Chap. 14 - The Weaving Begins

21 Jul, 2025

Life is the weaving of a divine tapestry and the soul is the weaver.

As human beings, we know not what the tapestry will look like, or what it's for. Along the way, we often pause, thinking we've found the perfect color to weave in—only to learn it was only meant for one small corner of the design.

🌼

There are chapters in a life that don’t lend themselves to stories—not because there is nothing to say, but because the stories are too many. They blur at the edges. They bleed together.

From the moment I left home at eighteen, I entered the long corridor of my forgetting. A span of 23+ years, lived through shifting roles, relationships, costumes, and chemicals. I was searching, though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time. Searching for belonging. For connection. For identity. For peace. For something that didn’t feel like terror lodged in my chest.

Alcohol and drugs were not a rebellion; they were a balm. A way to numb the ache of a soul separated from itself. I loved hard. I crashed harder. There were marriages, children, new starts. There were years lost in the fog of survival. I was, in a way, both running from pain and stitching together my own form of life, as best I could with the tools I had.

There were moments of light. My children. My brief awakenings into art, music, dance. Kindness from unexpected places that I didn't truly see as such. Even those were fleeting, because I hadn’t yet come home to myself.

The thread running through it all was fragmentation. I played every role with full conviction: the church girl, the hippie, the housewife, the wanderer. And yet underneath, the same child lived—still scanning for danger, still trying to earn love.

The final years of that period spiraled into deeper darkness. A relationship ruled by fear and violence. A house where my children and I never felt safe. And then one day, a voice rose within me. A whisper, but fierce: It has to stop!

And so, at the age of 30, I stopped. The drinking. The drugs. I thought I had stopped the pretending, too. But I hadn’t. That had started long before—when fear first entered my body at five. I built a self to survive. By thirty, I had lived inside that self for so long, I had no memory of who I’d been before the pretending began. Not even the girl I spoke of in Chapter 5—the one who once knew magic and lifted herself skyward.

That decision—small and monumental—was the beginning of my recovery. Not just from substances, but from a lifetime of soul-loss. It would take years before I fully understood what recovery really meant. But the moment I said “enough,” the weaver in me picked up the thread again.

And that’s where the next part of this story begins.

⬅️ Chap. 13
➡️ Chap. 15
⬆️ Return to Hub List

🕊A Living Memoir

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to share something, reach out > here.