Shine Sweet Freedom

My name is Amanda. I live in North Carolina, USA, and this is Shine Sweet Freedom. My first post.

For nearly 18 years, I was in an emotionally and psychologically abusive relationship—16 of those years within a marriage. I have been out of the day-to-day reality of that relationship for seven years now, but as anyone who has lived through this kind of abuse knows, leaving and being free are not necessarily the same thing.

My former husband is also the father of my two beautiful adult children, so our lives will always have some points of connection. There was no clean break where I walked away, closed the door, and never had to encounter that relationship again. And maybe that is part of what I want to write about here: what healing looks like when life isn’t quite that tidy.

Over the years, I have come to understand just how deeply emotional, psychological, and spiritual abuse can reach into a person’s life. It affected how I thought, how I felt, how I made decisions, how I interpreted other people and situations, how I understood relationships, and even how I understood my faith. When you have spent years questioning your own perceptions, learning to trust yourself again can be its own journey.

And that is what Shine Sweet Freedom is about.

These are my musings as I continue to make sense of what happened to me and, perhaps more importantly, discover who I am apart from and in spite of it. I’ll write about the things I still wrestle with, the old patterns that sometimes surprise me, the new people and situations that make me stop and wonder, Is this healthy? Is this toxic? Am I seeing this clearly? I’ll also write about the good things—the healthy relationships I appreciate so much more now, the peace I’ve fought hard to reclaim, the joy of having choices, and the person I am still becoming.

I don’t believe any two healing journeys are exactly alike. I am not writing this because I have arrived at some perfect place on the other side. I’m writing because this is my journey, and putting words around it helps me process and understand it.

And maybe, somewhere along the way, something I’ve learned—or something I’m still learning—will help someone else put words to and understand her own story a little better too.

Seven years out, I’m still figuring out who I want to be when I grow up (old).

But I know this much: peace feels different when you’ve lived without it. Choice feels different when you’ve had it slowly taken from you. And freedom—real freedom, the kind that begins inside of you—is very, very sweet.

Welcome to Shine Sweet Freedom.