Today’s episode of the limited podcast series features one of last year’s anonymous authors reading her piece, Definitely not a phoenix. It received so much support ran it ran on the Substack column—many divorced women related to the pressure to “rise from the ashes” as some sort of before/after success story. This piece is a much more honest look at what healing really looks like. I loved the conversation we had after she read her piece, and I think you will too. 

Show Notes

• A writer reads her original personal essay about the summer she took her children to a lake house in Wisconsin — retreating from a small town that knew too much, and sitting with a truth she wasn’t yet ready to name
• Why thirteen years later, she still doesn’t have a phoenix story to tell — and why that honesty struck a nerve with thousands of readers
• The cultural pressure to “rise from the ashes” after divorce, and what gets lost when we only share the tidy, finished version of our healing
• The difference between being a lantern bearer and being a self-help formula — and why sometimes what people need most is someone bleeding alongside them, not someone who solved it a decade ago
• On trusting the woman inside you who already got through the worst of it — and why that track record matters more than reaching any mountaintop
• You can be grieving and uncertain, and celebrate your own resilience.

Quotes:

“I feel shame that I am still grieving and unsure of my place in the world after all this time.”

“I think we’re taught to look for the transformation, but sometimes the truth is… you’re still living inside the question.”

"A lack of mountaintop experience does not mean that you have failed in the story of your own perseverance."

"No matter where you are on the spectrum, someone's ahead of you and someone's behind you in terms of healing."

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