The Blood in My Veins

I wasn’t meant for small spaces.

Even as I grew, I carried a fire beneath my ribs,
a hunger to see everything,
to feel everything,
to name what others dared not name.

I was born with a story stitched into my skin.
Not the tidy, smiling kind,
but a wild and aching song that kept pulling me forward,
even when the world around me demanded stillness, obedience, silence.

The Many Lives I Have Lived

I have lived many lives inside this one.

Each one built to survive the world I was given.
Each one a skin I wore until it grew too tight to breathe.

I have been the obedient daughter, smiling through clenched teeth.
The silent wife, shrinking inside someone else’s dream.
The faithful believer, mouthing words that never felt like my own.

I learned how to disappear without ever leaving the room.
I learned how to stay small enough to survive.

But there were other lives too.

The reject.
The heretic.
The burner.

Every time a life ended, it was not a failure.
It was a shedding.
A holy undoing.

I was not breaking.
I was breaking open.

The Reckoning

Confessions of a Mormon Trophy Wife was never meant to be a tidy memoir.
It is a reckoning, a remembering, a return.

I write because there are truths too heavy to carry alone.
Because memory can be a knife or a key, and I needed to know which.
Because silence was the first cage they built around me.
Because I was taught that suffering must be swallowed, hidden, prayed away.

I speak now because survival demands it.
Because telling the truth is how I stay alive.

I do not write to be admired.
I do not write to be absolved.

I write to carve out a space where others might feel safe enough to lay their own stories down
beside mine.
A place where the broken parts of us might be seen,

and still we are sacred.

The Invitation

If you are here,
if some part of you still aches to remember who you are beneath the ashes,
then you already know.

You are not broken.
You are not too late.
You are not lost.

You are becoming.

You are the ember that refused to die.
The sacred fire they could not extinguish.

There is no map.
There is no temple.
There is only the path you choose to walk
and the stories we choose to lay down beside each other
like stones across the river.

If you are ready to remember,
ready to rise,
ready to become something truer than what they tried to make of you —

then you are already one of us.

Welcome home.

 “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke