What Survival Taught Me About Hope

If you’ve been here for any part of this year, you already know:
I don’t have a fairy-tale story.

I have a survival story.

A story of adoption and a rare skin condition.
Of early motherhood before I really knew who I was.
Of food as comfort and then as a cage.
Of a marriage that slowly suffocated me.
Of packing boxes, moving home, starting over with nothing.
Of a dad who died in a tragic construction accident and a hole that never fully closed.
Of chronic symptoms and unanswered medical questions.
Of depression so heavy it almost took me out.
Of a health system that told me I was “fine” while my body quietly fell apart.

This year, I chose to start telling that story out loud.

Not because it was convenient.
Not because life suddenly became easy.
But because staying silent was starting to cost more than the truth.

Week after week, I sat down and wrote through the fog, the grief, the anger, the confusion, the resilience, the healing, the setbacks.

And I’ll be honest with you:

This blog has not “blown up.”
There is no viral story here.
No brand deal.
No publisher banging on my door.

Some weeks, it felt like I was writing into the void.

But I kept going anyway.

Because survival has taught me something that the world doesn’t talk about nearly enough:

Hope isn’t loud.
Hope is stubborn.

Survival isn’t pretty. It’s practical.

Survival taught me that sometimes the bravest thing you do is just not quit.

You don’t quit packing the boxes.
You don’t quit going to work when your heart is shattered.
You don’t quit advocating for your health when every doctor tells you your labs are “normal.”
You don’t quit on your kids even when you want to disappear.

Survival taught me that sometimes hope looks like very unsexy decisions:

• Leaving a marriage that looked “fine” on the outside because your soul couldn’t breathe.

• Moving back to your childhood bedroom with two kids and starting from zero.

• Asking for help, even when it makes you feel like you failed.

• Sitting in another waiting room for another test because your body says something is wrong, even when the system shrugs.

This year, survival showed up in other ways:

In iron infusions that raised my ferritin but didn’t quite fix the fatigue.
In a copper deficiency I never knew to look for until a hematologist named it.
In Hashimoto’s markers that conventional medicine told me to “wait on” while I decided I wasn’t going to wait to care about my own body.
In the choice to keep asking why when it would have been easier to just accept “it is what it is.”

None of it felt heroic.
Most of it felt like trudging.

But underneath the trudging was something else:

I was still here.

Hope isn’t a feeling. It’s a decision.

There’s this idea that hope is supposed to feel warm and inspiring.
In my experience, it usually doesn’t.

Most of the time, hope feels like discipline.

It’s:

• Writing the blog post even when no one is asking for it.

• Changing what you eat even when food is still your first comfort.

• Getting off antidepressants and facing what’s underneath, instead of numbing it forever.

• Ordering the labs, doing the research, taking the supplements, cancelling the supplements, trying again.

• Admitting you’re exhausted and still choosing not to abandon yourself.

This year, I learned that you can be tired and still hopeful.
You can feel disappointed and still committed.
You can be frustrated with your lack of progress and still refuse to go back to who you were.

Hope, for me, has become:

“I’m not where I want to be yet…
but I’m not going back to where I was.”

That’s it.
That’s hope.

The truth about the book I haven’t written yet

Let me be straight with you:

I am not currently sitting with a beautiful, color-coded outline for my memoir.
I’m not waking up at 5 a.m. drafting chapters with a green smoothie by my side.

I’m tired.
I’m still working a full-time job.
I’m still dealing with chronic health questions.
And I’m proud of myself for the simple fact that I stuck to this blog for most of 2025.

I promised myself I would show up.
And I did.

No one crowned me “author.”
No one handed me a book deal.
But this year, I became something more important first:

I became someone who tells the truth about her own life.

That’s the foundation.
That’s the muscle I needed before I ever write a book.

The memoir will come.
It will come when I have enough energy, enough distance, and enough clarity to hold the full story.

For now, these posts are breadcrumbs — the early sketches, the spine, the raw material.

Even if only a small circle of people ever read them, they matter because they represent something I never used to do:

I stopped hiding.

What survival taught me about hope

When I step back and look at this year, here’s what survival has really taught me about hope:

• Hope isn’t flashy.
  It looks like showing up for another day of your own life.

• Hope is honest.
  It makes you say, “I’m not okay, but I still care enough to try.”

• Hope is boundaries.
  It’s leaving what breaks you, even when you have no “perfect” next step lined up.

• Hope is advocacy.
  It’s refusing to let a broken healthcare system be the final word on your body.

• Hope is slowness.
  It’s allowing your healing, your book, your next chapter to come in their own time, not on the internet’s schedule.

• Hope is choosing yourself, again and again, even when it’s inconvenient.

If you’ve followed along this year — through the early motherhood chaos, the marriage cracks, the 2006 crash, the move home, the year my dad died, the food addiction, the medical maze, the health updates that never wrapped up in a neat bow — I want you to know this:

You weren’t just reading my story.
You were watching me reclaim it.

And maybe, in some small way, you were reclaiming yours too.

Where I go from here

This is my last blog post of 2025.

I’m not disappearing.
I’m pausing.

I need space to live the next chapter before I write about it.
To keep healing my body.
To focus on work, on my kids, on building whatever comes next.

I don’t know exactly when the memoir will be written.
But I know this:

I’m not done.

Not with my story.
Not with my health.
Not with the women who need to hear this.
Not with myself.

If you see yourself anywhere in these words — in the survival, in the silence, in the slow, gritty hope — I want you to hear this as we close out the year:

You are not weak for still being in the middle.
You are not behind because your healing isn’t finished.
You are not broken because your story has been hard.

You are a survivor.
And that alone is proof that hope never really left.

With heart,
Rebecca