The Day I Stopped Using Information to Regulate Myself

The call came from my eldest daughter. She wanted me to know about my grandson, a revservist in the US Army. He may be required to switch to active duty to retain his benefits. If he does, there’s a strong possibility he could be deployed to Iran.

That’s not neutral information.

That’s the kind of n…

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You Don’t Have to Live in Survival Mode

I didn’t know I’d slipped back into survival mode until I felt it.

That flatness in my chest. That dull hum that says: just get through the day.

Not sadness. Not fear. Just... grey….

And I thought: Oh shit. I’m back in it.

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Two years ago, I painted five faces as part of what I called the “Faces of Fear Project.”

Five portraits reflecting the pain of domestic violence. The wide eyes. The clenched jaw. The look of someone who’s been holding it together for too long.

I couldn’t cry it out. I couldn’t scream it out. So I painted it out.

All of those faces was mine.

I couldn’t cry it out. I couldn’t scream it out. So I painted it out.

Complete, honest, messy frustration. The kind that builds when you’ve been performing strength for so long that something inside you has quietly begun to collapse.

And when I finished those paintings, I had a choice: show them to the world, or hide them forever.

Because here’s what I was holding together at the time:

My entire life. My reputation as an artist in Lynchburg. The possibility that going public with these paintings might help other women—or destroy everything I’d built.

What if people thought I was “too much”? What if galleries stopped showing my work? What if my art life here—fragile as it was—couldn’t survive the truth?

But what if staying silent meant abandoning myself all over again?

I sat with that question for weeks. And every time I tried to decide, my chest tightened. My breath got shallow. My mind spun in circles.

Until I finally stopped trying to THINK my way through it—and started breathing instead.

Not as some spiritual practice. Not because I’m enlightened or “good at meditation.”

But because I was so cracked open from painting those faces that stillness was the only thing that could bring me back together.

So I sat. Just one minute. Eyes closed. Hand on my heart.

Four counts in. Four counts hold. Six counts out.

And for the first time in weeks, the noise stopped.

Not the fear. The fear was still there.

But the NOISE—the spiraling, the second-guessing, the voices telling me what I should do—that stopped.

And in that quiet, I heard something else. Not a grand revelation. Not a cosmic download.

Just a whisper: Show them.

So I did.

This is where the story gets real.

Not just about the front page or the missed opportunities—but about what I built after. The foundation that came from breathing through disappointment. The life that became possible when I stopped abandoning myself. If you’ve been reading quietly and these words keep finding you—this is your invitation.

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The Difference Between Survival Mode and Soul Mode (A True Story)

Last December ( 2024( should have been one of my best months.

If you’re a painter, December is when things usually move. People buy art. Gifts happen. Momentum builds. And instead of leaning into that, I gave it al…

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What Hurricane Laura Destroyed (And What It Set Free)

In 2020, Hurricane Laura tore through my hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Officially a Category 4, though anyone who lived through it knows better.

It wasn’t rain that devastated the city. It was wind. Violent, unrelenting, tornado-like wind that ripped things o…

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Why Stillness Isn’t Laziness — It’s Recovery

This past weekend, for the first time in my life, I spent two full days being still without fighting it.

No guilt. No bargaining. No voice in my head saying you should be doing something productive right now.

I simply rested.

And when I came out the other side, I understood something I’ve been circling for years.

…

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The Truth About Loneliness vs. Solitude
How to survive the ache of being alone without slipping into despair

I didn’t understand the shape of loneliness until the night everything went still.

Four years ago, when Hurricane Laura damaged my house, my neighborhood, my history, and the rhythm of my life in one violent sweep, I thought the worst part was the physical loss. Walls. Furniture. Books. Paintings. The familiar creaks of a home that had held my entire adult life.This was my parents home that I bought after both had passed away.

But the real loss didn’t hit until later.

I landed in Lynchburg with a small van of things I managed to save and a broken spirit, and a nervous system so blown out it vibrated even in the quiet. My daughter and her family were here then. Close. Present. Their nearness softened the edges of everything. I told myself I’d rebuild. I told myself I was fine. And for a few months I was. In fact, I thought I’d found Nirvana! I painted like there was no tomorrow. And quickly joined local art clubs, even gave lectures on painting. Phew.

Then! Nine months later my daughter and her family packed up and moved away.
One month after that I got COVID and went down hard. Three months in bed. Unable to do anything but shuffle between the kitchen for soup and the bathroom for relief. Unable to market my art- my only means of income. Unable to make art. I had an emergency savings account but after the third month, it was empty.

