229: What if your life unraveled thread by thread?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I felt like I went through a portal into this evil place. I was completely disgusted and out of my mind. And I immediately knew that we were in a whole different world. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

Episode 229. What if your life unraveled thread by thread?

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My recollection of growing up is we had a really happy home. My dad played with us a lot. My mom is one of my favorite people and she just was very musical. I think as a parent, she had a great way of balancing structure and we kind of always knew what was expected of us, but with a really strong undercurrent of love and acceptance. My brothers and I got along really well for the most part. So it was a happy house.

We went to church regularly. We went to an evangelical church. My parents sang in the choir and I sang in the little kids choir and became kind of a pillar of our life at the time. It was sort of like our second home.

Church was really meaningful to me. I really felt this sense of wanting to be close to God and wanting to have that relationship with God that people talk about, and also really wanting to be like a good girl. I held myself to a really high standard, and I just have always had such a strong urge to make sure I was always doing the right thing.

And then as I got into junior high and high school and got involved in youth group, that was where my personal faith took off. My faith was a really defining aspect of who I was as a person.

What I really loved so much about Christianity at that time was the idea that even though I felt very flawed as a human being, there is a God who not only lovingly created me, but there's nothing I can do at all that can separate me from the love of God. And I can experience complete grace there.

So when I would do something that I perceived as being wrong or I just felt flawed in some way, I took a lot of relief in knowing that I was still unconditionally loved. My faith gave me purpose and identity again.

But it did also come with a lot of expectations that I put on myself. You know, there were rules as a part of Christianity. And I think being a teenager in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was such a strong purity movement happening at that time. And it was the only brand of Christianity that I knew.

As a person who has always had these perfectionistic tendencies and towards sort of black and white thinking, purity culture was really easy for me to absorb.

While on the one hand, I really liked boys and wanted to be dating and all that stuff. I will not do X, Y, Z. I certainly won't have sex. I won't do anything that even approaches having sex. That's bad. And I really didn't understand why other people who were Christians had a hard time following that because to me, it was just like, well, that's the right thing.

Purity culture was all about kind of saving yourself for marriage and saving yourself for both God for the sake of your purity in the eyes of God, but also for your future spouse.

I vividly remember one day in youth group, I think in high school. So we're all standing in a circle. They passed around this paper heart and each person that held the heart would tear off a small piece of it and then pass it along until it reached all the way around the circle. And it's just a mangled, torn up piece of paper.

The analogy was that if you give yourself physically to anyone else who you're not married to, you have diminished yourself and you won't have as much of your heart left to give your future spouse when the time comes. I believed it at the time and I put a lot of pressure on myself as a result of that.

From as far as I could see, as a young child especially, everything in my family was great. And I think I even viewed us as almost an ideal family. Like I would go over to my friend's house and their parents would fight. And I would go home and just feel safe and loved. I felt fully secure in my home as a small child.

But when I was 12, the summer after sixth grade, one day my parents sat us down and told us that my dad was moving out. I cannot describe what a shock it was to me. My brothers and I just had absolutely no clue that there were any problems at all. My parents never fought in front of us. I'm still not even sure they really did fight ever.

I remember my dad sitting on the floor and just absolutely sobbing while telling us that he was going to be moving in with some friends for an undetermined amount of time while he and my mom worked on their marriage. They didn't tell us anything about why. They did tell us they weren't choosing to get a divorce right at that time. And at some point, my dad left with a suitcase and

It's the first time I remember going into kind of an out-of-body state because my view of my family had been, we're the best family around. So to go from feeling such a deep sense of security to all of a sudden things are being torn apart and I have no information about it was so incredibly disorienting and scary to me.

It really left me with the feeling of anything can happen at any time. And the things I know to be secure really aren't. They ended up being separated for about a month. My dad moved back into the house. The day he moved back in, we had a little family celebration. My parents made homemade vanilla ice cream. We had strawberries. And I remember feeling so protective of my mom, even as a 12-year-old.

I didn't know anything about what had caused this, but I had seen her be in pain and I just kind of picked a side. It was so painful to see my dad and I was so angry at him. From the time that my mom and dad separated when I was 12, I became a bit hypervigilant about what was going on in my home, which was a weird thing to experience when on the surface everything was completely back to normal.

We've kind of returned to what it was like before that separation had happened, except that under the surface, I did have this like lingering fear that something was not quite right or something was going to happen.

