36 lessons in 36 years

I turned 36 on November 29, 2025.

I didn’t do a big thing. No party, no big trip. Honestly, by December I was just trying to get to January in one piece. But something about getting older — actually older, not fake-complaining about it older — makes me want to take stock. To look back and name what I actually know now that I didn’t know at 25, or 30, or even last year.

Some of these lessons cost me something. A relationship. A season of my life I can’t get back. A version of myself I held onto way too long.

A few of them I’m still learning...like, actively, right now, while I’m writing this. I put those in too because I think the pretense that you’ve fully “arrived” at a lesson is its own kind of lie.

This isn’t advice. I’m not writing from the other side of anything. I’m writing from inside it, same as you. These are just the things life has had to teach me the slow way. And if even one of them lands for you the way it finally landed for me, then this whole thing was worth it.

Here are 36 of them.

When everything feels unsettled, it’s usually a sign something deeper needs attention.

This is one of those things that’s really hard to see when you’re in it, because your brain is trying so hard to connect dots and make sense of something that genuinely isn’t adding up. And the harder you try, the more confused you get. You go in circles. You replay conversations. You second guess what you saw, what you heard, what you felt. You start to wonder if you’re the problem.

Here’s what I’ve learned: chronic confusion is information. If you are consistently unable to find solid ground in a situation, in a relationship, in a dynamic, it’s worth asking whether the confusion itself is telling you something. Because sometimes what looks like your inability to figure something out is actually your gut trying to tell you that something doesn’t line up. That there’s a distortion happening somewhere. That what you’re being shown and what’s actually true are two different things.

You cannot think your way out of confusion that was created by someone else’s inconsistency or dishonesty or dysfunction. No amount of analysis is going to make that make sense. Sometimes the clarity comes not from figuring it out but from stepping back far enough to see that the confusion was never yours to solve in the first place.

Hope can make you overlook what honesty would have revealed. Pay attention to what people show you consistently, not just what they tell you.

I think a lot of us have stayed in situations way longer than we should have because we fell in love with what someone could be instead of seeing clearly what they actually were. Potential is intoxicating. It gives you something to hold onto, something to work toward, a reason to stay just a little longer. But potential that never materializes isn’t a promise. It’s a pattern too.

Watch what people do when things get hard. Watch how they treat you when there’s nothing to gain. Watch whether their actions over time match the words they say in the good moments. That’s the data. Not the highlight reel, not the apology, not the version of them they show you when they’re trying to win you back.

People tell you who they are all the time. The question is whether you’re willing to believe them.

Clarity is a sign of emotional health. Chaos is not chemistry. Peace is not boring.

I think a lot of us grew up with a version of love that was actually just intensity. The push and pull. The highs and lows. The kind of relationship where you never quite knew where you stood but somehow that uncertainty got mistaken for passion. Movies, TV shows, books — they sell us this idea that love is supposed to feel like fire all the time. That if it isn’t a little dramatic, a little unpredictable, a little all-consuming, then it must not be the real thing.

And then we took that into real life and called it romance. We romanticized being chased. We mistook mixed signals for mystery. We sat by our phones trying to decode whether someone was interested based on how long they took to text back. We called it a situationship and acted like that was just how dating works now.

It’s not. It’s just immaturity. And we normalized it.

Safe love can feel unfamiliar at first, especially if you’re not used to it. It can even feel boring if your nervous system got wired to expect chaos. But that feeling isn’t a sign that something is missing. It’s a sign that something is finally right.

You should know where you stand. You should be able to say how you feel without calculating how it’s going to land. You should be able to have a hard conversation and trust that the relationship is going to survive it. Clarity is attractive. Consistency is attractive. Someone who makes you feel settled in yourself instead of constantly off balance — that is worth so much more than the chaos ever was.

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Loving someone is not the same as saving them. Only God can do that.

This one is hard because it requires you to accept something that feels like giving up. When you love someone, your instinct is to stay. To keep showing up, keep reaching out, keep believing that your presence alone can pull them back. And sometimes love does that. But sometimes the storm isn’t something that happened to them. It’s something they’ve chosen. A pattern they keep returning to, a situation they keep recreating, a version of themselves they’re not ready to leave behind yet.

And you cannot want their healing more than they want it for themselves. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work. All it does is pull you into the storm with them, and now there are two people drowning instead of one.

