Hey Holy Spirit!

Date: Unstoppable

If you’ve ever kept breathing when you swore you couldn’t — sit close. Pull up a chair.
Popcorn optional. Wine mandatory.

This is where the healing starts… because if you’re reading this, you’ve survived something too.
Maybe not my storm — but your own.
Or maybe you’re just nosy and want to read mine (fair).
Either way, you’re standing in the doorway.

So here’s the deal:
If you’re not built for truth without bubble wrap, you already know where the back button is.
But if you are?
Then you might as well come all the way in.
If I’m going to tell you how I survived, I have to start by telling you how it really began.

It didn’t begin with a book.
It didn’t begin with a sermon.
It didn’t begin with a therapist trying to hand me language for things I hadn’t even learned to feel yet.
Those things can help — but they weren’t what saved me.

What saved me was learning to sit still.
Really still.
Still enough to hear my own breath.
Still enough to hear the wind.
Still enough to notice the things I used to race past.
Still enough to open my mind far beyond what my eyes could see.
Still enough to notice the goosebumps you get when you’re talking to someone —
the signs,
the whispers,
the moments you can’t explain but feel straight down your spine. I know that it’s a-lot of still, trust me it’s even worse doing it than reading all of it. It’s work and it’s also a-lot of showing up for yourself to do it.

And that didn’t happen overnight.
Not in a day, or a month, or even a year.
Honestly, I don’t know if there’s a finish line.
I’m still evolving.
What I do know is this: it happened, and it’s happening still.
Slow. Quiet. Painful. Real.
The kind of real where every ounce of my loved ones’ souls feels like it’s running through mine.

Whenever I thought of them — or needed strength, or just wanted to send a message to heaven —
I would write on a memorial candle and light it.
That was my language.
My way of reaching them.
And somehow, they always reached back.

Then one night, I lit a candle for the ones I love in heaven.
I struck a match for them —
and this time, they answered back.

“Strike one for yourself.”

That was the turning — the moment the wall cracked and the light finally came through.
I didn’t just light a candle.
I lit me.

From that moment on, I struck my own matches —
and the fire hasn’t stopped since.
I didn’t rise to explain myself.
I rose to become myself.

And let me be clear about something:
I don’t whisper my resurrection so anyone else can feel safe.
I walk in mid-storm — hair pinned by prayer, mascara doing whatever it wants —
and my spirit still undefeated.
Yes, even in my Barbie years.
You watched me bury the version of me that played nice.
The woman who stayed small to make everybody else around her feel more comfortable.

I finally stopped being loyal to the version of me that stayed quiet.
She served her purpose — she kept me alive once, maybe twice, hell, maybe the full cat-with-nine-lives count —
but she wasn’t going to take me any further.
I didn’t survive to be quiet.
I didn’t crawl out of that fire to stay small.
I didn’t come back to life to dim out of politeness.

The fire sharpened me.
The glory restored me.
And the flames that tried to burn me
became the very reason I learned to strike my match first.

No better friend. No worst enemy.