So at some point during my senior year of high school, I was 18, my family made a trip down to visit my grandparents. But for some reason, we took two separate cars. My mom was driving one car. My dad was driving the other car. And on the way home, my mom drove with my brothers and I rode with my dad in the car. My dad was somebody who never shied away from a hard conversation.

So while we were on this drive back home, he said, I've always been curious how our separation affected you.

I remember saying, well, it made me really mad at you. I want to apologize to you for that. I'm not really sure why I felt so protective of mom, but I did. And that really led to me taking it out on you when I know it wasn't really specifically your fault. I remember him being quiet for a couple minutes and he said, I can't let you think that.

It was my fault. And we separated because I was unfaithful to your mom. I think I started crying. He pulled the car over. I started asking questions like, was it someone I know? Was it an affair or was it a one time thing? Who was she?

It was, I think, becoming harder for him to answer those questions. And he told me, actually, I've always struggled with homosexuality. At that point in my life, I am a fairly sheltered Christian girl in high school. It had never been something that I had really reckoned with very much.

And so I had so little context for what a gay person is really like. Both of my parents did believe that homosexuality was wrong. I'm sure that came to them from their faith background. And that's what I was taught, too, growing up. So at the time when this all happened, I believed it was wrong.

I guess I specifically remember I had one gay friend in high school and it was just something I sort of held in two separate parts of my brain. Like I loved my friend. I thought he was incredible. And I just also had this other part of my mind that thought, oh, it's just too bad because that's wrong. That it's not in God's plan. That's kind of their particular cross to bear and

The idea that my dad was one of those people was just really disorienting. My mind just couldn't really comprehend it. And I think I kind of went out of body. So the rest of that drive, mainly I remember just kind of hugging my knees to my chest in the front seat of the car. And when we got home, we walked in the door and I made eye contact with my mom and

started crying and just like ran into her arms and she hugged me. And I, I said, dad told me in my mind, when I picture this moment now, I picture her just looking at him with daggers in her eyes. Like how could you have done this? The next 24 hours was a total fog.

All this stuff was just swimming in my head. So when I got home from school that day, I waited for him to get off work. And when he came home, I asked him if we could talk. And I asked him every brutal question that I could think of. Was it an affair? And he said, no. And I said, okay, so was it a one-time thing? And he said, yes.

I think I just kind of went into every single little nook and cranny of my brain that had been driving me crazy. And he answered each and every one of them straightforwardly. He has always, as he put it, struggled with homosexuality, but he loves her. Their love for each other and their respect for each other was so strong that their marriage was something almost built out of stone.

Pretty much after that conversation with him, to my memory, I was fine. I got the answers I needed and I was like, okay, thank you for being honest with me. Moving on.

I found out over time that my dad had done a lot of counseling. I believe he went to some gay conversion therapy. He would talk about that sometimes it felt like it was kind of he was like making progress, but never really in a permanent way. It never, of course, changed. I think in a way,

Me being brought into that knowledge made me feel closer to my dad. You know, it made me feel trusted. And in a strange way, it was the thing that created the bond that I had with him. Because I think after they had separated when I was a lot younger, I'd still held on to some tension towards him. And once I found out what was going on for him, it really felt like it healed that in a single day.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. After that summer, I went to a small Christian college and I became a theology major.

During my sophomore year in one of my theology classes, I noticed a guy in the class that I thought was really cute.

I felt sort of this like sense of kinship with him, even though I really did not know him and just viewing him as a safe and trustworthy person because he wanted to be a missionary and he was studying theology. So I kind of started pursuing him a little bit in a very Christian college kind of way. We weren't dating, but we started, it started to feel like there was some momentum with him and,

We're both these deep people. We love God. This is my person. For some reason, I feel this kind of inexplicable connection to him. But in retrospect, I see now that I was ignoring a lot of red flags.

For example, he had given me bullshit answers lots of times as to why we couldn't go out. He would say, oh, I don't have enough money for a date. And I was like, I don't care. Let's go sit on the bench and talk. It doesn't matter. And eventually, after months of this, I was like, what is happening here? And what he told me was, I'm afraid that if we get into a relationship, I'm not going to be able to stop myself.

It's for your protection. When I heard that, in a way, I felt satisfied. I was like, okay, that's the real answer. And for whatever reason, I didn't really pay attention to the fact that he had just told me he was worried for my safety. And I just jumped right into a relationship with him.

