Hello, and welcome to I Grow Strong Again, a weekly newsletter delivered to your email via Substack. I write essays with thematic elements of ambivalence and living in the paradoxes of life, reconstructing your identity midlife, and personal growth.
The idea behind the title of my Substack newsletter is based on a Scottish family crest from my husband Ben’s side: Reviresco, which loosely translates into “I grow strong again.” Accompanying the motto is an image of a large oak tree stump and a sapling sprouting at its base.
To me, this symbolizes the resilience of humanity, that each of us has a story of adversity we have overcome—or are still overcoming, bit by bit—and these stories deserve to be honored, spoken, and shared.
For a more detailed story behind the theme of this Substack, you can read this article.
As a free subscriber, you will begin receiving weekly essays to your inbox, and you can view the full archive of past publications here.
To get an idea of my style and voice, you might want to check out some of these articles:
- Pretty isn’t usually used to describe my daughter—A child’s compliment boosted my daughter Sarah’s self-confidence. “Pretty is not a word typically used to describe someone with a craniofacial diagnosis. Usually, it’s the opposite: witch, ugly, monster. Sarah has heard all of these a handful of times. But never pretty.”
- The world can be ugly, but you are not—An experience at the splash pad made Sarah question her appearance. “Things, and people, become beautiful to us once they are familiar. I’ve always said we fear what we don’t understand. Maybe this is why I’ve learned to live in the gray rather than in careful compartments of this or that, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. It’s because of raising a daughter like Sarah and what she has taught me about life, about love, about humanity. About the prejudices we all harbor but seldom admit. About the growth that is possible when we step beyond what is familiar and instead learn to sit with our discomfort until we can hold a space for it.”
- Hard things aren’t always bad things—Most of us live in the question marks, not the periods. “It’s the becoming that matters, not the destination. And we are always becoming.”
- I chose my son, and his life saved mine—Everything becomes a gift, if we let it: the tears, the broken hearts, the long nights. “Maybe it’s true what my therapist told me recently: ‘The most beautiful parts of you are the broken parts.’ Maybe the gift is in our brokenness, not in the wholeness we desperately seek. .” Brokenness reveals our need for each other, our need for love and connection and belonging.
- We live in an exhausting world—Life is an invitation to revive what has fallen asleep in us. “It is time to awaken our senses and our entire beings to what is possible now, today. Because now is all we have, and it is rife with opportunity to create and share beauty in the midst of detritus, to become the better person we’ve intended to be, to discover what we are truly capable of.”
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