Wildflowers and Weeds

I believe we are standing at the edge of an evolution in time.

Human history has experienced enormous shifts before. Water and electricity came into people's homes. Machines changed the way we worked. Women fought for rights and opportunities that previous generations could scarcely imagine. The internet connected the world in ways that once belonged only in science fiction.

Now artificial intelligence has entered our lives, and I believe it may change what it means to be human more profoundly than anything we have ever experienced before.

AI may help cure diseases, solve problems, and give ordinary people access to knowledge and opportunities they never had before. It may also eliminate jobs, spread deception, increase loneliness, and place extraordinary power into the hands of people who may not use it wisely. Will this evolution ultimately be good or bad?

I don't know.

I don't believe anyone truly knows.

Strangely, I feel peaceful about that uncertainty. It isn't because I don't value my life. My life has enormous meaning. I have Kevin, the love of my life. I have my children and grandchildren, my nieces and nephews. I get to write freely, which gives me tremendous purpose. I have people to love, work to create, and something meaningful to contribute.

I am not afraid of death. My faith in Jesus gives me peace about what comes afterward. If I am honest, I have sometimes been more afraid of life than death - not because I wanted life to end, but because living has required me to face uncertainty, loss, change, and parts of myself I spent years trying desperately not to feel.

THE YEARS I KEPT MYSELF NUMB

Looking back, I realize I wasn't hiding the alcohol from another person. I was hiding it from myself. I was hiding from the truth of what my life had become.

I would come home from work and take nine gulps of vodka. Not eight. Not ten. Nine.

I would become so intoxicated that I passed out. Then I would wake up and repeat the same nine gulps, only to pass out again.

It wasn't peaceful or restorative. My sleep was horrible, but horrible sleep had become familiar. It had been that way since I separated from my husband after twenty-seven years of marriage.

The end of that marriage wasn't simply the loss of a husband. It was the loss of the life I had known, the identity I had carried, and the future I thought was already written.

I will always love and feel connected to both of my former husbands. I was a teenager, trying to understand my first marriage before we had even figured out who we were. My second husband shared nearly three decades of my life. We raised children, built a home, created memories, and became part of each other's stories in ways that a divorce can never erase.

People who knew us also knew the difficult truth: I was the one who was no longer in love. Leaving did not mean that I stopped caring about him or that our years together had no value. It meant I finally admitted that I could no longer continue living a life that was safe and comfortable on the outside but no longer felt honest on the inside.

I left almost everything familiar to live my own life and speak my own truth. That may sound courageous now, but at the time, it was terrifying. I had spent most of my life living for other people - trying to be the wife, mother, daughter, businesswoman, and faithful church member everyone needed or expected me to be. When I finally chose a life of my own, I discovered that I didn't yet know how to live it.

Freedom did not immediately feel free.

I was trying to process the loss of my past life while learning how to live a new one. I didn't know how to do that, so I kept myself numb.

WHEN BELONGING DISAPPEARS

Years later, I began thinking about Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Maslow described human needs in levels. At the foundation are our physiological needs: food, water, sleep, and shelter. Next comes safety. Then love and belonging, followed by esteem. At the top is self-actualization - the desire to become who we are capable of becoming.

Life doesn't always move neatly from one level to the next. We can feel secure in one area and frightened in another. We may experience love while struggling financially or achieve professional success while feeling completely disconnected from ourselves and our loved ones.

For much of my life, I lived in the realm of love and belonging.

The LDS Church had provided community, structure, identity, and a place where I understood how I fit. When I left the religion in which I had been raised and eventually became a Christian, I didn't simply change where I attended church. I lost an entire sense of belonging.

Becoming a Christian was not a quick or easy transformation for me. It was arduous.

Religion had already created deep conflict within my family. My mother and father divorced over it, and the struggle continued until the day my father died. Eventually, nearly everyone in our family stepped away from the religion in which we were raised. Only one of my beautiful sons remained active.

