When you trust something entirely – a person, an institution, a doctrine, whatever the case – when you trust something entirely, you can end up basing your entire life around what it tells you that you should be. It can make promises that you hinge your existence and all major life decisions on... and you won't know if those promises are false until it's too late.

Plenty of our faith and trust can be misplaced for a long time before we ever realize how much time we've spent denying ourselves a true life.

Faced with the suffocating expectations of small thinking in a system that leaves no room for all of you, the thing you trusted ultimately serves to crush you. To fracture and compartmentalize you.

When this is the sort of environment that we come from, the defiant act of demanding to be whole and known in our fulness is one of the most essential, healing things we can do. Pain is inevitable. But "the art of life is choosing the pain that brings life and love and truth rather than the pain that brings death."