The hardest thing I’ve learned about loving people well is that sometimes it means letting them sit in the consequences of their own choices without rescuing them from it. Not because you don’t care. Because you do. And because the only one who can actually save anyone is God. Your job is to love them. His job is to reach them. Those are not the same assignment.

Everyone messes up. But repeated behavior shows you what someone is actually choosing. Patterns matter more than the words they use to explain them.

Effort only works when both people are willing to come to the table.

This one I learned the hard way. Because when you love someone, or when you’re invested in a relationship, it’s really easy to convince yourself that if you just try harder, love better, explain more clearly, eventually something will shift. And sometimes it does. But sometimes the other person has already decided, consciously or not, that they’re not moving. And no amount of effort on your end changes that.

It’s not a reflection of how hard you tried. It’s not a reflection of how much you loved them. Some people are not available for the kind of growth a relationship requires. And the sooner you can see that clearly, the sooner you stop pouring yourself into something that was never going to change.

You should grow in love. You should not disappear in it.

I think a lot of us have been in situations where love felt more like shrinking than growing. Where you got smaller over time. Quieter. Less sure of yourself. Where you started editing who you were to keep the peace or keep the person. And it happened so gradually you almost didn’t notice until one day you looked up and couldn’t quite remember who you were before.

That’s not love. That’s losing yourself. Real love, healthy love, makes you more yourself. It gives you room to grow into who God made you to be, not less of it. If a relationship is consistently making you smaller, that’s information worth paying attention to.

You cannot stay whole if you keep allowing people to drain the parts of you that God is trying to strengthen.

I used to think boundaries were something you put up when you were angry or done with someone. Like they were a punishment. What I understand now is that limits are just an honest acknowledgment of what you can and cannot carry. They’re not walls. They’re just the truth about your capacity.

And some people, without even meaning to, will take everything you give them and come back for more. If you let them, they will drain the exact parts of you that God is trying to build up. Your peace, your energy, your sense of self. Protecting those things isn’t selfish. It’s stewardship. You can’t give from empty. And you can’t grow what you keep giving away.

Access is a privilege, not a default. Not every person can hold the weight of your heart. Protecting your peace is wisdom, not selfishness.

You cannot stay emotionally healthy if you keep abandoning yourself to keep the peace.

And the tricky thing about this one is you might not even realize you’re doing it. It happens slowly. You stop saying what you actually need because it’s easier. You shrink your preferences down to whatever causes the least friction. You tell yourself you’re being flexible, being easy, being low maintenance. And it feels fine for a while because the peace feels real even if it isn’t.

But eventually the cost shows up. In resentment you can’t explain. In exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. In a quiet feeling that you’ve gotten so good at taking care of everyone else that you genuinely don’t know what you need anymore.

So it’s worth asking. Not in a dramatic, burn-everything-down kind of way. Just honestly. Am I saying what I actually need or am I saying what keeps things calm? Am I showing up as myself or as whoever this situation requires me to be?

It’s a small question. But the answer will tell you a lot.

Every time you dodge the hard thing, you strengthen fear, shame, procrastination, or resentment. Freedom comes when you choose discomfort on purpose instead of letting it choose you.

Pain becomes sacred when it’s brought to God instead of carried alone. Grief can open the door to a closeness with Him that comfort simply cannot create.

We live in a world that is really good at helping you avoid pain. There is always something to scroll, something to eat, something to buy, someone to text, some way to stay just distracted enough that you never have to actually sit with the thing that’s hurting. And comfort isn’t always bad. But it can become a way of managing your life instead of actually living it.

Pain has a way of stripping all of that away. And when it does, when you can’t scroll your way out of it or busy yourself past it, you find out what you actually believe. About yourself. About God. About whether any of this is real.

That’s where I’ve met Him most. Not in the easy seasons. In the ones where I had nothing left to offer and nowhere else to go. There is a kind of closeness with God that only grief can create. I wouldn’t have chosen it. But I wouldn’t trade it either.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the thing you’re most afraid to say out loud is probably the thing that has the most control over you right now. Name it. To God, to a therapist, to someone safe. It doesn’t have to be everyone. It just has to be someone.

It’s was freeing to me to learn that this is literally science. Your logical brain cannot lead when your emotional brain is overly activated. Plain as day, it cannot physically/biologically do it’s actual job. Giving yourself space is not weakness. It’s wisdom.