That was the moment the floor fell out from under me.

.

I remember lying in this very room too sick to stand too tired to cry, the air thick with that strange post-COVID heaviness, thinking, so this is what alone feels like. The silence wasn’t peaceful. It was dense. It pressed against my ribs like a question I didn’t want to answer.

There was no one to tell me “You’re strong. You’ll bounce back.”
But the kind of quiet that followed wasn’t something you bounce back from.
You learn to sit inside it. Or you disappear under it.

At first I mistook all of it for loneliness.
Of course I did.

I had been stripped of my old life.
My family was gone.
My body was fighting for breath.
My home didn’t feel like home yet.
And there I was, a sixty-something woman, starting over in a city where no one knew me well enough to knock on the door and say, “Hey, you alive in there?”

That winter here stretched on forever, made worse by the collection emails and phone calls from the landlord. They wanted - and rightly so - their rent! I was now 3 months in arrears.
The nights were the worst.

I’d sit on the edge of the bed listening to the quiet and feel that hollow ache in my chest, the one that tells you you’re untethered from everything that used to hold you up. I didn’t know the word for it, but it felt like grief mixed with freefall. Like living suspended between what was gone and what hadn’t yet arrived.

But one night something shifted. A tiny small voice nudges me with an idea. Take your current inventory of paintings and put them on a go-fund me page. Offer one painting to each $100 donation. It took nearly three days to complete the go-fund page- something that should only take a matter of minutes. But that’s how hard it was for me to sit at my desk. I could manage about three minutes at a time. Just long enough to add a painting’s image to the go fund me page.

Long story made short, I finally released the go -fund me via FB and the friends did what friends do best, they showed up. And I generated enough money to secure my home all the rent and late charges to boot!

But that did not change what was still lingering within me: this solitude that felt like a massive weight tied around my ankle.

If you have someone in your life who would benefit from following a real woman’s journey out of survival and into soul-led living — especially during the holidays when so many of us feel invisible or overwhelmed — consider gifting them a subscription.

I’m offering a special holiday discount through December 31 for anyone who wants to join us inside this unfolding.

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The Noise Was Drowning Me. So I Turned It All Off.

I was sitting at my kitchen table one morning, still weak from three months of COVID, staring at my phone like it held the answer to everything.

The apartment was silent. Not the peaceful kind. The hollow kind. The kind that happens when you’ve been alone too long and the walls start to feel like they’re watching you.

Outside, Ninth Street hummed with ordinary life. Cars passing. Someone’s dog barking. The coffee shop across the way opening its doors to the morning rush.

But inside, I was frozen.

My thumb hovered over the phone screen, the glass reflecting my face back at me in that sickly blue glow. I could see the shadows under my eyes. The thinness of my cheeks. The way my hair fell limply around my shoulders like it had given up trying.

And that’s when I heard it.

My own breath.

Quick. Shallow. Uneven.

The breath of a woman still bracing for impact that wasn’t coming.

My chest felt tight, like someone had cinched a rope around my ribs and pulled. My shoulders were up near my ears. My jaw was clenched so hard I could feel the ache radiating into my temples.

I set the phone down—not gently, but like it had burned me—and pressed both palms flat against the cool surface of the table.

The wood grain felt real under my fingers. Solid. Grounding.

And out of nowhere—not taught, not instructed, not part of any program I’d stumbled across in my desperate late-night scrolling—my body tried something different.

A rhythm that felt strangely ancient, like I had known it all along but had forgotten.

I closed my eyes.

Inhaled through my nose for four slow counts.
Held it—my lungs full, my chest expanded—for four more.
Exhaled through my mouth for six long, deliberate counts.

The first cycle wobbled. My breath caught halfway through like it didn’t trust the pattern yet.

The second cycle loosened something I’d been carrying for months. A knot somewhere deep in my belly began to soften.

By the third, something unlocked.

Not in my mind. In my body.

As if my nervous system—ragged and frayed from months of fighting just to stay upright—finally believed it was safe in that quiet kitchen.

My shoulders dropped.
My jaw unclenched.
The rope around my ribs loosened, just slightly.

And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn’t bracing anymore.

For months before this, I had been drowning.

Not in water. In noise.

After I made that crooked bed—the one that gave me my first spark of myself again after lying flat for three months—I thought I had reached the quietest point a woman could reach.

