Ep. 64 A Journey of Self-Love and Healing with Jessica Evans

[00:00:03] I'm Michele Simms and this is The Beauty in the Mess, a community where people who crave a shift in mindset, personal growth, and connection to like-minded people come together to start rewriting their stories. Through engaging, honest, and insightful conversations, the show will help you embrace the mess

[00:00:23] to recognize the meanings and the lessons it holds and discover its hidden treasures to help you start making a mindset shift. Let's listen, learn, and reclaim who we were meant to be. Hi friend, welcome to The Beauty in the Mess.

[00:00:38] For this episode I'm welcoming Jessica Evans to the show. Jessica was raised in what she calls a closed religious society, what some may even refer to as a cult. It was an extremely strict religious upbringing for sure.

[00:00:52] She now talks about having gratitude for the aspects of her life that used to hold her in a victim identity. In her book, Fade to Light, How I Learned to Dissolve Darkness, she shares her experiences

[00:01:04] of leaving the religious family and society in which she was raised and eventually severing ties. She sought stability after leaving the only community she ever knew by immersing herself in various identities such as an obsessive rock climber, a dedicated spouse, an enlightened

[00:01:21] yoga teacher, and even excelling as a business person. She figured out the key for her to self-love and self-acceptance, and she shares those with us, along with her insights on why self-forgiveness and self-acceptance can be so challenging for

[00:01:35] many of us, but also why it's so worth it to keep up the pursuit. So join me for episode 64 of The Beauty in the Mess called A Journey of Self-Love and Healing with Jessica Evans. So without further ado, let's dive right into today's conversation.

[00:01:52] Hi Jessica, welcome to The Beauty in the Mess. It's great to have you with us today. Thanks for having me. So glad we were able to connect. Now, I know you're an author of Fade to Light, but before we really dive into your book, I

[00:02:06] was wondering if you could give us some of your backstory, like what led you to where you are today? Oh, that's a big question. That's a multi-decade question. Yeah, well, it was in 2019 that I left a very good job, a job that most people

[00:02:23] would say, I've made it and this is my life. And I just knew I had to write and knew I had to create. There were other books that I was hoping to write about things that I've learned in

[00:02:33] my healing journey, about I was hoping that it was going to be one of those how-to books that I could take on the road and that sort of thing. And I sold my house and I moved to a smaller town, smaller house

[00:02:47] and decreased expenses and it's OK, here we go. I've changed my life to write this book. And it kept coming up to tell my story. I said, I don't want to write a memoir. I don't want to do it. I don't need to.

[00:03:01] I've buried these stories for so long, I don't need to. And, you know, I'm in my 40s, so I'm like neither young nor old, but memoir should be for someone when they're, you know, on their deathbed 80,

[00:03:13] like a really good full life, live 90, 100 years, have something to talk about. And then the memoir spilled out and it took about two years from the first manuscript to the final product, a little over two years.

[00:03:27] And the healing that I was able to get from the stories that I just have never I'd never shared. I had never written down. Some maybe I would tell over a campfire or share with close friends.

[00:03:39] But I started to dig through my story and go, oh, there's a lot that's gotten me to where I am and who I am, and I love who I am. And I'm grateful for the journey. So that is what became I've got my personal copy here.

[00:03:53] That's what became Good Old Fade to Light. And I did read it. I read all of it. Yay. Oh, great. And I have to say that you're a beautiful writer, by the way, because the way I mean, you just pull the reader right in.

[00:04:08] And it was like, I hated putting it down because it's like, hey, I want to know what's happening next. So thank you. Oh, that's great. Thank you. Beautiful writing. So but I did want it and I think you just answered it for me.

[00:04:21] I was going to ask if writing it was cathartic or if it was like you had to relive everything that happened to you. Yeah, both. Both. Especially some of the things at the beginning about my out bringing

[00:04:38] the way that I wrote about my family and the chapters called a happy childhood and it's meant to be a little bit tongue in cheek because I did experience a happy childhood as a child. But then whenever I look back on it, it's oh, wow, there's a lot.

[00:04:54] There's a lot to sift through in things that would now be rightly described as childhood trauma. It wouldn't be an exaggeration. It's just right there. And for instance, I was writing and said, you know, my brother's fought.

[00:05:08] And then I wrote and said there's a lot of laughter in our household. And then as I went back, I was able to write and there was a lot of violence in our household. There was a lot of yelling.

[00:05:20] There was a lot of physical altercations with my brothers. And just to write that down and almost it says if I like kind of close my eyes and type just kind of not wanting to see what I was typing, just going, oh my God, here it comes.

[00:05:34] Here it comes. It's like it was coming through me. And the story about I call it Alex and the jacket of sin. The my first crush that liked me back in high school and he gave me his hockey jacket.

[00:05:47] It's very 1950s saw cop sort of thing, except that my parents find the jacket and tell me that I can break up with him or I can move out and just hit the streets and be homeless. Oh, Jack. And I contacted him.