I have to remind myself of this one constantly. Like, embarrassingly often. Because when I’m in it — when something has hit a nerve or a conversation has gone sideways or I’ve gotten news that sent my nervous system into overdrive — my instinct is to respond immediately. To fix it, address it, say the thing, send the message. Right now.

And that is almost never the right call.

There’s actually science behind this. When your emotions are highly activated, your logical brain functionally takes a back seat. You are not thinking clearly. You are not going to say the right thing. You are not going to make the best decision. You are just reacting. And reactions made from that place have a way of making everything harder to clean up later.

So I’ve learned, slowly and with a lot of evidence, to give myself space first. Not forever. Not to avoid the conversation or the decision. Just enough space to come back down. To think. To respond from a place that’s actually grounded instead of activated.

It doesn’t feel strong in the moment. Stepping back when everything in you wants to engage feels like losing. But clarity on the other side of it is worth more than anything you could have said in the middle of it.

Leaving what harms you is part of choosing life.

This one sounds obvious until you’re actually in it. Because when you’re in it, leaving doesn’t feel like choosing life. It feels like blowing everything up. It feels like failure. It feels like giving up on something you promised yourself you wouldn’t give up on. There are kids involved, or finances, or history, or a version of the future you had already built in your head that you’re not ready to let go of yet.

And so you stay. And you try to heal inside the same walls that keep reopening the wound. And you wonder why you’re not getting better.

You can’t. That’s the honest answer. You cannot do the work of healing while you are still in the thing that is harming you. It’s like trying to recover from an injury while someone keeps hitting you in the same spot. The conditions aren’t right. They can’t be.

Leaving is not giving up. Leaving is not weakness. Sometimes leaving is the bravest and hardest and most necessary thing you will ever do. And it doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a job, a friendship, a church, a city, a dynamic you’ve outgrown. Anything that is consistently costing you your peace, your sense of self, your ability to hear God clearly.

Choosing to leave what harms you is choosing yourself. And sometimes that is exactly what God is asking you to do.

Real change happens when you let God reshape what you believe at the root — when you learn to live from who He says you are instead of performing your way toward it.

I catch myself doing this more than I’d like to admit. The grinding. The producing. The working harder as if output is what makes me matter. Like if I just do enough, create enough, show up enough, eventually I’ll feel like I’m enough. And for a little while it works. Until it doesn’t. And then I just raise the bar and start over.

That’s the trap. Because the doing feels productive. It looks like discipline from the outside. But underneath it, if I’m honest, it’s just a more socially acceptable version of the same lie: that my value is something I have to earn.

The truth, the thing I have to keep coming back to, is that I am literally nothing but a daughter of the Most High King. That’s it. That’s the whole identity. Not what I built, not what I posted, not how many things I checked off the list this week. Just that.

And getting there, actually living from that place instead of just knowing it intellectually, requires a level of inner work that is genuinely uncomfortable. It can make you feel completely undone. Because when you stop performing, when you strip away all the doing, you have to come face to face with what you actually believe about yourself underneath all of it. And that’s scary. But it’s also the only way through.

The doing will never be enough to fix a belief problem. Only God can do that. And He does it slowly, quietly, from the inside out.

The tight chest before a conversation you’re dreading. The exhaustion that shows up the second you stop moving. The way your stomach drops when someone says something that should be fine but isn’t. Your body knows. It was keeping score long before your brain was willing to look at the numbers.

This one took me a long time.

I kept waiting for a conversation that was never going to happen, an apology that was never going to come. At some point I had to decide that my healing couldn’t be held hostage by someone else’s unwillingness to show up.

You can close the door yourself. You’re allowed to.

I didn’t know how strong I was until I had no choice but to find out.

I didn’t do it perfectly. Not even close.

But going through it showed me two things I wouldn’t have seen any other way: that I was stronger than I thought I was, and that there were parts of me that still needed to be built up because they’d never been tested before. Both of those things were worth knowing.

I tried. Stayed busy, stayed distracted, stayed in motion.

It doesn’t matter.

The stuff you don’t deal with just sits there, completely unbothered, waiting for you to slow down. And you will slow down eventually. Better to choose when.

Some seasons require pruning before new life can come.

And pruning doesn’t feel like growth. It feels like loss. It feels like things being taken from you, relationships ending, doors closing, versions of yourself dying that you weren’t ready to let go of yet. It can feel like you’re going backwards when you’re actually just being prepared.