Over time, though, there was just a lot of control around how physical we were going to be with each other because we both had grown up in the purity culture movement. So both of us believed that we shouldn't have sex. Because I had so much shame around sex and believed that it was wrong to do anything sexual with somebody that I wasn't married to, everything that happened became very secretive.

While we did not actually have sex until we were married, there were quite a few times that he did things to me that were against my will. And I didn't understand at the time that that was something that was being done to me. I really internalized a lot of shame as if I had participated.

At this school that we went to, a lot of people would get engaged senior year of college. People would talk about getting your MRS degree, your Mrs. degree, or your ring by spring. And I had kind of mapped out my life. And I had just always expected that I would meet my future husband in college. And then I would get engaged and we'd get married right after we graduated.

So in our senior year, we started talking about it. And eventually, at some point, he did propose and we got engaged. I think one of the reasons why I didn't really pay attention to red flags in this relationship was because what I had been told about my parents' marriage was that the struggle itself was what made their marriage beautiful.

Yes, their marriage is so hard, but they love each other so deeply and they're so committed. I had really taken that as aspirational. When he would do things that made me feel bad or were hurtful or sometimes even, frankly, abusive, there was no part of my brain that was like, this isn't the life I want to live or this isn't how I want to feel in my relationships.

I kind of thought each time he says something mean to me and we have a whole fight about it. This is our opportunity to dig in deeper into our intimacy as if intimacy can only be drawn from pain. The branch of the faith that I was a part of, I understood that there was value in suffering. And as they say, you die to yourself.

I always think about the phrase, lean not on your own understanding, which is in the Bible. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will direct your path. My parents called me at some point during my engagement. And essentially they were saying, we're concerned and we're not sure that we feel comfortable with you marrying this person. And I just didn't want to hear it.

I really think I was just full steam ahead. And the summer after I graduated from college, this man and I got married in July of 2008.

The whole first year, I remember just being a little shocked when people would talk about the honeymoon phase. That is not my experience at all. It's really hard. We're fighting all the time. He was getting increasingly mean, criticizing how I would do tiny little things and how terrible I was and how undesirable and how the problems in our marriage were all my fault.

But I framed all of that with the idea that this is what builds a strong marriage, going through hardships and working through them together. During that time, I remember we moved into a two bedroom apartment and he insisted that the second bedroom was going to be his man cave. That entire second bedroom in our tiny little space was dedicated to his stuff where he would spend hours on his computer. And he really didn't ever want me to go in there.

I think we'd been married a little over a year. There was a weekend when he was going to visit his family and I somehow managed to get into his computer, which was super protected, but somehow I got into his computer.

And this was a thing actually that had happened before. Like he'd left his computer unlocked on some occasion and I had gotten in and I'd found, you know, a bunch of like porn on his computer. And it had been a big deal to me because that was not a part of the parameters of our marriage. So this time when he was out of town, I just had this real insatiable need to find out what was going on. Because I was like, the things I'm being told are not the full picture.

which is such a weird headspace to be in because it can make you feel crazy. So I got into his computer. I found my way to some buried deep folder and I opened it up and there were a ton of images of underage girls. Particularly, I clicked through a folder of what looked to be a young teen with braces on her teeth. And I just went into shock.

There were hundreds of images and it shocked me like on a level that I've never experienced. I felt so protective of the children that I was seeing in these pictures. I felt like the future was just rushing towards me. Like I was imagining if we ever have children, how can I trust him with them? How can I trust him with anyone's children?

I felt like I went through a portal into this evil place. I was completely disgusted and out of my mind. And I immediately knew that we were in a whole different world.

I remember Googling, what do I do if my husband has teen pornography? Of course, I didn't find anything useful. And I knew that once I told anyone in my life about this, they would always know it. So if I had any desire to stay married to my husband, I just felt trapped. Like I couldn't share this information with anybody.

Then I started looking even further. I looked through his email account, his bank account. And what I ended up finding was a receipt for a product that was essentially a device that was supposed to look like a key fob for a car, but it had a secret camera in it. So then I started looking around the apartment for it and was like, is he spying on me? Like, what is he using this thing for?

I did try to connect it to the computer and see what was on there and the files were corrupted or I wasn't ever able to find anything on that device. But obviously a really creepy thing to find in your home. And I found some stuff in his bank account, things like he was paying for like cam girls and stuff like that.