[00:06:02] We had not spoken since I didn't talk to him again in high school. As I was writing that chapter, I found him and I reached out and just had this. Hey, this is going to be long. This is going to be a long message.

[00:06:17] And we had a really, let's say really healing conversation because he had also processed what had happened to him in having that crush taken away and was able to reflect on how it influenced his dating choices all through his 20s.

[00:06:33] He said he kept chasing unavailable women and he felt like he was trying to to heal the Jessica that was taken away. And he's now happily married and lives overseas and he's had two kids for a while. And we were just able to go. That was really crappy.

[00:06:48] What happened to us? That was really unfair. OK, we can just sit in this together. So it wasn't just my own healing, but healing along with some others as well. So he knew why you disappeared out of his life, right? Because you had to give it back.

[00:07:03] That's why. Yeah, we both remembered it the same way that I got a friend to return the jacket. And he even told me which friend that was and he said he really wanted to pursue me and she told him, don't do it. Wow. Don't do it.

[00:07:16] Just leave her alone. Wow. Yes, tough. All of you lived a lot of life in a short amount of time, I think. Honestly, I can wear that now. I've gotten over the I don't have enough to share for a memoir

[00:07:32] because it feels like I could do another one just in what's happened since this book. Oh, wow. Yeah. Can't wait for the second one. So I know one thing that stood out to me and that your book

[00:07:48] Fade to Light, How I Learn to Dissolve Darkness is that you kind of at least what I took from it, you kind of chronicle this self love journey also because of your upbringing, you had a very hard time learning to love yourself.

[00:08:05] And you had a very different upbringing than a lot of us because you I don't I know you don't like calling it a cult necessarily, but you lived in a cult or a very repressive religious household. So that trying to love yourself, I'm sure is very tough.

[00:08:22] But that's the piece that I think anybody or a lot of people, I should say, can relate to a lot of people have a hard time learning to love themselves. So I was wondering if you could tell us how do you

[00:08:34] even start for those people that are stuck in a similar way that you were stuck? How do you even start? Well, what worked for me is what I came to call my love project, which is just over 10 years ago, whenever I hit an absolute point of rock bottom.

[00:08:53] And it was inspired by one line that I read in a book, a yoga book, because at that point in my life, I was a yoga teacher and learning, trying to do fancy yoga. And I'm not that flexible.

[00:09:03] I'm not like my skeleton does not move in ways that you would think a typical like your white chick yoga instructor would do. And there was so I was reading books, I was going to just get so good at it,

[00:09:16] right, because that's also something I realized from my upbringing of like needing to be really good at the religion and the better that you are doing at the religion, the higher kind of a rank. And it was all kind of unspoken but spoken. It's not written down.

[00:09:30] It's not chronicled, but it's just known. It's just the social norms of living in that religion. And so there was a line in this book that said something along the lines of what would it look like if I fell in love with myself?

[00:09:45] And I thought, well, shoot, I'm very good at falling in love. I've had this string of just whirlwind romances and I moved to an island to be with a guy within three months of dating him and was just like anything for love.

[00:10:00] And it was in that journey that I even in writing about that in the book that I realized that even what I had experienced as love in those relationships wasn't necessarily authentic. I wasn't putting a slant on my past and saying nothing was ever worth it

[00:10:18] or wasn't there was no authenticity. Like there were some strong feelings with the people that I had been in relationships with. But I need to learn how to be in a healthy relationship with myself without necessarily having healthy relationships to draw upon.

[00:10:34] So I just started with telling myself, I love you. That just seemed like that it's such a special important time in a relationship. Who says it first? How do they say it? Does it just get blurted and spills out of them?

[00:10:49] Or is it like this big movie moment on top of a skyscraper or a cliff with the wind in your hair or whatever? And so I just started quietly saying, I love you, Jessica.

[00:10:59] And I kind of felt I think I suspect now that it's a little bit of inner child work, which I've been learning about since I wrote the book. So I wasn't specifically trying to speak to any version of myself in the past. It was just self.

[00:11:14] And it helped me move through an incredibly negative, critical inner voice and find what I called an inner support. The hey, you can do it. Yeah, keep going. Yeah, come on. And I've been able to do a lot with that motivation.

[00:11:30] And even now like I'm I've become a mother since writing the book. And in the tough times of postpartum, I've done that, you know, curled up in the dark. The baby's asleep. I can't sleep and I'm lying there and I just go, I love you, Jessica.

[00:11:46] Just you're doing it. Let's keep going. I think that's great. So has that inner critic gone away then? Or do you just ignore it? Or how do you because a lot of us have that little angry voice that just doesn't stop.

