It's Okay Not to Be Okay

It’s been months since the last time I wrote. I kept thinking, once I feel better, I will get back to it.

June has been the best month in the last several months. I finally had energy again. I was finally feeling like myself.

You see, the previous months I had been hit with such grief, it was hard to name. I kept thinking maybe it was overwhelm, or maybe burnout. Now, those things could have been part of it, but the biggest hurt in my heart was the grief of a broken dream.

Let’s go back to January of 2025. It was mid-January, and my friends and I were sitting together doing a Bible study. The leader of the group asked us, “What is your broken dream?” Others shared stories of vulnerability, and my mind went blank.

“I don’t know. I don’t have a broken dream,” I thought numbly to myself.

This is me, who just the previous year and half had moved more than 200 miles away to disenmesh from my family of origin and heal. Me, who had just signed up for a Trauma Reboot group at church. Not because I thought I had any trauma, but because it called to me, and it seemed interesting as a “therapist”. You know…

We do this, don’t we? We can see others so clearly, but when it comes to seeing ourselves, it takes an immense amount of courage. Or, put more gently, maybe a mild amnesia of our own pain is needed in certain seasons of our lives. It’s as if, when we’re still in survival mode and carrying so much responsibility, the mind blocks out pain sensors because it knows it is not the time to process it all. It can’t. We would break if we tried to process it all at that given time. And so we carry on, almost anesthetized to our inner wounds.

From 2025 onward, a rapid succession of events occurred. My grandfather passed away, our beloved pastor heard the call of the Lord and moved on to a different post, my husband’s stepfather and a dear friend of mine went to rest with the Lord, we were in a terrible car accident, and life continued to unfold. My entire foundation was shaking, but I had learned to vibrate with it and keep things moving. By October, I finally made the decision to step away from my career that I loved so that I could focus on my three children and homeschool them. A move that I had prayed for so long, but one that stacked onto the already shaking foundation.

By January 2026, we made the decision to step away from the church we had congregated at since moving to our new town. I didn’t know how painful this would be. Nothing specific that I can name happened. The new pastors are amazing people, but it no longer felt like home to us. Although we knew it was from the Lord to move to a new church, the tearing away again was painful.

With all the unprocessed changes of the past months, by March through May of 2026 I was in a state of complete mental paralysis. An ennui so strong that I couldn’t cry or feel anything.

Until my dear friend, upon listening to how I was feeling, brought back that faithful question from January 2025.

She said, “It sounds like you’re grieving your broken dream.”

There. It. Was.

I had been carrying the weight of that broken dream. The dream that I could move to a new town and start afresh. No traumas. No traumas from past churches. No traumas from the old self.

The word trauma comes from the Greek word traûma, meaning a wound or a hurt. So many of us are walking around with old and deep wounds that, with time, were buried but never properly healed.

I thought we had found our “Gilmore Girls” town. With the perfect, authentic church, great community, and wonderful people.

But this doesn’t exist.

Instead, we find ourselves wherever we go; we find other humans, also deeply wounded, wherever we go.

So then what?

I had to come face to face with my grief.

• With the grief I carried from recognizing my family of origin. Whom I deeply love and am thankful for, but recognizing the shattered parts of those relationships. To disenmesh from a system is painful. There is a tearing apart that leaves parts of you behind and fragmented parts of you to heal. This took me three years to even begin to breathe and properly forgive and heal. This was right before we decided to move at the end of 2023.

• With the grief that there is no Gilmore Girls town with a perfect white-steeple church. That we, as broken as we can be, are the church. That maybe, just maybe, we as the church look a lot less like white-dressed saints and more like bloody thieves hanging next to Jesus. Stripped away from all pretense, but in our bareness finally able to look to Him and say, “You ARE the Son of God. YOU ARE.”

Maybe these have been my years of stripping it all away and coming to this place with Jesus.

As I was finally meeting with this grief, befriending it, recognizing all that I had to forgive and be forgiven for, I was finally waking up more like myself. I had energy again to be fully present. Visits back home started to feel refreshing and welcoming.

Then I received a message this past Monday from my mother.

My cousin in Cuba had committed suicide.

She hung herself.

There was a long pause.

(Maybe I am still displaced in this pause.)

Why?

What pain did she carry alone, and for how long? A young woman in her late thirties. A physician. A mother of a two-year-old. A wife. A daughter.

Today is day two since the news, and I am met with a whole different type of grief.

How do we make sense of our pain as humans? Our stories?

I vividly carry an image of her and me as little girls—her maybe ten or eleven, and me around five—playing. How do you tell one of those girls how her life would end? How do you explain to the other what meaning to infer from it all?

I don’t know.

I am in the thick of it.

How do I just encapsulate my uncle and her child in this thread of never-ending love to protect them from the impossibly unbearable pain of this new reality?

How?

I don’t know.

So many Bible verses come to mind. All true. But not for this moment.

Only one makes sense.

“Jesus wept.”

We weep too.

So I write today in the midst of my own questioning, my own pain, because why do we wait until we have a semblance of being okay to finally share our stories?

We’ve heard this before. I echo it today.

IT IS OKAY NOT TO BE OKAY.

Our lives continue to happen. We exist, even when so many things are not okay.

In the midst of this pain, I’ve shared with loved ones. I’ve asked for prayers. I cry when I need to. I smile when I need to. I take my days a little slower. I show up to my everyday responsibilities, but I also leave the plates unwashed if I need to. I’ve been going to sleep early these past few days.

It’s okay not to be okay.

Jesus meets us here.

Where others are afraid to go, He will go.

He met the leper. He met the paralyzed man. He met the woman at the well. He met the forgotten, demonized man in the cave. He met the woman who was about to be stoned. He meets me today in the middle of my broken dreams and grief.

He will meet you too…

If you’re not okay as well, I pray that you may feel this hug. I pray you seek support. I pray you know how much your life echoes and ripples through so many lives.

My cousin has left a quake in our family through her absence. Her life mattered. Her lineage continues. Her place in our family tree, in our hearts, in our stories.

We are all carrying a deep hurt somewhere.

Can we sit and find a space to unpack it?

To let Jesus meet us there too....