Memoirist writing about grief, deconstruction, survival, identity, and finding your voice.
Writer of trauma informed essays, memoir and fiction
Leave a CommentOne Truth in Many Beliefs Religion comes in many shapes, colors, and languages. Each tradition uses its own words, rituals, and practices. But when I look past the surface, I see the same core ideas repeated over and over, just dressed differently. Whether it’s Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or even the Law of Attraction, there’s a […]
The Universal Thread
Leave a Comment“The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear. It is the storm within which endangers him, not the storm without.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson It was black outside, dark as night. The wind was blowing so hard that the tops of the trees were bowed, […]
Not All Storms Are Destructive
For years, I thought divorce was morally wrong. This is the conditioning I learned from the Independent Fundamental Baptist world. Marriage was sacred, divorce was rebellion, and the person who left was the person who broke the covenant.
“God hates divorce” (Malachi 2:16), “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6), and “Whosoever shall put away his wife… committeth adultery” (Matthew 19:9). I had been taught that the Bible was the instruction manual for life. It had verses on how to dress, raise children, behave as a wife, handle money, respond to authority, and certainly stay married. Scripture did not simply offer wisdom. It told us what God required, and disobeying it carried consequences. So when I heard these verses about divorce, I did not hear one possible interpretation of marriage. I heard God telling me what I was not allowed to do.
I did not hear much about what happens when the marriage itself becomes harmful. I never heard a preacher stand behind the pulpit and say, “If your husband abuses you, you have to stay.” They did not need to. Abuse was softened into something else. He had “a temper.” He had “anger problems.” Maybe he was “rough around the edges.” Maybe she needed to watch how she spoke to him. Maybe they both needed marriage counseling. Maybe she needed to pray more, submit better, forgive more quickly, or wait for him to get right with God. Divorce, however, was treated as the true danger.
That is one of the things I have had to untangle in my own religious deconstruction. You do not have to explicitly tell someone to stay with an abuser if you have already constructed a theology in which leaving is spiritually worse than what is happening to them. That teaching does the work for you. If divorce is covenant-breaking but abuse is merely “a temper,” then the person filing for divorce becomes the covenant-breaker.
If abuse is treated as a marriage problem rather than the behavior of an abusive person, then both spouses become responsible for fixing it. If submission is emphasized more often than protection, accountability, justice, or the husband’s obligations, then the burden naturally falls on the person with less power. Nobody ever has to say, “Stay and be abused.” They only have to keep redefining abuse until it no longer sounds serious enough to justify leaving. So, I’ll say it. That theology keeps women in abusive marriages.
Once I began reading those verses in context, I started seeing things I had never been taught to notice. Malachi 2:16 is one of the most quoted passages in Christian discussions about divorce: “For the LORD, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away…” That verse is often shortened to “God hates divorce,” but the surrounding passage is not a simple statement about divorce in the abstract. In Malachi 2:14, God confronts men who have dealt treacherously with “the wife of thy youth” and “the wife of thy covenant.” The passage centers on betrayal, covenant treachery, and violence. This raises a question they don’t want you to ask: Why was Malachi used to condemn the person leaving a destructive marriage rather than the person behaving treacherously inside one? Because it protected the men. Malachi condemned husbands for betraying their wives. But the church used it to keep wives with the men who betrayed them.
Then there is Matthew 19. Jesus says, “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6). This verse was presented as though Jesus were answering every possible question about divorce for every marriage, but that was not what prompted the conversation. In Matthew 19:3, the Pharisees asked Jesus, “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” That context matters because Jesus was responding to men asking how easily they could discard their wives. He was not being asked whether a battered woman had to remain with the man beating her. Or whether coercive control violated the covenant. Nor was he being asked whether a spouse had to remain with someone who terrorized the household. Those were not the questions Jesus was answering, yet Matthew 19 became the answer to all of them. People call that taking the Bible literally. But it isn’t. Applying Jesus’ answer to questions he was never asked is an interpretation some man made.
Then comes Matthew 19:9: “Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication…” In the Independent Fundamental Baptist framework I lived in, it was reduced to one exception. Adultery equals biblical grounds for divorce. Abuse does not. Sexual infidelity can break the covenant, but being hit apparently cannot. Sleeping with someone else can destroy a marriage, while terrorizing your spouse somehow does not.
