I was almost 200 pounds, and I have lost around 30 pounds in about three and a half months.

And no, I have not been living in the gym or pretending I suddenly became some hardcore fitness girl. I am still shocked too.

But I also know this has been about more than weight.

It has been about noticing my body differently. It has been about change. It has been about feeling something shift. It has been about realizing that transformation does not always arrive loudly. Sometimes it starts quietly, and one day you look up and realize you are not standing in exactly the same place anymore.

Books, quotes, and affirmations have helped me survive things I could not always explain.

I love books because words have always reached me in places where ordinary conversation cannot. I love quotes and affirmations too, especially the ones that actually tell the truth instead of just sounding pretty. The ones that comfort you without lying to you. The ones that hold both tenderness and backbone.

Brianna Wiest is currently my favorite author for exactly that reason, and Ceremony is an absolute must-read.

One of the things I love most about her writing is the truth at the heart of one of my favorite passages: sometimes the people who hurt you are acting from wounds of their own, and while that may explain their behavior, it does not excuse it. Their damage was not proof that I was unworthy. It was proof that I got caught in a storm I did not create. And eventually, there comes a moment when you have to decide whether you are going to keep standing in the wreckage of what hurt you, or walk forward into your own light.

That truth has stayed with me because it feels brutally honest and deeply freeing at the same time.

I love stories that actually make me feel something.

I love horror movies, romantic dramas, and romantic comedies because I am not made of just one emotional texture.

My favorite horror movie is A Nightmare on Elm Street, the one I watched when I was seven, thanks to my sister Rhiannon and my cousin Paula. It terrified me, obviously, but it also fascinated me. I think horror pulls me in because it explores fear, danger, survival, and the psychology of what people become under pressure.

Then there is The Notebook, which I love because it is raw, aching, and deeply human. It is about love, yes, but not the polished kind. It is about memory, devotion, heartbreak, time, tenderness, and the way love can survive distance, pain, and change. It actually makes you feel something, and I have always been drawn to that.

And I love Sweet Home Alabama for a completely different reason. Beneath the humor and charm, it is also about identity, roots, home, and the complicated truth that you can outgrow parts of your life without fully disconnecting from where you came from. It is about reinvention, but it is also about history. It is about the tension between who you were, who you became, and what parts of yourself still matter.

That stays with me too.

I am fascinated by people, psychology, and the stories underneath the surface.

I am completely obsessed with crime dramas like Law & Order: SVU, Criminal Minds, CSI, Chicago PD, and The Rookie.

I have always been fascinated by psychology, motive, human behavior, and the question of why people do what they do. Maybe that comes from being observant. Maybe it comes from lived experience. Maybe it comes from knowing that what people show on the surface is almost never the full story.

I also love genealogy and learning about where I come from. There is something powerful about tracing family lines and realizing your story did not start with you. I love roots. I love history. I love the pieces of the past that still echo into the present.

One of the things I find especially incredible is that I am related to Sir Frederick Grant Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin. He is my second cousin three times removed, which basically means we are part of the same extended family line, but separated by several generations. It is not a close everyday cousin relationship, but it is still part of the same family tree, and I think that is pretty amazing.

I want freedom, movement, and a life that belongs to me too.

I love meeting new people from around the world. I love hearing different stories, learning about different lives, and connecting with people whose experiences are not like mine. That is one of the reasons I love travelling so much. Travel stretches you. It humbles you. It wakes something up in you.

One of my biggest dreams is to do a solo road trip across Canada.

And honestly, that dream means more than just travel to me. It would mean finally getting my license and owning my own vehicle, which yes, probably should have happened a long time ago but didn’t. So that dream is not just about the road. It is about freedom. It is about independence. It is about finally claiming something for myself that I should have had sooner.

I want the open highway, the playlists, the roadside stops, the little cafés, the random detours, the beautiful views, and the feeling of belonging entirely to myself for a while.

And one of my other biggest dreams is to take a solo trip to the United Kingdom, not just because it is beautiful or full of history, but because it feels tied to my roots. That trip would feel personal in a way I do not think everyone would understand. It would feel like standing in places that connect, however quietly, to the deeper story of where I come from.

Not just travel for the sake of travel.

Something ancestral. Something grounding. Something meaningful.

Like touching a piece of history and feeling some part of yourself answer back.

I am still rebuilding parts of myself, including my faith.

I am trying to rebuild my relationship with God. I am trying to be a better Christian, and some days that comes easier than others.

Faith is complicated when life has left marks on you. Some days it feels steady. Some days it feels quiet, tired, or hard to reach. But I am still trying. I am still praying. I am still reaching. I am still choosing not to walk away from that part of myself.

I was also diagnosed with mild Tourette’s Syndrome and mild Asperger’s Syndrome, the latter of which is now classified under Autism Spectrum Disorder, when I was a teenager. That is simply part of me too. It does not make me less capable, less intelligent, or less worthy. It just means there are parts of how I think, feel, process, and move through the world that may be a little different.

And honestly, understanding that has helped me understand myself with more compassion.

What I wish people understood most

I am not just a woman who has been hurt.

I am not just a woman who has lost people. I am not just a woman who has been called names. I am not just a woman who has been underestimated, controlled, dismissed, or bruised in ways most people never saw.

I am also a woman who creates. A woman who thinks deeply. A woman who loves fiercely. A woman who notices beauty. A woman who keeps learning. A woman who dreams big. A woman who is still here.

I am still healing from things I am not fully ready to talk about. I am still carrying grief that has no clean ending. I am still putting pieces of myself back together that other people had no right to break.

But I am also still becoming.

And that matters.

Because I did not survive everything I have survived just to shrink.

I did not carry all of this just to become quieter, smaller, easier, or more convenient for other people.

I did not fight this hard just to disappear.

I am still becoming who I was always meant to be.

And maybe that is the part people should have known about me all along.