Dementia creates a kind of grief most people don’t talk about. You begin grieving someone long before they actually die. Loving someone who is still her but slowly disappearing brings a kind of pain that’s hard to explain. It’s a mix of love, guild and memories of who they once were.

The hardest part of leaving Jehovah’s Witnesses wasn’t losing my beliefs. It was the moment I had to face my children and realize that they had been trying to tell me the truth all along.

Maybe being a good mother isn’t about never getting it wrong.. Maybe it’s about loving your children enough to change when you learn the truth.

“I trained people how to treat me every single day. Not with words. With what I allowed. With what I excused. With what I tolerated in silence.”

“Why does pretending the world has collapsed sometimes feels calmer than living in it fully powered.”

“I don’t want to be valued for my body anymore-but I’m scared of who I am without that.”

My whole life I have been directed, corrected, or over-managed as a child, young adult, and grown adult. Therefore, my nervous system learned that being told what to do means “being powerless or not capable.”

My ability to trust has nothing to do with whether another person is trustworthy or not because we are all human and we all fail time and time again. If trust was dependent on that then we would never be able to trust anyone ever! Trust is about my internal capacity, not the other person’s behavior.