Eventually I had to ask why. Where does Jesus actually say that? He does not. The conclusion comes from treating the exception Jesus mentions in one particular conversation as an exhaustive list of every possible covenant violation. Again, that interpretation was presented to me as though it were simply what the Bible said. An interpretation that allowed a wife to leave if he cheated, but not if he hit her.
The difference between interpretation and Scripture matters to me because one defining feature of fundamentalism is the tendency to erase the space between interpretation and God. A pastor does not say, “This is how our tradition interprets this passage.” He says, “The Bible says.” As if it is law. Once I recognized that, I started noticing another contradiction. Independent Fundamental Baptist teaching places enormous importance on the marriage covenant, but a covenant cannot logically consist of only one obligation: do not leave.
Marriage contains other obligations too. Colossians 3:19 says, “Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.” Ephesians 5:25 says, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.” Those are covenant obligations, along with faithfulness, care, protection, honesty, responsibility, and the refusal to use violence or fear.
Yet in many churches, violating those obligations doesn’t carry the same theological weight as filing divorce papers. A husband can intimidate his wife for years, and people still describe the marriage as intact. He can humiliate her, control her, threaten her, and destroy her sense of safety, and people will say the marriage is struggling. But when she finally leaves, she is the one who has “broken the covenant.”
That logic is backward. The legal end of a marriage on paper and the destruction of a marriage are not always the same event. Sometimes the paperwork simply acknowledges something that happened long before anyone entered a courthouse.
Other passages also complicate the fundamentalist narrative. Psalm 11:5 says, “The LORD trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth.” Proverbs 22:3 says, “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself…” And in 1 Corinthians 7:15, Paul writes, “But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases…”
Christians disagree on how broadly to apply that principle. Some believe abandonment means only physically leaving. Others argue that severe, persistent abuse can constitute a kind of functional abandonment because the abusive spouse has already abandoned the essential obligations of marriage. I understand that sincere Christians disagree about this. There are traditions. There are theological arguments. But there is not one obvious sentence in Scripture that says, “If your spouse abuses you, God requires you to remain married.” Nor, “If your spouse abuses you, then you can leave.”
So, I began looking outside the religious world I was familiar with. Which was a little uncomfortable at first. But that is just part of deconstruction. Fundamentalism teaches that other religions have a compromised truth, while your belief system is the only true one that follows Scripture.
I learned that Judaism regards marriage as sacred while also recognizing divorce. Deuteronomy 24:1–4 regulates divorce rather than pretending it does not exist. Islam likewise takes marriage seriously while permitting divorce and emphasizing fairness and kindness. Qur’an 2:231 specifically warns against keeping a spouse to harm them. Buddhism generally does not treat marriage as a divine sacrament in the Christian sense, and its ethical framework emphasizes compassion, non-harm, and the reduction of suffering. Hindu traditions vary widely, but the principle of ahimsa, or nonviolence, complicates any suggestion that maintaining a marriage automatically takes precedence over harm occurring within it.
What struck me was that the Independent Fundamental Baptist assumption I had embraced wasn’t a universally obvious spiritual truth. It was one theological framework among many, and even Christianity itself contains multiple frameworks.
Some Christians permit divorce for adultery and abandonment. Some recognize severe abuse as abandonment or covenant-breaking. Some permit physical separation but prohibit remarriage. Some churches leave the decision largely to conscience, pastoral discernment (and do not get me started on this topic), and the circumstances of the individual marriage. Once you know that diversity exists, it becomes much harder to accept the statement, “The Bible is clear,” without asking what exactly is it clear on? And according to whose interpretation?
One of the biggest things I have had to unlearn is the idea that the way I was taught to interpret the Bible was the only way to interpret it. I was taught to fear breaking the marriage covenant, but I was not taught to consider all the ways that covenant might already have been broken long before anyone filed for divorce. I was taught to focus on who left. Now I find myself asking different questions. Who threatened? Who humiliated? Who kept promising to change and never did? Who was expected to keep forgiving while the other person never had to become safe?
Most importantly, why does the person who finally says, “I cannot live like this anymore,” receive more scrutiny than the person who made the marriage unbearable?
