Before You Read Anything Else 🖤

This is not a lifestyle blog.

This is a story.

The kind of story that only sharpens with distance, and the tumble of years behind it.

I’ve lived a few different lives.
This is the one I’m starting with.

I used to be a pastor’s wife.

Serve on schedule.

Live a life that looked meaningful and whole from the outside.

But underneath it all, it was always…very, very off.

It wasn’t loud, at first. The off-ness.
It was just enough to make me question my own intuition.

Am I imagining?

Or is this just life?

These are scenes from that life.

Not a perfect timeline.
Not a polished narrative.

Moments.
Returning now, to me, in real time.

The kind that, when they start to pour out of you, tell the truth in a way you couldn’t recognize while you were standing in the middle of it.

This is about disappearing.

Shrinking.

Losing your sense of self, of individuality, of sovereignty and of your own presence.

Until you don’t even recognize who you are anymore.

What does it take to come back to yourself?

If you’re new here, start with the Scenes From a Previous Life.

I’m writing a memoir in scenes.
I call it Heretic.

These are moments from a life I lived before I understood what was happening to me.

The rest of my life, the other stories, didn’t happen around this one.

They moved before it, through it, and beyond it.

They live here too, but on the periphery for now.

This is the part I couldn’t understand while I was inside it.

These are the scenes that need telling.

Now.

So this is where I’m starting.

I’m writing this now, with the clarity I didn’t have then.

Welcome.

— C