But I hadn’t.

Because even after that bed ritual began, even after I could finally stand long enough to heat soup without collapsing, the inside of my life stayed unbearably loud.

Not from sound.
From pressure. From expectation. From every voice except my own.

When the COVID fog finally began to lift—when the fever broke and the weakness started to recede and I could breathe without my lungs rattling—I realized my nervous system felt like it was running on broken wiring.

I woke each morning braced. Tight. Jittery.

As if life itself were something I needed to defend myself against.

The world outside my window looked normal. People walked their dogs. Went to work. Carried groceries. Laughed on street corners.

But inside my apartment, inside my body, I was still fighting.

And because I didn’t know how to steady myself yet—because no one teaches you how to land after you’ve been in freefall for months—I did what most women do when they are scared beyond reason.

I reached for noise.

The news before my feet hit the floor.

I’d wake up—groggy, disoriented, still not sure if I was safe—and grab my phone from the nightstand before I even sat up. The blue light would flood my face in the dim morning room, and I’d scroll.

Headlines screaming.
Case counts rising.
Experts contradicting each other.
The world on fire in a thousand different ways.

I told myself I was staying informed. Being responsible. Keeping up.

But really, I was just filling the space where my own voice used to be.

Then came the advice channels.

YouTube gurus promising clarity if I followed their seven steps.
Podcasts with spiritual teachers who sounded so certain, so calm, so unbothered by the chaos.
Instagram accounts full of soft lighting and hand-lettered affirmations that only made me feel like I was failing to feel inspired.

I consumed it all like a woman starving.

Not because it helped.

But because noise feels like company when you’re frightened.

Noise feels like control when everything is slipping.
Noise feels like progress when you’re too overwhelmed to move.

So I clung to it.

I let other people’s certainty fill the apartment. I let their voices drown out the quiet hum of my own intuition—the one that had carried me through every loss, every heartbreak, every collapse before this one.

I didn’t trust myself anymore.

So I trusted everyone else instead.

But that morning, sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee I didn’t even want, something different happened.

My phone sat next to me on the table, glowing like a lifeline.

The news app had a red notification bubble. Seventeen unread articles. The world demanding my attention before I’d even brushed my teeth.

My hand reached for it without thinking. Pure habit. Pure fear.

My thumb hovered over the screen.

And my body stopped me.

That quick, shallow breath.
That tightness in my chest.
That sense of bracing—always bracing—for the next thing to go wrong.

I looked down at my hand, trembling slightly, and thought: What am I doing?

That’s when the breath came.

Not a thought. Not a decision.

Just my body—exhausted, depleted, but somehow still wiser than my frightened mind—offering a way through.

Four counts in.
Four counts held.
Six counts out.

I closed my eyes and followed it.

The kitchen fell away. The phone stopped glowing. The hum of the refrigerator faded into the background.

There was only breath.

In. Hold. Out.
In. Hold. Out.

By the third cycle, I could feel my heartbeat slowing. The frantic drumming in my chest easing into something steadier. Something almost calm.

And that’s when I heard what my nervous system had been trying to tell me for months:

The noise wasn’t helping me survive.

It was drowning me.

Drowning out my instincts.
Drowning out my clarity.
Drowning out the part of me that knew—had always known—how to find solid ground even when everything else was falling apart.

If you’re finding value in this series and want to support my work, I’m running a simple Christmas offer this month. You can send someone a year of my paid subscription, or use it for yourself if your soul needs a place to land. It helps me keep writing these free series with the depth and honesty I offer here

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Survival Series: Part Three

There’s a moment in any collapse where you realize something awful and liberating at the same time:

The old identity is gone. And the new one isn’t here yet.

That’s the raw middle.

Not poetic. Not inspiring. Not cinematic.

Just a woman in pajama pants standing in her own home, looking out the window at Ninth Street, watching peopl…

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The strangest part of that season is how quiet it was.

I had just moved to Lynchburg, thinking I was coming to be closer to family, only to watch them pack up and leave a few weeks later. One minute I belonged somewhere. The next minute I was a newcomer in a strange town with no community, no con…

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Survival Series: Part One

The Moment You Realize You Haven’t Been Living

It happened on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon — the kind where the sky can’t decide if it wants to rain or just stay moody. I was standing at my kitchen counter, eating soup straight from the bowl like a woman who’d forgotten she owns utensils.

I wasn’t sad.
I wasn’t overwhelmed.
I wasn’…

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