I still believe marriage can be a beautiful bond between two people, but I no longer believe it should hold like super glue no matter what it costs the people in it. Filing for divorce does not automatically tell me who destroyed the marriage. Sometimes the damage was done long before anyone left, and keeping the marriage intact does not always mean something sacred is being protected.
For me, religious deconstruction has not been about throwing away every belief I was given. It has been about asking where each one came from and whether it deserved the authority I gave it. Some came from a verse. Many came from someone’s interpretation of a verse. Some came from culture. And some survived only because no one was allowed to question them.
Looking back, I can see how much power those teachings had over the choices I thought I could make. Sometimes a marriage breaks down long before the paperwork is filed, and the person who finally leaves isn’t necessarily the one who broke it.
If you are reading this because you have lived some version of it yourself, I created a Narcissistic Abuse Recovery course to help you understand the patterns, untangle the messages that kept you stuck, and begin rebuilding trust in yourself.
Originally published at https://yolikaereynolds.substack.com on October 21, 2026.
My deconstruction started when I questioned forgiveness.
If God forgives us and sent His Son to die for our sins, then why are some people condemned to hell?
I often heard that His forgiveness is conditional. We have to accept it. But that doesn’t make sense to me. I can forgive someone who never apologizes. I can even forgive someone who doesn’t believe they did anything wrong, and they will never know I forgave them. Their participation is not necessary for my forgiveness.
So why would the all-loving, flawless God’s forgiveness have conditions, when mine doesn’t?
I understand consequences. Forgiveness doesn’t make a person safe. It doesn’t rebuild trust or require you to open the door to someone who hurt you. But eternal punishment in hell raises another question. What is being accomplished when suffering has no end?
Then there is the harm that cannot be repaired.
A person can sincerely change, but they can never return what they took. They can’t give someone back their childhood. An apology does not restore a life that was taken. It does not return the years lost to abuse, even if that person becomes someone different.
That leaves me asking what justice could look like when both things are true: the damage remains, and the offender has changed. Endless punishment wouldn’t undo the damage either.
I don’t have a complete answer. That question opened into a much larger one.
So, I began looking beyond Christianity.
I learned that religions don’t all understand forgiveness, judgment, or creation in the same way.
In Jewish traditions, repentance and repairing harm are central, and some teachings describe purification after death rather than endless punishment.
Buddhist traditions explain consequences through karma, without a creator god deciding who to forgive.
Many Hindu traditions understand heaven and hell as temporary within a larger cycle of existence.
The Bahá’í Faith describes heaven and hell as spiritual conditions of nearness to or distance from God.
Islam strongly emphasizes mercy while retaining repentance and divine judgment.
None of those traditions is a single, simple answer. Each contains differences and debates. They showed me that the framework I knew wasn’t the only one people had developed.
I have always known that hell is not universally taught, but I was conditioned to believe that it is a literal place, regardless of how other religions understood it. Then I began to wonder whether the hell I had been taught about was what the biblical writers actually described. Different words, images, and passages had been brought together into something I had always understood as one clear teaching.
What do I actually believe about God? Is there a literal God?
I suspect there is something unknown, and I don’t feel like I get to decide whether to call it God. The word, the name, carries so much: a personality, intentions, expectations, rules, and a whole history of people explaining what this god wants.
I don’t know which of those descriptions, if any, are true.
I suspect the divine is within me. I keep thinking about God’s answer to Moses: ‘I AM THAT I AM.’ I don’t know whether it connects to the simple awareness I feel when I say ‘I am.’ But it makes me wonder whether the divine, if it exists, is something our names and descriptions cannot fully contain. Perhaps that awareness belongs to something larger. Maybe the divine is a potential within all of us.
Those are possibilities I am considering. I haven’t established them as facts. And they don’t answer another question I keep coming back to: where did we come from?
I am not asking about our purpose yet. I want to understand how we got here. Where, or from what, did we come?
Genesis begins with God creating the heavens and the earth. Later, the story follows Adam and Eve and their children. But when Cain fears other people might kill him, and then has a wife whose background isn’t explained, I have questions.
Genesis does say Adam had other sons and daughters. The traditional explanation is that the other people were family. But Cain’s wife isn’t specifically identified that way. The narrative doesn’t supply those details.
I have wondered whether this could have been one god’s creation story among other gods. This bible-gods version of life.
