The Light is You

What to do when there is no light at the end.

Last month, I changed the name of this publication to The Light is You. This essay is all about the new name, and what you can expect from my Substack going forward (spoiler: it’s more of the same!)

I started this Substack two years ago to document writing a memoir about the years I spent searching for something to believe in after getting divorced at twenty-seven and leaving the Evangelical church.

Part of what made that time of my life so hard was the way I’d been shapeshifting for years, hiding parts of myself to better navigate the confines of a belief system that felt toxic and the wounds of an unhappy marriage.

When I left, I believed I would bounce back to some earlier version of myself who hadn’t felt the need to hide. At first, it seemed like I would. The relief of being free was so intense that it blanketed all aches for a while. But like a corpse—loose at first, with almost the appearance of life—rigor mortis began to creep in. I felt myself stiffening, calcifying. I longed to sit very still until no one could see me, to recoil back into myself inch by inch.

The humiliation of “failing” at my marriage was bad, but the exposure was what really shocked me. I felt all the eyes in my life swivel toward me, the slowing of cars beside an accident, and realized that I couldn’t stand to be perceived. I was not cured from this disease that made me want to shift into another shape to protect myself, and although I tried, the muscles to hold myself in place had atrophied after years of disuse.

I kept waiting for the more carefree version of myself to arrive, to take over and tell me how to be myself again.

I’m never coming back, I realized as it finally clicked that there was no way to resurrect the earlier, unmarred person I had been counting on to save me. If I wanted to learn how to stop hiding, I was on my own, without the protective shell of some braver past self to hold me up.

Whenever I remembered that I would never know myself as I could have been, that the possibility of her had ceased to exist somewhere in those years of abandoning myself for the shapes and beliefs of others, I felt a chasm open up in my mind. I found myself scraping and clawing at the past, trying to salvage something of the person that had been lost in those years, her potential, her trajectory. I longed for her with an intensity I couldn’t describe, grieved with a ferocity that felt illegitimate.

And because I couldn’t describe it to anyone I felt like no one around me understood what I was going through. A trick of grief, perhaps, but the sense of being alone in the echoing cavity of loss was acute.

While I languished in the loneliness of the experience, my family and friends told me not to worry, that the suffering would end.

Grief is hard for people to sit with, I understand that. It is terrifying to be near the pulse of such a raw emotion, even when it is neatened and restrained, because it reminds us of all those things in life that we can’t control. We fear being pulled into the tailspin of loss.

It is easier to produce a cliché refrain, offered as a jeweled comfort: there will be a light at the end of it all.

While people shouted down the tunnel at me to keep going, practically gloating about all the happiness that was waiting on the other side, I internalized the idea that my life would only really begin again once all the grief was over.

Unfortunately, some grief is immortal, an aimless thing that does not age. Sometimes there isn’t an end.

But I wanted to live!! So, grief or not, I started to try. I did new things. Things that felt awkward and complicated, like taking a kayaking trip with strangers. I learned how to stay inside myself even when I was uncomfortable or lonely. I let myself be bad at things long enough to become good at them. I raged over all the pieces of myself that were lost, and I let the heat of that anger and the vision of what could have been propel me forward.

I also started nurturing my own creativity. This was something that I had been doing instinctively with my writing since college, but in those years after my divorce I began to be more intentional about it.

I read the Artist’s Way and began doing Morning Pages (almost) everyday. I started taking risks, like submitting my essays to literary journals. I got published. I launched a Substack (real proof that I had learned to endure being seen).

And I learned that there is a lot of light inside the tunnel as well.

Whenever I began to worry that the darkness of grief would, at long last, become too absolute, that the last reserves of joy, or optimism, or hope were finally about to run out, I would come upon another little light.

Something beautiful and serendipitous would happen, an exciting diversion would present itself. Sometimes, it was that exquisite anticipation of new love, or the thrill of finding out an essay I’d written was being published. Sometimes it was just summoning the courage to tell someone how I really felt and finding that I did not turn to sand in the laser beam of their disappointment.

Eventually, I stopped obsessing over how long the tunnel would be. I understood that I didn’t have to wait until all the grief was “over” to experience my life again.

Learning to be seen and becoming (at times embarrassingly) earnest about my art changed me. It helped me create something meaningful out of the memories that had caused me the most pain.

I learned that even immortal grief changes shape over time, until it forms something that almost makes sense. Until it starts to give off its own kind of light.

In 2024, I trained and became certified as an Associate Certified Coach, specializing in helping people make progress on goals or transitions that feel stalled. Coaching is now part of my job, and in the last two years, I have worked with more than 100 clients including tech workers, recent graduates, non-profit professionals, salespeople, and creatives to help them get unstuck and feel more connected to their inner compass.

As I worked with my clients, I began to see the connection between coaching and creative practices. I had seen the power of creativity in my own life to guide me through phases of grief and loss, professional uncertainty (we are officially in the era of AI, like it or not), and even my lifelong search for something bigger than myself to believe in.

I decided that I wanted to help other people connect with that power too, because I know that developing our creativity can help save us in those difficult or unexpected turns of life, like being laid-off from a job or losing someone you love (even if that person is yourself).

My goal for this Substack going forward is that it would be a place for my creative writing and a place for me to share more about how you can nurture creativity in your life in order to deepen meaning and fulfillment. Creativity is for everyone, not just writers, or painters, or classically trained artists.

I plan to share occasional essays on developing creative practices, what has helped me get unstuck when I am hitting a wall, and how to build resilience to the fear of sharing our art with the world. If you want to learn more about my coaching work, you can visit my website!

In my creative writing, you can expect more of what I have been sharing these last two years: stories from my life, reflections on love and relationships, and essays about learning to believe deeply in myself again. I write about grief—the suffocating interior of that apparently infinite tunnel. And I write about the lights, those sun-soaked days of triumph and exhilaration that reminded me I was alive and that there was something left of me besides suffering.

This is me shouting down a dark tunnel to my younger self.

“There is no light at the end!” I am screaming. “The light is you!”

The light is you.