I just was completely panicking, you know, and I'm 23 and still pretty innocent in my life. I just had no idea what to do. I think that was Saturday night and he was going to be coming home on Sunday. And my mom called me just to kind of chat and check in. And she's like, what's wrong? I made a split second decision to tell her everything.

And my dad called me back a couple minutes later and he said, okay, so I'm coming over. I'm going to be there in the morning and we're going to figure out what to do. What we ended up deciding was my husband can't live in my house anymore. My dad was worried that my husband might get violent or refuse to leave or something like that. So the plan we came up with was my dad was actually going to be the one to meet him at my apartment.

I went over to a friend's house and I just like hunkered down there for a couple of hours while my dad waited for my husband to get home. When he came home at first, it was friendly. And he was like, oh, hey, what are you doing here? And when my dad told him, I'm here to protect my daughter, I need to ask you to pack up some things. My husband's tone really shifted and he got a lot more agitated and

He started kind of rushing around the apartment and gathering stuff and ran out the door. And he actually took my car and left. Eventually, within the next couple of days, I did sit down with my husband and I talked to him about all of these things. And he really downplayed the underage girls. He was claiming that he didn't even know what those were or where they came from.

There was more stuff that happened after that. He eventually told me that he had actually been unfaithful to me, told me a story about how he had slept with another woman. But really, the thing that brought it all crystal clear to me was the thing with the secret camera.

He told me that he had purchased that because one of my friends was going to be coming to visit us and staying in that room. And he was planning to secretly film her while she was changing. And he was twisted enough that it didn't strike him as a thing he shouldn't say. Like he was kind of so far down a rabbit hole that he thought that would be a normal thing to tell me.

Or it wasn't the real answer. Like my dad told me that he suspected that he could have been using that to film kids. I have so many mysteries in my mind about all this. I'm like, I know that I don't know everything that happened. There was so much.

I look back on certain details. Like I always now think about the fact that his phone never had any texts on it. Like he would get texts, but if I ever picked up his phone and was like, what's going on here? It was always zeroed out. I didn't really think much of that until much later where I was like, do I ever go in and delete my texts? No, I don't because I'm not hiding anything.

I had downstairs neighbors in that apartment building who told me after he left, you know, we always used to hear really loud banging sounds from your apartment. And I was like, what? Do you think it was video games? And they're like, definitely not video games. Every once in a while, I go down a little rabbit hole where I try to put together what was happening in my own home. And I don't think I'm ever going to really know.

After that big weekend, we separated. I filed for divorce very quickly in the next month or so. So we were officially divorced on August 23rd, 2010.

My ex-husband was trying to get me back or he was kind of just trying to pull me back into a life with him. And then when I pushed back on him or maybe I just wasn't interested in what he was trying to do, he would completely snap and start telling me why I'm such a horrible Christian because Christ tells us to forgive and my heart is clearly so bitter. I can't forgive the many horrible things he had put me through.

I was definitely in the beginning stages of the pattern of abuse where you start to lose your sense of self and your identity. And I was beginning to experience that, but I was able to get out. After I got out, what I experienced was a huge sense of freedom. But there were just so many unanswered questions and it felt like there was just kind of this black box of what did I even live through?

I do remember maybe like six months after we split up, standing in the shower one day, just having this total realization come over me. I remember leaning my head on the side of the shower and just standing there in the water. It was like it just came over me, like a huge rainstorm just pouring on me and soaking me and weighing me down.

Just to process the facts that I couldn't ignore, which were he bought this device, I found these images on his computer, and now he's told me that he has cheated on me. All of those things were trauma in themselves, but then to not even really be able to make sense of it afterwards has definitely been the most disorienting part of it.

The real possibility of how deep some of those behaviors could have gone for him or how far he might have taken them. The reality that I don't know and I will never know. I can imagine that it was limited to him looking at images on the internet and then having sex with one other woman, which is what he told me about. All the way up to I can imagine he was being violent towards people possibly even in my home when I was gone.

I've never known what to make of that except just I could feel it in the house. I stayed in that apartment after we split up for another six months or so and then I moved into my own space and I remember feeling like my head just completely cleared because it had an energy that was really dark inside.