Genesis doesn’t establish that interpretation either. Still, asking made me realize how much I had assumed about what the story claimed and how it had to be read. To be frank, I was told how to read and interpret it. Some people read Genesis as a factual account of how the first humans appeared. Others read it as a story expressing ancient beliefs about humanity and God.
Other traditions had their own answers about origins.
Some Hindu philosophies understand existence through Brahman, ultimate reality. Advaita Vedanta teaches that the deepest self is ultimately identical with that reality. Other Hindu schools understand the relationship differently.
Daoist teachings describe things arising from the Dao, the underlying Way. Early Buddhist teachings speak of a cycle of birth and death whose beginning cannot be discerned. Some ancient Gnostic traditions distinguish the maker of the material world from the highest divine reality.
Ancient Mesopotamian stories describe multiple gods participating in the creation of humanity. In one Māori tradition, Tāne forms the first woman from earth, within a wider understanding of kinship between humanity and the natural world.
I can examine these teachings without deciding that one must become my answer. A belief’s resemblance to something I feel doesn’t prove it true.
That matters to me because I want evidence, too.
Human evolution has strong evidence, including fossils and genetics. Humans share DNA with other life. Evolution is still happening; inherited characteristics continue to change in populations across generations. It doesn’t require today’s apes to turn into humans. Our histories branch from shared ancestors. Yet I can not say for certain that this is how we got here.
Evolution, the universe’s development, and the origin of the first life are different questions. Science has substantial explanations for parts of that chain. Yet it doesn’t fully explain how life first arose or where the universe’s earliest state came from.
Those gaps don’t establish God. They also don’t settle every question about whether anything divine exists.
I wanted to go further back. What’s the earliest spiritual teaching we can actually find evidence for?
Intentional human burials at Qafzeh date to about 100,000 years ago. Red ochre found near the remains suggests ritual activity. It doesn’t tell us what those people believed.
Monumental structures at Göbekli Tepe date to approximately 9600–8200 BCE and are interpreted as evidence of communal ritual activity. We cannot read a surviving statement of their teachings.
Among the earliest religious compositions we can read are Sumerian hymns preserved on clay tablets from around 2600–2500 BCE. The Kesh Temple Hymn praises a temple and several deities. Egypt’s Pyramid Texts, first inscribed around the twenty-fourth century BCE, preserve another very early body of religious writing.
These discoveries establish that people practiced rituals and recorded beliefs. They don’t establish that the divine beings they described existed. The oldest surviving teaching isn’t necessarily the first teaching, either. People could speak, wonder, and pass stories down long before they could write.
I found myself frustrated that so much remained elusive. Every explanation seemed to end with another question.
Then I came across a TikTok. The creator described leaving Christianity without claiming certainty about what, if anything, exists beyond it. She spoke about experiences she couldn’t explain and the possibility of remaining open to them without naming whatever they might be.
What stayed with me was the permission to not know.
I have been searching for answers. But I needed room to be okay with not having all of the answers.
I can ask how we got here. I can take evidence seriously. I can have experiences I don’t understand without deciding they prove something supernatural. I can question the God I was taught about without pretending I have settled whether anything divine exists.
I don’t need to choose a label. And I definitely don’t need a replacement belief simply because an old one no longer fits.
Today, I accept that I don’t know. There may be something supernatural. I don’t know its qualities, whether ‘God’ is the right name, or whether it needs a name at all.
But I am curious. And I am allowed to not know.
Sources and further reading
Video that prompted the reflection: https://www.tiktok.com/@wakemeup272/video/7697684144272248078
Originally published at https://yolikaereynolds.substack.com on October 20, 2026.
Starting a daily writing practice depends more on design than on willpower. Pick a goal so small you can’t talk yourself out of it. Attach it to something you already do every day. Give yourself permission to write badly, and keep a simple record that celebrates showing up. When you miss a day (you will), start again the next morning without trying to make up for it.
Here’s how to put each of those steps into practice, with concrete examples you can use today.
The most common beginner mistake is setting a goal that matches your ambition instead of your real life. A thousand words a day sounds inspiring on Sunday night. By Wednesday, it feels like a debt you can’t pay.
A tiny goal works because it removes the negotiation. You don’t need inspiration to write three sentences. You just need a pen.