I do not share this to criticize the people who remain active or to suggest that their faith is not sincere. I share it because leaving a religious community can involve real grief. You may gain anew understanding of God while simultaneously losing traditions, relationships, certainty, and the identity that once told you who you were and where you belonged.

Those losses are complicated. They can leave you wondering where you fit. I tried to quiet those questions with alcohol.

It worked - until it didn't.

Alcohol didn't heal my grief. It postponed it. It numbed the pain temporarily while quietly creating more pain for me to face later.

POOR, RICH, AND STILL BECOMING

I have been poor, and I have been rich.

I wasn't truly happy in either situation.

Money can provide security, comfort, choices, and wonderful experiences. I understand its importance. Kevin grew up in a family where worrying about money was passed from one generation to the next, and because I love him, his worry sometimes affects me.

But money does not drive my peace.

I have learned that a bank balance cannot tell me whether my life is meaningful. It cannot determine whether I am loved, whether I have loved others well, whether I have served anyone, or whether I am becoming the woman God created me to be.

Peace came when I stopped measuring my life primarily by what I owned and began measuring it by whom I loved, whom I served, what I created, and how closely I walked with God.

MY SELF-ACTUALIZATION ERA

For many years, I don't believe I reached the self-actualization level of Maslow's hierarchy. I was surviving. I was looking for safety, fighting to preserve relationships, rebuilding an identity, and trying to find somewhere to belong.

Now, in my sixties, I feel as though I am in the middle of the self-actualization era of my life. Self-actualization doesn't mean I have solved everything. It doesn't mean I never feel afraid, make mistakes, or become overwhelmed. It means I am finally becoming more fully myself.

I get to write.

I get to tell the truth.

I get to create something meaningful from experiences that once felt meaningless.

I can love my family without losing myself. I can serve other people without believing I must rescue everyone. I can speak about addiction, mental illness, divorce, faith, aging, sex abuse, and beginning again - not because I have mastered all of them, but because I have lived them. The world may be entering the age of artificial intelligence, but I am entering the age of becoming fully myself.

Perhaps those are both examples of evolution through time.

One is happening around me. The other is happening within me.

REDEMPTION IS NOT THE SAME AS NECESSITY

Sometimes I wonder whether my addiction was part of the road that led me to Jesus.

I don't believe God needed me to become addicted to alcohol so I could find Him. I don't believe the pain was required or that the addiction itself was a gift.

Addiction hurt me. It stole years of real sleep, clear thought, honest emotion, and genuine presence. It did not peacefully lead me to God.

It showed me how desperately I needed a peace that alcohol would never provide.

There is a difference between believing something terrible had to happen and believing God can redeem what happened. The addiction was not the gift.

What God helped me build from its ruins may be.

The suffering gave me compassion for people who are still hiding bottles, pills, secrets, shame, or pieces of themselves. It taught me that people are often trying to survive pain no one else can see. It gave me a desire to speak honestly so someone else might My story is not about being a victim. It is about becoming.

WHAT MAKES A LIFE MEANINGFUL?

We are living in uncertain times. Technology is advancing faster than our ability to understand its consequences. The future may bring extraordinary breakthroughs and profound disruptions. I cannot control all of that.

But I can decide how I will live during it.

I can love Kevin. I can love and be present with my children and grandchildren. I can try to stay close to my sister, nieces and nephews, who have always been a big part of my life. I can write books and tell the truth. I can serve people. I can keep learning. I can remain curious. I can choose faith over fear and honesty over numbness.

Most of all, I can trust that my value does not rise and fall with my income, accomplishments, age, appearance, or the approval of other people.

Maybe self-actualization is not finally arriving at the top of a pyramid.

Maybe it is reaching a point in life when you stop trying to become the person everyone expected you to be - and become the person God always wanted you to be.

I have lived through wildflowers.

I have lived through weeds.

I have lived with both, and grown during this last era of my life.

And perhaps self-actualization is finally understanding that every part of my story belongs - not because every part was good, but because God has helped me create something meaningful from all of it.



From my open diary.

Wildflowers and Weeds.