This is my story

There's a particular kind of ache that comes in the quiet hours — the kind that doesn't announce itself loudly but settles in like morning mist over water. It's the ache of realising your kindness was received as currency, not connection. For so long I believed that if I loved well enough, waited long enough, served faithfully enough, it would soften the hardness in others. But what happens when you finally understand you cannot will people into being who you hoped they'd be?🤔

Two years ago, I was absolutely freaking out. The Awards Gala loomed ahead, and I'd been asked to step into a role that felt utterly terrifying — I had to become the "beautiful assistant." One week to buy the make-up, learn the techniques, and somehow transform myself into someone polished and camera-ready. But looking back now, I realise the anxiety was never really about the make-up, was it?🤔 It was about something far deeper, something I couldn't yet name.

My phone lit up while I was drowning in lists — too much to do, not enough hours, that familiar weight pressing down like clouds before a storm. I expected a productivity tip. Instead, the message answered my exhaustion with something far more unsettling. The pen in my hand stilled. There it was — the very thing I've spent my whole life avoiding, and the one thing I still don't know how to receive. What if I am already loved, before I've done a single thing to earn it?🤔

There's an optical illusion floating around online — a snowy mountain where some people see two figures embracing and others see a dinosaur. Today I looked at it and saw neither. I saw an exhausted little puppy, curled into the snow, completely spent, her whole body saying what she couldn't find words for. And my heart stopped. Because what if that puppy was me, and what if her honesty was the very thing I'd been too afraid to admit?🤔

This morning my heart was so full it nearly spilled over — and it wasn't a grand gesture that filled it. It was a man with a vacuum cleaner in his hands, kneeling to scrub a bathroom no one asked him to touch. For years I've been learning what it truly means to be someone's foundation, and Clive has quietly become mine. But what does it look like when a man measures his worth not by what he achieves, but by the safety he builds for broken things to heal?🤔

I've been sitting with one question all morning, and it's undone me in the most tender way: who does He say I am? Not who the church said. Not who my wounds convinced me to become. Just this — what does God actually say about me? For years I dimmed myself to fit, hollowed myself out to keep the peace, and let shame speak in a voice I mistook for His. But what happens when I finally stop searching the rubble for another defect and turn my face towards Him instead?🤔

There was a small girl dancing in a Technicolour Dreamcoat, and the seats that mattered most sat empty. In their silence she learned an arithmetic so simple it was devastating: no one came, therefore this must not matter, therefore perhaps I do not matter. Yesterday I sat with all seven keys — singing, drawing, dancing, writing — and a thread became visible I can no longer pretend not to see. What if they were never seven separate wounds at all?🤔 What if you're still staring at an empty row of your own?🤔

Some vows are made so young we forget we ever spoke them — until a question about love languages cracks the ground open and there they are, still echoing. In a dream I found myself at a place built for joy, surrounded by people who love me, and yet I stayed back while they rode. Then I jumped, and a song rose up in me, and I began to dance like nobody was watching. But what happens the moment I realise someone is?🤔

The words felt heavier than usual that morning — heavier than I knew how to carry. Then a book found me, and it didn't offer me the tidy comfort I'd come to expect. Instead it whispered something I almost couldn't believe I was allowed to hear: that some things aren't meant to be fixed at all. For so long I thought my job in ministry was to make the pain disappear — but what if I've had it backwards all along?🤔

A dear friend asked me a simple question today, and it cracked something open I'd kept sealed for most of my life. To a child, love is spelt T.I.M.E. — and long ago I learned to stop asking for it, learned that needing it got me punished. So I became the one who serves, the one who gives, the one whose own hunger folded smaller and smaller. But what happens when someone finally offers you the very language your soul is starving for?🤔

There's something I've carried for so long, worn smooth from handling — the whisper "Wait, there's more…" and my certainty that it meant more broken, more to fix, more evidence I'm not yet healed enough to be trusted. Then a friend asked me a question that has stayed with me ever since: what's the acid-test for self-hatred?🤔 I sat with it far longer than I expected. And what I found had me recognising something I'm almost afraid to say aloud.

I learned early that suffering happens in silence — the kind where hard things unfold behind closed doors and you learn to keep your breaking private. Then I spent thirty years in church, surrounded by hundreds who knew my name, and discovered something that still catches me off guard: the silence followed me. It just wore a different dress. Three deaths in less than a year taught me who actually stays when the room empties. But did they ever really see me?🤔