Set a timer and write until it rings. Stopping mid-sentence makes tomorrow easier to start.
Fill a single notebook page by hand. The physical boundary tells you when you’re done.
Ideal for busy or low-energy seasons. Some days you’ll write more, but three counts as a full win.
Once the tiny goal feels automatic, usually after a few weeks, you can stretch it. Not before.
Habits stick when they’re tied to a trigger. Instead of “I’ll write sometime today,” try “After I pour my morning coffee, I open my notebook.” The coffee becomes the cue, and the decision is already made.
Choose the time you’re least likely to be interrupted, not the time you imagine a “real writer” would pick. Early mornings work for many people, but so do lunch breaks, train commutes, or ten quiet minutes before bed.
Perfectionism quietly ends more writing habits than lack of time does. If every session has to produce something good, sitting down becomes stressful, and you’ll start avoiding it.
Treat your daily pages as practice, not performance. Musicians play scales nobody hears. Your daily writing can be messy, repetitive, unfinished, and completely private.
A few other helpful rules: don’t reread yesterday’s entry first, don’t edit while drafting, and don’t share daily pages unless you want to.
A blank page is hardest when you have no starting point. Keep a short list of prompts you can grab without thinking:
Prompts work like doorways. Many sessions that start with one wander somewhere completely different, and that’s the point.
Tracking helps you see progress, but the wrong system becomes a guilt machine. Keep it simple: a check mark on a wall calendar, a dot in your planner, or a note in a habit app.
Track showing up, not word counts. Three sentences and three pages earn the same mark, which reinforces the behavior you’re actually building.
Skip streak counters that reset to zero. Look at monthly totals instead. Writing eighteen days out of thirty is a genuine practice, even with gaps on the calendar.
Missing a day happens in every long-term habit, so it isn’t a failure. What matters is what happens next.
Many writers follow a simple rule: missing once is fine, but avoid missing two days in a row. That keeps one off day from quietly becoming a lost month.
Resist making up lost time with a double session. That turns writing into punishment. Just do your normal tiny goal and move on.
If you keep missing at the same point in your day, the plan needs adjusting. Move your writing window, shrink the goal, or choose a different cue.
Pick a tiny goal, tie it to a daily cue, write imperfectly, reach for prompts when stuck, track showing up, and restart gently after a miss. Journaling, fiction, poetry, and letters all count. A lasting writing habit grows from small, repeatable sessions, not heroic ones.
You don’t need a perfect notebook, a free afternoon, or a big idea. Set a timer for five or ten minutes, write whatever comes, and let that be enough for today. Tomorrow, simply do it again.
From age 12 until I moved away at 21, I watched ocean waves break on Southern California’s shores. I took those waves for granted. To me, they were just background noise in my tanning adventure. Surfing wasn’t for me, but those golden-tanned surfers with their bleached-blonde hair? That was another story entirely.
It took me over 30 years to return to the ocean. And now I can’t get enough of it. The waves, the salt, the gritty sand under my fingernails. I love all of it. Except for that one time I failed to wash my hair after lying in the sand on a full-moon night and ended up with sand in my bed. No matter how many times I tried to wipe it away, three nights later, I still found more sand. At that point, I decided to just strip the bed and wash the sheets.
These days, I come to the beach for something quieter. I sit, watch, and wait for the ocean to speak to me.
What does it have to say? What does it want to teach me?
I watch as people walk along its shores. A man casts a line. Wave after wave crashes forward. Its sounds and sights are healing. The ocean breeze, or today, the ocean wind, keeps my hair in a constant disarray. But something about the beach makes me stop caring about how my hair looks.
I like it here because I can take off my corporate attire and relax. Even the fanciest of restaurants have a more casual dress code. The people who live here are friendly. The tourists, not so much. It may take them a few days to unwind, as it does me. Eventually we settle into a rhythm, like the ebb and flow of the waves.
What did the ocean say?
She said, “Some days, life will bring you small, calm waves, and other days, it will bring tall, strong ones. Those smaller waves are good for surfers still learning-still finding their footing. But these strong ones are for the surfers who like to take risks and ride the waves handed to them.”
If my life had been easy-if my waves had always been small-I might not have much reason to write. But they weren’t small.
