I started this blog a few years ago when I was struggling to write and express myself. It was designed to be a space where I could release unspoken things without the pressure of an audience who knew me.

A place for the tears and the temper tantrums.

A place for the things I was terrified to say out loud.

Many of these things dealt with spirituality, religion, and traumatic experiences. Heavy shit. Things that made me feel like the scum of the Earth to say out loud, and yet I knew my voice needed a space to exist because my silence was physically hurting me.

Sometimes, we need to scream into the ether.

I was a silenced soul that needed to be heard, and not by the ears of the people who have been trying to conform me into a box of their own design.

Each piece of writing was the crack in the dam; an opening that has helped me sort through undefined pain, foster my confidence to speak up, define boundaries, and embrace who I am, even if it isn’t what people expected – and sometimes demanded – me to be.

I learned that there is healing in expressing the ugly.

I learned that I don’t have to swallow my own beliefs while others dump theirs on me.

But most importantly, I learned that sometimes the only way to pull the weeds inside your soul is to vomit out your vitriol (in a safe space, of course).

The exorcism of deeply harbored pain eased my feelings of anxiety. It tempered the physical illnesses bred by emotional pain and taught me just how important one’s mental and emotional health is to their physical state.

There is a lot of unseen optimism beyond the murky depths of these posts. Smiles and laughter and joy and intimacy have grown in the empty spaces left by things long-held and finally released. And while the tsunamis and the waves still sometimes break against the quieting ocean inside my soul, I am learning to ride them with more grace, and less water in my lungs.