Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier.

This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.

Something deep in all of us yearns for God's beauty, and we can find it no matter where we are.

Into every life a little rain must fall.

You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backwards" -Secret Life of the Bees

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.

I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.