There was a 24-year abusive marriage. I have buried one son and learned how to miss another who is still alive. Grief so large I still don’t know where to put it all.
Those were not waves I chose. They were the kind that rise in front of you before you have time to prepare, the kind that knock you down and leave you unsure which way is up. And yet, somehow, I am still here.
Maybe that’s why I can understand the ocean now. The bigger the wave, the deeper the sound. Sometimes, the bigger the wave, the more beautiful it is.
What does the ocean have to say?
She reminds me the waves never stop. She does not ask whether we are ready. Most days, she simply comes and goes. During a storm, though, she insists on being seen and felt. Our life is just like the ocean; it happens to us daily. We cannot stop it. We can prepare and plan, but it still moves in the background, whether we’re watching or not. Some things pass quietly. Others arrive with enough force to change the shoreline — a death or illness, maybe even a birth. These are things worth seeing and feeling.
Waves crash on us. Sometimes we stay standing. Sometimes they knock us down, and we have to get back up. We can ride the waves, or do like me — sit and watch as they flow over us. Either way is fine.
Look at her. To me, the ocean represents a constant, calming presence in life.
I used to come to the beach for a suntan.
Now I come to listen.
Originally published at https://yolikaereynolds.substack.com on October 1, 2026.
Some things are easier to write than to say out loud. Sometimes, the page is where we first discover what we need to say.
I created The Write to Sanity to give people a starting point for that kind of writing.
The website brings together my self-paced journal therapy program and What I Was Never Allowed to Say Out Loud: A Guided Journal for Finding Your Voice Again. You can explore guided lessons or begin with the journal’s prompts and space for your own words.
You’ll also find a coming-soon introduction to my memoir, Not What God Promised: What Happened When I Stopped Waiting for God to Save Me. It explores the beliefs that kept me inside an abusive marriage, what they cost me, and the life I began building when I stopped waiting to be rescued.
My work grows out of lived experience with silence, grief, and finding my voice. Through the program and journal, I offer room for you to explore yours.
Visit The Write to Sanity:
https://thewritetosanity.com
I used to think “home” meant a place with four walls, a roof, and an address on the mailbox. But somewhere between the life I was trying to survive and the life I am now building, the definition of home became clearer.
Home wasn’t always safe. For 24 years, I lived inside a structure with walls, but also with secrets, with silence, and with the particular loneliness that comes from hiding abuse behind the appearance of a good life.
There is a phrase people use: ” Home is where you hang your heart.” I used to like it. Then I sat with it. To hang your heart, you have to take it out. And if you take it out, you die.
For those 24 years, I understood that phrase more literally than most people would want to because I felt so dead inside.
Home isn’t where I was born.
My dad was a career military man, and we moved a few times before I was old enough to know where I was living. So home was wherever my dad was stationed at the time. By the time I was 12, my dad opted out of reenlistment, and then we called California home.
My definition of home has changed a few times. It changed the first time I realized that the place I returned to every night didn’t feel like rest — it felt like performance. It changed again when we separated, and I discovered that safety isn’t always given. It sometimes has to be chosen and built.
Today, home is where the masks come off. Not the literal masks, emotional ones. The I’m fine, and I’ve got this kind. It is the place where the world doesn’t expect me to smile if I don’t feel like it, where tears can fall without needing an explanation, where laughter echoes off the walls without needing a punchline.
Home is sitting in a recliner in a sweat suit, braless, wrapped in a blanket because the A/C is so cold. There is comfort in being physically and emotionally a mess and being safe in it.
Where I remove the things I wore all day in order to feel put-together and acceptable to society. Where I sometimes strut around in whatever I please. And feel completely accepted for who I am, just as I am.
My home has a husband in it who kisses my forehead in passing, and I feel more loved in that moment than if he shouted it from a rooftop.
Arguments are allowed here, though we rarely have them.
Forgiveness lives in the walls.
I have made peace with the shadows I brought with me.
I’ve learned to live with them, maybe even learned to love them a little.
I spent too many years afraid of what was in the dark to waste this season on being fearful of it.
There are times I catch myself feeling regret. It is emotional, sad, and heavy, with a wish that I could go back and change things. But I know better. If I changed any of it, I would not have this life or this home. And this life is the story I was always meant to tell.