I think about a tree that gets cut back hard in the winter. From the outside it looks like damage. But come spring it grows fuller and stronger than it would have if it had been left alone. That’s what some seasons are. They don’t look like anything good is happening. But something is.

If you’re in a season that feels like loss right now, I just want to say…it might be exactly that. And it might also be the thing that makes what’s coming possible.

I’ve shown up to things exhausted, distracted, underprepared, and still in my head about seventeen other things.

And my kids didn’t care.

They just wanted me there. The perfect version of me they’ll never remember. The one who showed up anyway — that’s the one that counts.

It requires trust in the work already done on the cross.

I am guilty of this one constantly. The lie that if I stop, I’ll fall behind. That rest has consequences. That there’s always one more thing I should be doing before I’m allowed to exhale.

But choosing to rest is actually choosing to trust. It’s saying I believe that what God has already done is enough. That the effort, the time, the resources I’ve put in, He can multiply those in ways that me working harder simply cannot. That’s not a passive thing. That’s actually one of the harder acts of faith there is, because it requires you to stop doing the thing that feels productive and trust that He’s working even when you aren’t.

Hustle culture will tell you that rest is earned. That you can sleep when you’re dead. That your worth is measured in output. But that’s not the economy of the Kingdom. In the Kingdom, rest is commanded. It’s built into the rhythm of creation itself. And when you choose it, you’re not falling behind. You’re just finally trusting the one who’s actually in charge.

Information can teach you about God.

Revelation lets you actually meet Him.

You can understand Scripture with your mind, but only the Holy Spirit can make it real in a way that brings peace, conviction, and actual transformation.

I still catch myself replaying old moments and wishing I had seen things sooner. But I didn’t have the clarity then that I have now. I was doing the best I could with what I understood.

Hormones are REAL and very powerful. Paying attention to what my body is doing physiologically taught me when to give myself grace, when to slow down, and when my emotions are just louder because my hormones are shifting.

Some people are committed to misunderstanding you, and no amount of explaining will change that. Peace is accepting it.

If someone cannot hold complexity or sit with conflicting truths, the conversation was never really about understanding — it was about their discomfort. You don’t have to keep explaining yourself to someone who cannot meet you there. Save your energy.

In Numbers, Moses sent twelve men to scout the promised land. Ten came back terrified, eyes fixed on the obstacles. Two came back confident, eyes fixed on God. Ten stayed stuck in the wilderness. Two stepped into the promise. Our focus decides where we go.

I spent a long time, especially during the hardest season of my life, wondering if the bad things kept happening because I wasn’t hearing God clearly enough. Maybe my discernment was off. Maybe I wasn’t spiritually attentive enough. Maybe if I just prayed differently or listened better or got something right that I kept getting wrong, things would stop falling apart.

I’m still working through some of that, honestly. It’s complicated and I don’t think I have a clean bow to put on it yet. But what I do know now, on the other side of a lot of it, is this: God is the author of my story. And while I play a role in it, I don’t have to white-knuckle my way through every hard thing trying to fix it myself or figure out what I did to cause it.

He’s aware of what’s happening. He’s already in it. He’s already writing something I can’t see yet.

So when my mind starts to spiral, when things feel uncertain or scary or out of control, I’m learning to come back to that. Not toxic positivity, not pretending it’s fine. Just a quiet surrender. A reminder that peace with God isn’t about having all the answers or doing everything right. It’s about trusting that He’s going to meet you on the other side of whatever this is.

He always has. That’s enough for me to keep going.

His goodness doesn’t promise ease. It promises nothing hard will be wasted. He pulls purpose from impossible places and won’t abandon you in the valley, even when you’re tired and unsure.

Fear keeps you second-guessing. Obedience creates space for God to show you what you couldn’t see before. When you move in the direction He’s leading, the answers start to unfold and peace follows.

Conflict is not the problem. Unwillingness to repair is.

A healthy person can receive feedback. They’re self-aware enough to see their own blind spots, and willing enough to own their part even when it’s uncomfortable. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s not about being perfect or never causing harm. It’s about being willing to come back to the table and do the work of making it right.

