I Didn’t Know There Was Anything Beyond the World I Was Given

There was a girl I used to be.

When I look back at old photos now, I hardly recognize her.

Not because she wasn’t beautiful.

Not because she wasn’t trying.

Not because she wasn’t real.

I don’t recognize her because she was living inside a world so small, so sealed, so predetermined, that she didn’t even know there was anything beyond it.

She did not know she was asleep to herself.

She did not know that what she called faith was often fear.

She did not know that what she called goodness was often performance.

She did not know that what she called safety was often constriction.

She did not know that a person could live from their own center, from their own knowing, from their own aliveness.

She didn’t know there was another way to be.

That small world was all she had ever been given.

It was the air she breathed.

The map she inherited.

The story she was told was the only story.

Be good. Be pure. Be pleasing. Be obedient.

Be chosen by disappearing.

Be loved by staying small enough to fit inside everyone else’s comfort.

And she tried. God, how she tried.

She tried to be the right woman.

The right wife. The right mother. The right believer.

The right example. The right everything.

But when you spend your life becoming what everyone else needs, there comes a day when you realize you have become a shell of yourself.

A well-dressed shell. A smiling shell. A capable shell.

A shell who can perform, endure, organize, serve, and survive.

But still a shell.

And the hardest part is this: she didn’t know.

She did not know there was more.

She did not know that life could feel spacious.

That love could breathe.

That truth could be bigger than doctrine.

That a body could become a home instead of a battleground.

That desire could be sacred.

That grief could crack open false things.

That leaving could be holy.

That awakening could cost you almost everything and still be worth it.

She did not know.

Until the questions became too big.

Until the pain became too much.

Until the life she had built could no longer contain the truth pressing from underneath it.

That is where my son became my hero.

Cole.

Even writing his name still reaches into places in me no words can fully hold.

He did not come to me as a teacher in the way people romanticize pain.

I will never call what happened beautiful.

I will never pretend loss is a gift wrapped in spiritual language.

Some things are devastating because they are devastating.

Some losses split the earth open because they do.

But I can tell the truth about what his life — and his loss — did.

He broke open the sealed room.

He released me.

Not by asking me to let him go.

Not by making suffering noble.

Not by turning tragedy into some neat redemptive lesson.

He released me because his life forced questions that my small world could not answer.

He released me because my grief became too real for borrowed theology.

He released me because once I stood in that kind of pain, I could no longer survive inside explanations that demanded silence, denial, or spiritual performance.

The questions were too big.

The pain was too much.

And the world I had been handed was too small.

So something in me began to crack.

At first it felt like destruction.

Then betrayal.

Then terror.

Then freedom so unfamiliar I barely knew how to stand inside it.

But slowly, painfully, honestly, that cracking became an opening.

An opening into a bigger life.

A truer life.

A life I did not even know was possible.

And no, I did not arrive here all at once.

I found my way in fragments.

In grief.

In anger.

In the courage to ask forbidden questions.

In the unraveling of old identities.

In the slow and brutal work of learning that love does not require self-erasure.

In the sacred shock of discovering that my body had wisdom.

That my voice had wisdom.

That my desire had wisdom.

That my no had wisdom.

That my becoming did not need permission from systems built to keep me small.

Over time, the world kept opening.

What once would have terrified me became part of my liberation.

Expansion came where fear used to live.

The life we live now would have once been unimaginable to the woman in those old photographs.

The love.

The honesty.

The tenderness.

The complexity.

The courage to step outside inherited rules and build something real.

A throuple.

A deeper embodiment.

A more conscious way of loving.

A refusal to keep performing a life that looks acceptable while starving the soul.

And I know some people still do not understand that.

That’s okay.

Because I am no longer living to be understandable to people committed to smallness.

I am living to be true.

And from that truth, so much has been born.

A book.

A voice.

A platform.

A deeper marriage.

A more honest love.

A new life.

A new home.

A new place.

In just two days, we leave for Florida.

Even typing that feels surreal.

We are standing in the middle of so many endings and so many beginnings that I can barely separate them anymore.

We are packing boxes and touching memories and sorting through old photo albums.

I’ve been looking at the faces of the people we were and feeling both grief and awe.

We are letting go of a house.

We are carrying a finished manuscript.

We are stepping toward a future we could not have imagined a few years ago.

And in two months, our show comes out.

There is something almost cosmic about the timing of it all.

The book is done.

The move is here.

The old life is closing.

The new one is opening wider.

And our story is about to become visible to even more people.

If I have been quiet here for a while, it is not because life has gone still.

It is because life has been moving at the speed of transformation.

There are seasons when you post every thought.

And there are seasons when you are inside the chrysalis, breaking and reforming, too busy becoming to narrate it in real time.

This has been one of those seasons.

But I wanted to come here and tell the truth:

We are in a threshold season.

A holy in-between.

A season of endings and beginnings.

A season where the old self is not coming with us.

A season where the life ahead is asking for more honesty, more embodiment, more courage, more soul.

And if I could say anything to the girl in those old photos, it would be this:

You are not foolish for not knowing.

You were given a very small world and told it was the whole sky.

You were surviving inside walls you did not build.

You were doing your best with the light you had.

But love, there is more.

So much more.

There is a life where your body is not your enemy.

There is a life where your questions are not sins.

There is a life where grief does not destroy you but deepens you.

There is a life where love expands instead of confines.

There is a life where truth costs you things but gives you back your soul.

There is a life where you do not disappear to belong.

There is a life where you become visible to yourself.

I know because I am living it now.

And Cole, my brave boy, my hero, is woven through all of it.

He opened the door I did not know existed.

He shattered the illusion that the tiny world I was given was enough.

He released me from bonds I might never have had the courage to break on my own.

He changed the direction of my life forever.

I carry that with reverence.

I carry that with grief.

I carry that with gratitude so fierce it still burns.

So here we are.

At the edge of a move.

At the edge of a launch.

At the edge of a public unfolding.

At the edge of a new chapter in every possible way.

And for once, I am not standing at this threshold as a shell.

I am standing here awake.

Fully awake.

With my voice.

With my truth.

With my love.

With my grief.

With my expansion.

With my becoming.

And I am ready for what comes next.

Always,

Kami