Embracing Life: How Sharing Your Story Creates Acceptance and Peace
Hey, friend.
Glad you stumbled in—I mean, gracefully arrived in full emotional awareness and with perfect timing. (Same thing.)
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to actually live your life—and tell the whole truth while you do it.
Not just the shiny parts.
The gut-punch parts.
The cracked-wide-open parts.
The “I just screamed into a throw pillow and now I’m baking cookies like nothing happened” parts.
Because when life smacks you square in the face (as it so generously does), the first thing your brain likes to whisper is:
“You’re the only one.”
“You’re too much—or not enough.”
“No one else is this messy.”
And here’s the truth that’ll ruin your pity party:
🧡 You’re not the only one. You’re never the only one.
Someone out there has walked a path uncomfortably similar to yours—and survived with their sense of humor mostly intact.
You just haven’t met them yet. (But maybe you just did.)
Your Experiences Aren’t Unique (and that’s a good thing!)
When you’re deep in it—ankle-deep in shame sludge or buried under a mountain of laundry and existential dread—it’s easy to feel like the loneliest human alive.
But listen. There are more than 8 billion people bumbling around on this rock, and I promise: you are not a one-woman anomaly.
Sure, your story is uniquely yours. But the emotions? The spirals? The unspoken fears and self-loathing on loop?
So. Damn. Universal.
Especially for women raised in the LDS church (or any high-demand, high-expectation environment).
I swear we’re all secretly carrying the same five-piece emotional baggage set:
Perfectionism (comes with a matching guilt tote)
People-pleasing (monogrammed with martyrdom)
Shame (in an exclusive, heavy-duty designer duffel)
Guilt (free with purchase of literally anything you ever do)
That sinking fear that no matter how hard you try, it’ll never be enough
Life wears you down. Then it isolates you. Then it convinces you to zip your lips and sit quietly in the shame corner because “surely no one else feels this broken.”
Here’s the mic-drop truth:
🧡 You’re not broken. You’ve just been trained to suffer in silence.
And I think it’s time we untrained that.
The Power of Sharing
One of the biggest reasons I speak so openly about my life—yes, all of it, even the messy, mortifying, “did-she-just-say-that” parts—is because shame is a cockroach.
It thrives in the dark.
It scuttles around in silence.
And it only dies when you throw on the lights and stomp.
If you want to get rid of shame, you’ve got to drag it out into the sun, hand it a mic, and say: “Go ahead and talk. We’re not scared of you anymore.”
It turns out, light and noise are shame’s worst enemies.
And once shame packs its bags and storms off in a huff?
That’s when healing finally shows up.
So yeah—consider this my formal invitation to the Shame Exorcism Club. I’ll go first.
Let me be loud about my life for a minute.
Because if my stories help crack open your silence—even just a little—then all this noise is worth it.
Sexual Abuse
I was sexually abused as a young girl.
And I carried that story in silence for way too long.
Because when your sense of safety and identity get violated before you even know how to spell “identity,” it rewires everything. Your thoughts. Your relationships. Your ability to trust yourself.
For years, I honestly believed I was broken.
Unfixable.
Worse—I believed it was my fault.
But when I finally started speaking about it—sharing the truth of what I’d survived—I couldn’t believe the number of women who came up to me and whispered:
“I’ve never told anyone this before… but me too.”
These weren’t strangers.
These were women I knew. Admired. Grew up with.
And every time one of them shared their story with me, it cracked shame’s grip just a little more.
It reminded me:
I was never alone.
I just felt alone because no one else was talking.
Let me be clear—I’m not saying everyone should air their pain on the internet.
Your story is yours. Only you get to decide when, how, or if it gets shared.
But I will say this:
Letting it out—safely, gently, even if it’s just in a journal or with one trusted person—can be deeply validating.
Because sometimes, speaking your truth isn’t just healing for you.
It’s the spark that gives someone else permission to heal too.
Pornography Addiction
This was another big one.
My husband was exposed to pornography at a young age.
Bringing together a sexual abuse victim and a porn addict in marriage can be…well…tricky.
It was something we struggled with from day one. And I blamed myself for years.
“If I were prettier…”
“If I were sexier…”
“If I were more spiritual…”
…then maybe I could fix it.
Today, I’m operating with this truth:
His addiction had nothing to do with me and everything to do with his own trauma and shame.
It took a long time to get to that place. And the whole time, I felt like I had to keep it a secret—because what would people think? About me? About him? About our relationship.
I mean, if I couldn’t even make my husband happy, what did that say about me
But let me throw down a few stats for you:
🔹 Over 24 million websites are pornographic.
🔹 Every second, over 30,000 people are viewing porn.
🔹 75% of men under 30 visit porn sites monthly.
This isn’t just happening in your marriage. You are not alone. And your worth has zero to do with someone else’s addiction.
Parenting a Transgender Child
When our child came out as gay at 17, I thought I understood what it meant to be supportive.
I was raised by a gay man. I’d always been vocal about LGBTQ+ rights. I clapped for rainbow parades and liked all the right posts.
But then, a few years later, that same child came out again—this time as transgender.
And suddenly, this wasn’t about politics or social theory.
It wasn’t a Facebook article or a “love is love” bumper sticker.
This was my kid.
My flesh. My blood.
My baby.
And let me tell you, no amount of allyship memes prepares you for the moment your entire belief system gets called into question by someone you’d take a bullet for.
It shook me.
Not because I didn’t love her.