I remember my really good friend coming over at some point shortly after my ex had moved out. And she told me that she had had a dream. She was standing with me in my apartment and we looked down at the floor and it was like linoleum floor covering. And she noticed that in the corner of the room, the linoleum was starting to peel up a little bit. And she and I walked over to the corner and we started just pulling it up and pulling it up more and more and more. And

And as we pulled up the flooring, the entire underneath all of the floors was filled with dead bodies just rotting inside my apartment. It resonated with me so much because that's what it felt like to continue living there. It was like every corner, every closet, every closet I went into, I was wondering what I was going to find. Like, was there some little piece of evidence that he had left behind or just what was going to be there?

Just this feeling of deep betrayal. I don't know. It's so much bigger than that because I felt personally betrayed, but I also felt protective of other people who were mysteries to me. But I felt that it's possible that other people have been victimized by this person who I have been unwittingly protecting and keeping in my home. It was so heavy.

Honestly, at the time, it didn't even really occur to me to press charges. And I think it was because I was 24 years old. I was in complete shock about what was happening. And I don't think I had even really processed and understood what I had just found and what I had discovered about him.

I just didn't comprehend it. I was still really pretty innocent, I think, in life. And it's been something that over the last 10 plus years, I've had a lot of regret about

So a couple of years ago, I was in counseling. I was seeing a therapist regularly. And one of the things that came out of that counseling process for me was that I did decide to, I know where he lives now. I know what town he lives in. And I ended up just calling the local authorities in that area and tipping them off.

I knew if I went back and reported something that happened 10 years ago, I have absolutely no evidence for that at this point. But I felt like it was the best I could do in retrospect to try to get his name on some kind of list. The person that I spoke with said, you know, it's someone who has had this tendency in the past will tend to offend in the future. So it is good to have his name just so we know to kind of check. So that's where we left it.

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In July of 2011, my dad ended up being diagnosed with bile duct cancer. And I just had this immediate feeling of like, oh, this is going to take him. I went home to visit to be with my family while he went into the one major surgery that he had to try to remove the cancer. And I sat down with him on the couch.

As I was asking him to talk to me about his feelings about cancer, he went over to a closet and pulled out his journal and read it to me. And it was the journal from the first day he had a cancer symptom. It said, perhaps this is the illness that I've prayed for. And I remember my mom sitting there and just weeping. But I really wanted to understand where he was coming from. And so I just stayed really calm.

He ended up being with us for another eight months. And even though he died from cancer, in some emotional part of me, I feel like he ended his own life by way of cancer. I think he was grateful that cancer took him so that he wouldn't have to do something himself and put us in the position of having to deal with that. So it's a mixture for me where I feel...

so tender about my dad. I don't see his death as a betrayal. I just see it as a tragedy. And I don't mean the fact that he died, because I know he didn't see that as a tragedy, but I kind of see his life as a tragedy. It is so sad to me that a person as beautiful as him could have not seen himself that way.

He didn't need to try to fix himself. And I know that by the time he passed away, he had accepted the fact that he was never going to be able to change that about himself. But he still thought of it as something wrong with him.

It's a hard thing to articulate because I would never want to say that my dad's life was a waste. Of course it wasn't. He gave and received so much love. He was the wisest person, talented with art, acting, and writing, and just like a beautiful mind and soul. So his life wasn't a waste, but...

It makes me so sad to think about how much of his life he spent trying to change, trying to earn acceptance from his family, from his faith, from God, and just from himself. That's the tragedy, that he never lived freely.

During the time that my dad was sick, I moved back to my hometown to be near my family and to help care for my dad and to be there for him.

Right around the same time that my dad got diagnosed with cancer, I met somebody. I knew I was going to be moving away. And so I didn't take it seriously at all. But we really hit it off. And we ended up dating for a couple of years after that. And we got married one year after my dad passed away. And we have now been married for nine years. And we have an awesome six-year-old daughter.

observing my parents' marriage, what was really held up as a value in their relationship was marriages are hard work. It's really hard. You have to work so hard to stay married. And I think I internalized that getting into my first marriage. It prevented me from seeing some of the red flags because I was like, oh, well, marriage is hard work. So this is just one of those challenges we have to work through.

And now that I'm in my second marriage, I understand that the type of hard work that a healthy marriage involves is like communicating through difficult issues and being kind to each other, even when you're mad and learning to navigate parenting styles, things like that. Those are normal challenges to have, but you should not feel destabilized as a human being inside of your marriage.

