Echoes of Insight

My own perceptionI’m at a place in my lifeAt an age I didn’t expect to witness it living outside of me—The unfolding rewardsOf my life’s workChallengingThe status quoOf parentingIn my bloodline Falling in griefRising in loveNo space that held between themBreaking the sound barrier inside me Tilled my fallow groundBetween a rock and a hard placeBlooming in the cracks Walls coming downKill the…

Author’s Note: I wrote this two days before Thanksgiving, still stuck in the freeze, still trying to trace the shape of what my body remembered. I didn’t edit it then. I didn’t have the distance. I’m sharing it now because the mess of it is part of the healing. Bodies don’t separate lineage from the present moment. I’ve been orbiting the same truth for hours, waiting for my body to let me look…

Learning the difference between protection and confinement. Guidance was the word he loved best.He said it often, like a blessing—as if it excused the sharpness of his voiceor the weight of his rules. But what he called guidance was really control—a leash disguised as protection,a lecture delivered as love. I was taught that obedience was trust,that submission was loyalty,that respect meant…

What we inherit isn’t always visible—but it lives in us until we choose differently. I inherited what could be held,and what couldn’t—the pieces that gathered dust,and the patterns that settled inside me:silence, duty,and a reflex to hold the family together no matter the cost. It wasn’t gifted to me; it was assigned,like a chore chart written in invisible ink.Be the strong one.Be the glue.Be…

We’d split from the noise—“I’ll meet you at the car”—and I stepped out the restroom door, still half in motion.His silhouette caught my eye;he felt it, turned, and our gazes locked.Recognition hit clean as breath, and without a wordwe moved together through a different door,the one that opened toward the night. As if the night were listening, we stepped into the same breath.Mouth to mouth,…

The story I lived wasn’t the one I wrote. For a long time, my life was a story other people told.I was the daughter shaped by her father’s rules,the partner mistaken for someone easier to love,the woman defined by what she could hold together. I became fluent in wearing roles I never chose,fluent in disguising my own voiceuntil I could barely recognize it. The hardest part wasn’t losing…

Learning the difference between surviving the fire and living in the light. I didn’t always know what gentleness meant—not the kind that makes you feel safe in your own skin.There was love in my house, but it lived inside expectation.Once the babies came, there was no time left for lingering.I became the one who knew what to do—the helper, the example, the extra set of hands.When I needed help…

A new chapter of Echoes of Insight is about to begin. This Wednesday marks the start of a nine-part lyrical memoir called The Life I Refused to Inherit — How I Rewrote the Story I Was Born Into. It traces the quiet, ordinary revolutions of growing up inside a story written by others—and the slow, deliberate work of writing my own. Nine movements. One arc.Softness, reclamation, inheritance,…

Sometimes awareness moves faster than language. It doesn’t ask to be named—just noticed.By the time I try to capture it, it’s already turned into something else.Still, I write. Not to explain.Only to offer.To leave a note in the places where someone else might one day stop and breathe. When I stay present in what once fractured me, something reorganizes.Not outside me—around me.The field…