But because I had to untangle years of religious conditioning and theological dogma just to get to that love.
It was hard.
It was isolating.
And it cracked me open in the most painful, beautiful ways.
Today, our daughter is thriving.
And I am, too—because of her.
She taught me what it means to love without caveats.
To listen more than I speak.
To unlearn so I could show up better.
And here’s the truth I never expected:
At first, we were the ones holding back the love—caught in the weeds of what we were taught.
She was the one showing us how to love.
She waited. Patiently.
While we stumbled our way through the learning curve of unconditional acceptance.
Eventually, we figured it out. And now?
I consider it one of the greatest honors of my life to walk beside her.
Only those lucky enough to love someone in the LGBTQ+ community truly understand the gift of it.
The radical empathy.
The necessary humility.
The joy that comes when love wins.
A Severed Hand
One of the most difficult—and accidentally life-altering—experiences I’ve ever had was the day I severed my right (dominant) hand in a rollover ATV accident.
Yup. You read that right.
Now, you might be tempted to say, “Hey, accidents happen!”
Which… sure. They do.
But the full truth?
This one was avoidable. And worse—I caused it.
I remember sitting in the dunes, holding my right hand in my left, bloodied and broken and surreal—and the first thing I wanted to do was lie to the paramedics. That’s how deep the shame went.
Because that day? I was angry.
I was tired.
I was burnt out.
I was just coming off radiation treatments for salivary gland cancer (oh yeah, forgot to mention that little side plot).
My marriage was falling apart.
Our finances were circling the drain.
And I was so far into victim mode, I might as well have had my mail forwarded there.
So naturally—obviously—I decided to teach my 14-year-old daughter how to drift an ATV.
Which, to be clear, she had never driven before.
And I had only successfully drifted one time—ten minutes prior.
Ten.
Minutes.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t go well.
The accident could have been my breaking point.
Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually.
It could’ve left me bitter and permanently curled up in the fetal position.
Instead?
It woke me the hell up.
For reasons I still can’t fully explain, that accident snapped me out of my fog.
The next morning, lying in ICU, stitched together with uncertainty and morphine, I made a decision:
I choose peace.
Not someday. Not after things “got better.”
That day. And every day after.
I didn’t know how. I didn’t have a plan.
But I was done being a bystander in my own damn life.
That single decision didn’t just change my life.
It saved it.
Leaving a High-Demand Religion
Of all the plot twists in my life—and wow, there have been some cinematic ones—this one might be the biggest.
I was raised in the LDS Church.
Yep. Mormon to the core.
And like a good little generational overachiever, I passed that legacy right along to my kids.
We were the poster family. The “they’re definitely going to the Celestial Kingdom” crew.
Seminary teacher? ✅
Young Women’s president? ✅
Gospel Doctrine teacher? ✅
Husband in ward and stake leadership? ✅
Perfectly ironed Sunday clothes and crushed maternal guilt? ✅✅✅
I knew the gospel backwards and forwards.
And I tried—really tried—to live it.
And then?
I left.
Let me be clear: Mormonism is not a “Sundays and casseroles” kind of religion.
It’s a full-time lifestyle. A whole identity.
Leaving it was like stepping out of my skin and then trying to figure out if I even had bones underneath.
It wrecked me.
It freed me.
It cracked everything open in the most brutal, beautiful way.
The grief of leaving? Real.
The liberation? Also real.
And yes—sometimes the pain still sucker punches me during random Target runs or when an old hymn sneaks up on me in a TV show.
But the growth?
Absolutely, unapologetically, life-altering.
There’s still healing to do.
There’s still programming to unwind.
There are still landmines made of shame and weird theology waiting to go off in my brain.
But here’s what I know:
My family and I made it out.
We escaped a system that demanded obedience and called it virtue.
We reclaimed our voices, our choices, and our damn Saturdays.
So yeah, it’s hard.
But it’s worth it.
Every confusing, liberating, permission-giving, life-on-our-own-terms minute of it.
Everyone Has A Story
Just in case you still think I’ve lived on a cloud of healing crystals and positive affirmations, let’s throw in a few more fun facts:
I miscarried a baby
I survived salivary gland cancer
I’ve battled severe depression
I have an auto-immune disease
I filed bankruptcy and foreclosed on our family home
And I’ve clawed my way back from all of it.
But here’s the wild part…
Every one of those experiences taught me something.
They taught me how to stop expecting life to be easy.
How to stop looking to the outside world for peace and purpose.
How to go inward and build it for myself.
An Offer of Support
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, isolated, or like you’ve been duct-taping your soul together just to get through the week—hear me when I say this:
🧡 You are not broken.
🧡 You are not weak.
🧡 And you are definitely not alone.
Because the truth is?
We’re all just out here trying to make sense of our stories—
The ones we were handed, the ones we never asked for, and the ones we’re still rewriting in real time.
If you’re ready to stop carrying it all by yourself…
If you’re ready to stop hiding the messy middle and start living out loud…
If you want someone who’s walked through the fire and will hold your hand while you stomp through yours—
✨ I offer private coaching for women who are done pretending they’re fine. ✨
Book your FREE Self-Discovery Call to see if coaching is the next right step. No pressure. No weird sales pitch. Just a conversation. You talk. I listen. Magic happens.
And one last thing, just so we’re clear:
You were never meant to do this alone.
And now?
You don’t have to.
PS: Want to hear more of my story? Grab my book, Severed: A Memoir of Hope and Healing, on Amazon.