It's been hugely healing for me to go through a second marriage like this with somebody who doesn't always see eye to eye with me. But when we disagree, there's so much kindness and willingness to listen. So he's been a huge factor in me healing from everything that happened in my 20s.

When I reflect on all of these different changes that happened in my life and these events, one of the things that sticks out to me is the way that it has shifted my identity and my sense of self.

I think a lot about kind of the sliding doors aspect of my life, that if these things had never happened, I'm sure my life would look completely different and I would be a very different person than I am now because all these changes have required me to just sit with a lot of ambiguity and inner conflict. I like who I am, but there's been a huge grieving process that's come along with the loss of my faith.

So much of my identity and my sense of purpose in life had come from my relationship with God. I feel like what was really happening for me was after my divorce, when I made that choice to leave and to value my own voice, my own inner truth, and to choose my safety over staying married, I had sort of passed a point of no return period.

Starting with my dad coming out, then with my first marriage, and then the choice to get divorced, which I had always been taught was wrong and not something I should ever consider. As each event happened in my life, that was devastating. It felt like I was pulling a thread, like a thread of a tapestry, let's say. And

And I saw the thread and I could have chosen to ignore the thread. But instead, over time, I just kept pulling more and more. And the tapestry of my faith just kept unraveling. It began dismantling my belief system bit by bit.

The one thing I didn't do was run away. It was actually in the process of needing to have a genuine search for truth. That's how I got here. And it feels like to ask me to go back into the identity and the belief system that I used to have would be asking me to lie to myself.

Watching my dad feel pressure to live his life in a way that wasn't true to him and seeing close up how harmful that was to him as a human being. I'm never going to be a person who can lie to myself. It has required me to rethink so many aspects of my identity. Like, what does it mean to be a person of character if that's not just following God?

How do you know what's the right thing to do if you're not just reading about it in the Bible? Well, there's lots of ways to find out, but I'd never known those ways. What does it mean to be a sexually ethical person if you're not getting your rules from the Bible? And what does it mean to be a person of depth and loving towards others if it's not coming from a place of modeling your life after Jesus, which was the only way that I was taught

It felt like grief to me. And that was a really sad and scary experience. I look at all of these things as examples of why no one can be expected to live for somebody else. I feel like that was kind of the family legacy for a long time.

Living that way has the potential to have really extreme consequences. I think my parents believed that they were doing something really good and noble by staying married, by holding some of these secrets close to them.

I think my mom really believed that she was protecting my dad by staying married to him and by holding on to his secret. And I think she believed she was protecting myself and my brothers by not putting us through a divorce and not exposing us to realities of the world that she thought we weren't ready for when we were kids. But fast forwarding, I look at the consequences that that had for my dad and I see how much it hurt him. I look at the consequences from my mom.

Understanding how the marriage to my dad had affected her and how it was really unfair that she was put in that position where she was married to someone who wasn't attracted to her. Yes, she made that choice, but how devastating, right?

For myself, I think I've started to realize that there's a really big difference between following your own inner wisdom, listening to your voice, following your own passions versus being selfish. I'm building a life for myself where I have genuine fulfillment. And that means that my daughter grows up in a home where she sees her mom thriving and

She experiences my love and she experiences me sacrificing for her at times, like all mothers do, like all parents do. But she does not see me dying for her. And she's not going to.

I want her to see me as a fully actualized person who gets to have a full life with flaws and joy. And I don't want her to see me as someone who's just there to serve others and not have an identity of my own. That Bible verse that says, lean not on your own understanding. I think on a daily basis, lean into your own understanding. I believe in my own voice now.

It's like, listen to the quiet voice inside of you. And I feel so much more peaceful using that as my guide than I do trying to meet an external standard. I think what's been beautiful to me recently to rediscover is that I still find the sacred in my world.

And I believe that the sacred is in me and it's in everyone. And I feel that way about my child. When I look at her, I feel like I'm looking into the face of God.

It's not the same way that I used to understand God. It's not the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But I can't help but look at her and see that she contains the divine. And I also apply that to other people that I encounter in the world.

that they are worthy of love and dignity, and that their inner voice is also worth listening to, that they too contain the divine. Today's storyteller requested to remain anonymous, but if you'd like to contact her, you can reach out through email at foundatc9 at gmail.com. That's foundatc, the number nine, at gmail.com. ♪

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