Tonight I held a bottle of medication in my hand. I held it and stared at it longer than I care to admit. Not because I wanted silence, but because I wanted to understand how my life has gotten to this point. I paused and looked around the room at the people I love: my husband, children, and thoughts of friends.
The people who have carried me through so much. But every one of them is walking their own journey, carrying burdens I cannot take away from them. I have always found it easier to carry everyone else’s weight than to ask someone to carry mine. So I stood there thinking only one thing: Shit… my life has been hard.
I wasn’t falling apart, I was reflecting on decades of moments that had quietly stacked themselves on top of one another until they became the mountain I was standing on. My mind traveled back to one of my earliest memories of being told my life would be different from my brothers’ and sisters’. I was just a teenager receiving my patriarchal blessing. Looking back now, I laugh a little because I was probably more naughty than righteous. Virtuous certainly wouldn’t have been the word anyone used to describe me. I was adventurous, stubborn, forever pushing the boundaries my mum and dad carefully tried to set. Rules felt more like suggestions than instructions, and curiosity almost always won.
What I was really searching for wasn’t trouble; it was love. At that young age, I carried a loneliness I couldn’t explain; it was a longing to belong. I desired deep friendships, but they always seemed just out of reach. At the time, I convinced myself it was because I was Mormon. Looking back, I realise that was simply the story I told myself. Whether it was true or not almost doesn’t matter – my childhood was my reality. I felt different, separate, a bit like everyone else had been handed a map to friendship while I was still trying to figure out which direction to walk. Then came my patriarchal blessing. Among the promises and counsel was a message that stayed with me: My life would not be easy. I would need to remain faithful to my Heavenly Father. At the time, those words didn’t make much sense. Hard? Compared to what? I was a teenager. Life was awkward, dramatic, exciting, and yet also full of possibility. I had no idea what hard really meant.
I couldn’t have imagined at that young age the baby loss, the silent grief that followed me into every pregnancy after. I also couldn’t have imagined the years of struggling with my own mental health, wondering why surviving each day sometimes felt like enough. I couldn’t have imagined losing my mum, losing my faith, or even losing most of my tongue to cancer, or rebuilding an identity when so much of the person I once was had disappeared. For years I believed those hardships were punishment. Every loss, diagnosis, and heartbreak became evidence that I had somehow failed.
This isn’t a story about religion; it is a book about searching for meaning when life refuses to make sense to me. About learning that resilience isn’t always something you are born with… it is forged, each day at a time.
Tonight, I realised something unexpected. Despite everything my life has thrown at me, in every chapter that nearly broke me, I wasn’t thinking about my ending. I was finally ready to understand my beginning.
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