Because home, I have come to understand, is not a town or an abode with bedrooms. It is where I am heard and seen. Where can I stop pretending? Where the hum of the refrigerator at two in the morning is the only background noise I need.
My home is now a safe house, a history book, and a confessional. It is where I sleep the best. It is where I cook. Where I store my good memories and where I have experienced one of my hardest ones yet.
Everyone comes when they are feeling nostalgic or need to see their mom. My home is in the beautiful state of Arkansas.
And after everything I have survived- the years of hiding, the grief of starting over. This life I live today, in this home, feels complete.
Home is my husband, my children, and the woman I finally became. It is found in the life I have built and in the struggles and peace I have made with myself to get here.
And I would not trade any of it. Not the struggle, or the grief. Not even starting over. Because all of it brought me here. And I am home.
✍️ Writing Challenge: “What Does Home Mean to You?”
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Naomi lit the amber candle in the corner of her room at The Medspa 101. She aligned the towels on the warming shelf, making sure the corners matched and the edges were flush. She opened the top drawer, then the second, then the third. Checking that everything inside lay where it should.
The first client of the day was a woman wanting her lips to look fuller. Once the woman settled into the chair, Naomi pulled on her gloves, then tilted the woman’s head back. Naomi placed her pinky finger along the woman’s jaw to steady her hand. She could feel the warmth of the woman’s breath through her gloves. The smell of coffee mixed with nicotine made it through her mask; it reminded her of her grandmother.
The woman wore a soft, floral perfume that smelled expensive, but strong. She was trying to mask the smell of her morning cigarette. Naomi breathed through her mouth for a moment, then through her nose again. She had trained herself years ago to let smells pass through her without lingering.
Naomi worked carefully, marking the woman’s lip line, measuring, and steadying her hand. The woman didn’t flinch when Naomi inserted the needle. Naomi made several passes with the needle, pausing between each insertion to visualize where to place the next one.
When she was done, the woman opened her eyes. Naomi handed her a mirror. The woman looked from side to side, then turned to Naomi.
“You smell good,” she said.
Naomi’s eyes dropped to the ground. “Thank you.”
Naomi turned to the counter and washed her hands nervously, then washed them again. She hated it when people told her she smelled good. That’s why she had stopped wearing perfume years ago. It must be my deodorant, she thought.
The woman left, pleased with her new lips. Naomi wiped down the chair, blew out the candle, and aligned the towels again before picking up her keys to leave.
The road into town ran past her childhood home. It was the only road in and out. Every weekday morning, she drove it to get to the salon, and every evening, she drove it back home. The old homestead had been sold three times since she moved out — once when her mom and siblings moved, and twice after that. It was so old when they moved there that she couldn’t understand why it was still standing.
For years, she had begged God to burn it down. She was even ready to start the fire herself, but she was too afraid she would get caught. And she knew exactly which room she would ignite first. That middle bedroom upstairs. She had visualized all the ways she could destroy that room. One night, she stayed awake, imagining herself taking an ax to it, starting with the bed.
She shuddered, remembering the tiled ceiling and how she would try counting them to take her mind off what was being done to her. There were nine glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to one of the tiles. From that one time her brother talked about becoming an astronaut. She could still smell the room, still smell him. Dust masked with Glade, and his oily scalp. But one memory that haunted her constantly was what he always said to her. He liked the way she smelled.
She thought moving out would help her forget. But driving past that house twice a day would not let her memories fade. It only strengthened them. Her stomach ached every time she passed. She held her breath as if she was trying not to smell that room. She gave it a quick look, drove a few miles, and then realized she had checked out.
Over the weekend, severe storms and a tornado came through their small town. There was extensive storm damage throughout the area. Her home was spared. She lived in a little valley, and tornadoes seemed to skip over it. But Monday morning, when she was headed to work, she realized the tornado had taken the same path she did every day.
She saw wads of grass wedged in trees left standing, pecan orchards split open, a path leveled to the ground. The roof rolled back on homes. Then, as she was approaching her childhood home, she noticed it had been leveled to a heap of lumber.
She stopped the car and stared. Her hands gripped the steering wheel so tight her neck and shoulders ached. Then she started to cry. She wasn’t sure whether she was sad because a good part of her childhood had been destroyed, or relieved that a bad part of it had been. But it was both. Her prayer had been answered. The home was destroyed, although not in the way she imagined. She turned the car around and drove home, canceling her appointments and telling them she had storm damage to deal with.
