Let me shout a heartfelt THANK YOU to every.single.one of you who took time to respond to my last email.
In my heart, I knew I would be met with love and support. But in my head, I was afraid and struggling with doubt. After all, it's been a long time since you all heard from me.
But at the end of the day, I believe that the women I connect with will understand the silence and will celebrate the return. And you did!
So today, let’s talk about where we go from here.
First, I want to share a little more about my life over the past 18 months, and then I have a question for you.
For the past 18 months, my life has been relatively quiet.
I wish I could say it has been a peaceful kind of quiet, like a Sunday morning, sipping my favorite cup of tea. But no.
My life was the kind of quiet that happens right after something breaks.
You know the awkward stillness when you're staring at the mess as you try to figure out, "Okay. Now what?!"
Over time, I hope to share more details about my journey over the past year and a half. The truth is, some things still don’t quite make sense to me yet.
But I will tell you this: my life shifted, and I wasn't ready for it.
So I went silent.
Not just on here. In life. I pulled back from spaces where I used to show up faithfully. I stopped reaching out and started making space to be still. I let voicemails sit in my inbox and texts go left unread for days.
The version of me that used to fiercely show up ‘no matter what’ — needed a major timeout. Now, I needed to show up for that part of me as faithfully as I used to for others.But when the timeout extended from days to weeks, then weeks to months, I started to think something was deeply wrong with me.
The Surrender I Didn't Choose
Here's what nobody tells you about hard seasons: sometimes you don't get to fight your way through them.
Sometimes the only way forward is surrender.
I've always been a ‘figure it out, keep moving, you've got this’ kind of person.
Surrender felt like life as I knew it was being ripped from my hands.
It felt like everything was falling apart.
It felt like losing.
But somewhere in the middle of month four or five or six — I stopped counting — I realized I wasn't losing. I was letting go.Letting go of the version of myself I thought I had to be. Letting go of the timeline I'd built for my life in my head. Letting go of the idea that moving fast equals moving forward.
Surrender, I learned, isn't the end of the story.
It's actually where the real one begins.
Surrender was the place where God met me with tenderness, because I was too tired to be anything but honest.
My prayers stopped being inspirational and full of scripture; they became disjointed pleas and rants from my broken heart to my Heavenly Father. My honesty was not pretty, but it was real.
Real-er than I had dared to be in a long time.
One day I realized- I’m shifting! Things are changing deep down on the inside, and that’s a good thing.
Maybe you are being invited to the journey of surrender that leads to a gut-level of honesty, too. If so, you’re shifting, and that’s a good thing!
Coming Home, Not Just Creating One
After working through the recent twists and turns of my life, I’m now entering the place of rediscovering who I am.
Some people call it self-discovery, but that sounds almost too gentle for what it actually feels like.
It feels like waking up each morning, opening Pandora’s box, and sifting through both the chaos and beauty being released. Accepting that there’s both an abundance of possibilities all around me, while there’s also an undeniable inner struggle to keep things the same.
I'm relearning what I love — not what I used to love, not what I love because it's easy — but what genuinely lights me up deep in my soul. I'm asking hard questions and sitting with the discomfort of not having fast answers.
I'm building things slowly, intentionally, with my heart, not just with my hands.Some days it's exhilarating.
Some days it's terrifying. Most days it's both.
But here's what I know now that I didn't know 18 months ago:Hard seasons don't last.
They feel like they do.
They feel permanent and immovable, and like they have claimed your future. But they don't last. You come out the other side — maybe changed, maybe quieter, maybe more cracked open than you expected — but you come out.
And the version of you on the other side? She's worth meeting.
Now, A Question for You
I'm sharing all of this not just to process out loud (though, honestly, a little of that too 😊) — but because this community is something I want to build with you, not just for you.So here's where I need your help:
👇 Hit reply and tell me: What do you think we should talk about on the Mentor for Moms podcast?
Is there something that's been sitting heavy on your heart? Is there a message, an encouragement, or practical answers you need to hear?
I want to hear from you. And please know, there's no wrong answer.
I read every reply.
Can't wait to hear from you.
Until next time,
Susan
P.S. — Know someone who's in the middle of their own hard season? Send this their way. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do for someone is just say, "I was thinking of you."