Thanks to The Porch Magazine for allowing me the space to place words to the experience of holding death after shape-shifting through this past year-and-a-half with it in a more powerful way than I ever have.

What a journey it has been. I’ve found myself at so many points wanting to rush to make sense of it or push myself forward as fully healed and ready to use that vulnerable space I touched into in so many ways. As deeply painful as my experience was, it allowed me to meet myself in ways I didn’t know I could. It forced me to swim through a shadowy depth of confusion with what happened, with our culture’s systems and expectations, with how to hold my own grieving and healing process before I would feel my feet touch in and begin to walk over this threshold in my womanhood. I remember holding a felted fig in the palm of my hand so many nights, rolling it around, placing it on my belly as I read and listened to other women’s stories. She was the size of a fig, my Tully.

You can read the full piece written for The Porch HERE.