Life is a beautiful and brutal experience. From the moment we arrive we’re shocked with the cold of the air and this sense of having been separated from our home. From there we enter society. A collective of humanity, and all of their voices, explaining to us what is real. No two people explain it the same way, but those who grew up under similar circumstances, around a certain crowd, tend to tell similar stories. Cosmologies evolve right alongside the organism. With overlapping borders each swash of cultural identity develop into segregated justifications for what is and isn’t. And we are born into whichever explanation our parents had learned. And out of this, we become.

I was born to a christian home, in a whitewashed world. Being born female, I would spend my entire life as a second class citizen. But as traumas unfolded, I became even less acceptable to the world around me. My grief interrupted the veneer they’d all been privileged enough to believe. I was mistreated in horrible ways. The very fact that I had PTSD was an offense to the christian world. To the new age world. To our white bastardizations of more honest faiths. To be acceptable, it was required that I behave as if the majority of what the world really is didn’t exist. Pain, and tears, and anger, and for me, even hope. Because very often lashing out is an act of hope. To balk against the oppression is a powerful sign of belief.

I am incapable of lying to myself for the sake of assimilation or approval. It’s not that I can’t lie to myself. I can. I just can’t do it on the basis of acquiescing to the unwritten demands of others. And the world they proffered did not have any semblance of evidentiary support from the reality I was surrounded by. The more I questioned, they more I was rejected. I scrambled to find ways to somehow repair the rift between my culture and my experience. Creative rewritings of the primary doctrines to maybe integrate their priorities with my reality, but it was never quite the degree of conformity that they required. And over time, I realized, with the help of a voice that speaks to me like a friend, that there was entire world of love outside of how I had been raised.

I set out to become myself, and along the way I learned how to ask critical questions to dissolve the lies in which I had been ensconced. I learned how to break things down to their simplest parts. I stripped myself bare over and over and over again, in the pursuit of knowing something real. I learned how to cry. I learned how to hope. I learned how to look into the hearts of those around me and know exactly what was needed so they could also shed the lies and become themselves.

I will not tell you what to believe. I will only help you realize that you get to choose. There’s no wrong way to do it. There’s panacea of truth. There’s just a world made of dirt and light, the spinning of nothing into profound sensations, a lack of knowing and a desire to change it. We exist. We do. You exist. The parts of you they said were unacceptable, those parts exist. It’s not for them to decide what about you is beautiful.

I’ve asked my friends precisely what it is that I offer. I thought it best to have other people summarize how I’ve impacted their lives. I told them that my brand is honestly, and that, therefore, they should be honest about me. Good or bad. I am told that, being around me, they feel seen, they feel understood, and they feel as if I have somehow given them permission to be human.

It’s ok to be who you are, and to talk to me however it is that you talk to people. It is also ok to hide. It is ok to be bold. It is ok to be nervous. It is ok to sound shiny or crusty. It is ok to sound like you come from the tower. It is ok to sound like you come from the street. It is ok to be you in this space. I would love to find out who that is. What do you need today? Please, let me hear you.