But when you’re dealing with someone who isn’t healthy, you’re often dealing with someone who isn’t working with the same reality you are. And that’s where it gets dangerous. Because you can spend months, years, trying to resolve something with a person who will never see it the way you saw it, never own what you need them to own, never meet you where you need to be met. The conflict becomes a merry-go-round you can’t get off of. The longer you stay on it, the further you get from what actually brought you there in the first place.

Idk if you do this, but I used to think if I just explained it better, found the right words, came at it from a different angle, eventually they’d get it. They didn’t. Some people can’t. And recognizing that isn’t giving up. It’s just finally seeing clearly.

It is maturity to pivot when God (or your life) redirects you or when new information comes.

Changing your mind doesn’t make you a hypocrite. I want to say that clearly because I think a lot of people stay stuck in positions they’ve outgrown because they’re afraid of what it looks like to shift. But believing something different than you believed five years ago isn’t inconsistency. It’s growth. Those are not the same thing.

Maybe you got new information. Maybe an experience cracked something open that no book or podcast or TED Talk ever could have. Maybe a friend went through something and gave you a perspective you literally had no access to before that moment. That’s not weakness. That’s how humans are actually supposed to develop.

I think about who I was in previous seasons of my life and the things I was so sure about. Some of those things I still believe. Some of them I don’t. And I’ve had to make peace with the fact that the version of me who believed them wasn’t wrong, she just didn’t know what I know now. She was working with what she had.

Changing your mind is part of growing into who you are. It’s how your perspective develops, how your point of view of the world gets sharper and more honest and more yours. The people who never change their minds aren’t the strong ones. They’re just the stuck ones.

A lot of life is completely out of your control. And that is genuinely unfair sometimes. I think you’re allowed to sit with that for a minute. You’re allowed to be angry about it, grieve it, say out loud that it shouldn’t have happened. That’s not weakness. That’s being honest.

But at some point the question shifts. Because you can’t change what happened. You can’t go back. The only thing that’s actually yours is what you do with it from here.

And I think that’s the hardest part. Not the pain itself, but the moment you realize you have to decide something. Whether you’re going to let this thing define you or inform you. Whether you’re going to stay in the self-pity, which is valid until it isn’t, or whether you’re going to step into it and own how it’s changed you.

For me that has looked like bringing it to God and surrendering the work of restoration to Him. Because I couldn’t fix it myself. I tried. What I could do was let it shape my character instead of harden it. Let it make me more compassionate, more honest, more clear about what I actually believe and who I actually want to be.

The people who come out of hard things well aren’t the ones who had it easier. They’re the ones who decided what they were going to do with it.

It doesn’t mean trusting again, restoring the relationship, or excusing the harm. It just means releasing what will keep wounding you if you keep carrying it.

I want to be really clear about what forgiveness is not, because I think we’ve gotten it twisted. Forgiving someone is not pardoning them. It’s not saying what they did was okay, or that you’re opening the door back up, or that there are no consequences for how they treated you. You are not the judge of that. That’s not actually your job.

What forgiveness is, at least the way I’ve come to understand it, is a transfer. You’re taking the thing you’ve been carrying, the anger, the hurt, the injustice of it, and you’re handing it to God. You’re saying I’m not going to hold this anymore. Not because they deserve to be released from it, but because I deserve to be free from it.

And here’s the part that finally made it click for me: holding onto unforgiveness isn’t neutral. It’s poison. It keeps you tethered to the person and the thing that hurt you long after they’ve moved on. And honestly, it’s not biblical. I say that gently but clearly. Withholding forgiveness is its own kind of disobedience, and it costs you more than it costs them.

Forgiving someone also doesn’t mean trusting them again. Those are two separate things. Trust is rebuilt slowly, over time, through consistent behavior. Forgiveness is just the part that’s yours to give regardless of what they do next.

So I release it. Not to them. To God. And I trust Him to deal with what I couldn’t. That’s the only version of forgiveness I’ve been able to actually do. And it’s the only one that’s ever set me free.

This list is one of the reasons I started this Substack.

Not to have answers — I very much do not have all the answers — but to think out loud with people who are in it too. The messy middle, the hard seasons, the slow lessons. That’s what this space is for.

Every single one of these could be its own essay. And honestly? I think they will be. One by one, I want to go deeper on the ones that are still alive in me — the ones I’m still learning, the ones that cost me something to figure out.

So, anyways. That’s what this is. Slower. Longer. More honest than a caption ever let me be.