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sleepless night, in the middle of a familiar cycle of self-doubt, or while standing at the edge of a life that no longer feels aligned. It is the moment she realizes, sometimes for the very first time, I am not my past. I am not my pain. I am not the stories that once kept me small.
I know this moment intimately, because for many years, I lived inside a story that told me my circumstances and past mistakes defined my worth and my future. During that time of my life my outer reality mirrored everything that I believed about myself on the inside.
The Story I Once Lived
The life I live now is not one that I believed possible thirty-six years ago. At that time, I was a single welfare mom of a six-yearold daughter and felt I had no future. That feeling was based on the decisions I had made leading up to becoming a single mom at twenty-two. The years prior included being a runaway, high school dropout, Queen of self-sabotage, and financial misfit, and we won’ t even go into the unhealthy relationships I called in back then.
I lived in a constant state of overwhelm, anxiety, self-doubt and deeply entangled in patterns of self-sabotage that felt impossible to escape. My family would often say that it seemed that I couldn’ t get out of my own
WISDOM & SELF-GROWTH
You don’ t rise by erasing your past. You rise by reclaiming authorship over the meaning you give it.
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