It would be months before they cleared the house off the land. Every day she passed it, she was reminded of the destruction that a home was capable of. For 130 days, it looked like the same heap of destruction it had been the morning after the storm. Nothing changed, and no grass grew. The storm had taken the topsoil, too. And a bulldozer sat on the property in anticipation of work.
Day after day, at work, her hands kept moving. She did facials, lash extensions, brow waxes, Botox, and lip injections. And she would light the candle and align the towels. The women in her chair talked about their husbands, their children, and their vacations. Naomi listened, nodded, and smoothed serum into their skin. At the end of each day, she drove home past the wreckage. And the bulldozer did not move. She hated the way the sight of that debris made her feel.
About six months after the storm, on a bright morning, she drove past and saw everything was gone. The wreckage. The bulldozer. All of it. She stopped, then pulled into what used to be the driveway and turned off the engine. She sat there for a moment, both hands still on the wheel. Then opened the door and got out. The cool Autumn breeze felt refreshing.
The lot was bare. Smooth in some places, churned in others, the way a piece of land looks after machines have done their work. She walked to the middle of the lot and stood there. Looking up at where the staircase had been. The one she had to climb to that middle bedroom. Above her, somewhere in the empty sky, was where the ceiling tiles and stars had been.
Then she squatted down and ran her hands through the dirt, remembering the hardwood floors in the living room. The dirt was damp and smelled earthy and clean, like after a fresh rain. This dirt had been hidden under the floor of this house since 1930. She felt something and closed her hand around it. It was a nail. Old, rusted, and bent at the tip. She turned it over in her palm. Then tucked it into her pocket. Stood up and brushed her hands on her scrubs. She let out a sigh; her stomach was no longer in a knot.
She got back in the car and drove the rest of the way to work.
At the salon, she lit the amber candle and aligned the towels — corners still matched, edges still flush. She checked the drawers, top to bottom. Then she washed her hands once. Her first client of the day was a woman she had not seen before. The woman settled into the chair, tilted her head back, then asked Naomi, “What perfume are you wearing?”
Naomi smiled as she pulled on her gloves and said, “It’s just my deodorant. It must be doing its job well today.” She placed her pinky along the woman’s jaw and began shaping her new appearance. She could feel the nail in her pocket pressing against her while she leaned into her client. And she thought of that lot and the fresh dirt. And how she, too, had been given a clean slate.
About The Author:
Yoli Kae Reynolds is the author of Not What God Promised, a memoir. She is a Certified Journal Therapy & Grief Coach based in Central Arkansas. Her writing explores suicide loss, family trauma, and survival in the aftermath of abuse. Her personal essays have appeared on Medium in Women Write, Reaching Hearts, Threads of Life, and Money and Momentum. Her fiction has appeared in The Fiction Journal on Substack. Through both her coaching practice and her fiction, she investigates how systems fail survivors and the violence that echoes through families.
Originally published at https://thefictionjournal.substack.com.
After my divorce from a violent marriage in 2014, we (the children and I) faced another traumatic event, leading us to seek counseling. Each Therapist who heard our story said the same thing:
“Wow! You should write a book!” He shook his head in amazement, mixed with bewilderment and perplexity.
I rolled my eyes, took a deep breath, and looked up. I nodded my head in agreement. (If I had a dollar for every time someone told me that, I would have enough money to actually publish the book!)
He continued, “No, I’m being serious.”
Tears started to fill my eyes. I didn’t even want to come into his office today, but my daughter asked me to be there this time. I laughed mockingly and said, “Yes, I know, but I’m not ready to revisit it.”
His face cringed as he realized that my daughter’s therapy session could easily turn into my therapy session. “I understand, but just when you think that MAYBE you can, then that is the precise time to do it. It may even help you get some closure.”
Closure. But I am over my ex! Or at least I thought I was. MAYBE it is time. MAYBE this is it. MAYBE this is the beginning, to the end.
I wrote this blog on May 31, 2016:
I was not ready ten years ago. I did not want to revisit it. But now I’m telling my story.
The book is almost done. I’ll keep you posted.
Originally published at https://yolikaereynolds.substack.com.