[00:12:02] So I can't imagine it ever going away completely. But maybe it does for some people, I don't know. I can say that for a brief moment in time, maybe a few months, I really couldn't access it. Oh, wow. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:20] You know, that didn't last because life I exist in the world. And now I'm a mom, so I'm very, very aware of what I can do better almost all the time. And it's it's softer, though. It's definitely softer or I can catch it.

[00:12:36] And I used to there's a whole part of the book where I'm an obsessive rock climber. And I was so hard on myself when I was a rock climber, right? Like just do better, get stronger, be skinnier, climb higher, go faster.

[00:12:50] And I'm kind of not even really interested in climbing anymore because of that aspect of just give or go. It's so like I got into running and then I am not running right now because of feeling from childbirth, but I am just so chill.

[00:13:06] I run so slow and if I'm not feeling it, I can walk and I'm just so much kinder to my body. Oh, wow. Whereas when I was climbing, it was stupid body. You'd say these words out loud together.

[00:13:19] Other climbers would say it by stupid finger and you just kind of tape it up or take some painkillers and keep going. And our body was something that got in the way of what we want to accomplish. Wow.

[00:13:30] And now it's just, OK, body, you don't want to run yet because you grew a human and squeezed him out. OK, OK, let's just keep healing. I want to see if I got this right. I think you said at some point that you chose rock climbing.

[00:13:46] It was more of a way to connect to people at some point, wasn't it? It became a community for me. Right. But I honestly loved it. I had never moved my body in that way and I had never considered myself an athlete.

[00:14:02] And now looking back, I can see I probably was pretty athletic as a teenager. It's just that we weren't allowed to do sports. OK, yeah. We weren't because that would be taking time away from God and you don't want to do that.

[00:14:16] So I never really got the opportunity to try. Wow. So climbing was just so refreshing. And then I realized that, yeah, it gave me. It was I wouldn't say easy. None of it was easy, but it was pretty straightforward to walk away

[00:14:31] from the religion because I had other things to do. OK. Yeah. Back on the critical self voice real quick, and you said that the inner child work. I was wondering, like, I know that some of the work that I've done myself,

[00:14:46] I kind of figured out that that little voice that nags us all the time. When I never questioned it, that was my biggest problem. I would just listen to it and it's on repeat, right?

[00:14:56] And when I finally got to a point in my life where I started thinking, OK, now why am I saying this to myself? And I realized that it wasn't even my words. It didn't come from me. It came from someone else and I repeated it to myself.

[00:15:10] But until I got to that point that I even questioned it, I would just listen to it and believe it. You know, it's got to be the truth because it's on repeat and I keep hearing it. So did you have anything like that where you started questioning

[00:15:25] what that little voice was telling you or that feels very familiar? I can't say it's specific point in time when I turned and said, hey, you shut up. Knock it off. I can't remember a specific point, but yeah.

[00:15:40] Yeah, that really resonates that it was just, hey, wait a minute. I came at it from a different angle of can I replace it and can I question it? So it would say you can't. And I'd say, what if I can? What if? What if?

[00:15:56] And it just kind of getting little conversations together, I guess. I believe you talked about that you kind of resisted your past for a while and then you came to accept it at some point. So what helped you learn to accept what had happened to you?

[00:16:11] That was just after I left that really good job and sort of the family feel. And I was fairly high up in the company and had a lot of authority and a fair amount of freedom.

[00:16:26] It was and it's paid well, you know, I was able to buy a house in today's market. And I left and I thought, OK, so I also touch on in the book about having lost just a number of friends and acquaintances and family.

[00:16:41] It's just they died suddenly in a variety of accidents over the course of I think it was about two years or so. And so I felt that I had gotten pretty familiar with processing grief. Right.

[00:16:54] And one of the main things that I saw about processing grief was acceptance because when I saw other people processing and if they were saying, no, no, no, the person they can't be gone, this can have happened. No, no, no, I just saw them increasing their pain.

[00:17:09] So I have a fairly logical analytical brain, sort of like a little computer going, oh, OK, that increases the pain. So if I can accept right away, then I can decrease the pain or I could get where I'm going faster.

[00:17:22] So I was very thoughtical about processing what I figured would be the grief coming from leaving the job. OK, here we go. Potential loss of identity, loss of income. There's going to be some stress here.

[00:17:35] And I set some time aside and said, OK, again, just I'm just so wise. Let's process the grief from leaving this job. This is a really big life change. And once I dug into it using what's referred to as my version

[00:17:50] of what's referred to as the Buddhist death meditation, which invites us to look at our lives like I look at my life today and say, do I have any regrets in this moment? Like if something was happening and I thought, oh, my goodness,

[00:18:06] I'm leaving what would come up and say, but wait, I wish I had had that conversation done that thing. What have you? And it was in that instead of necessarily focusing on the transition from a good job to be self-employed again, which went well, by the way,

[00:18:26] I realized that I had reached a good level of acceptance with not being in touch with my parents. And I was able to really dig into that. And I did that work then of just accepting that we are not in each other's lives.

[00:18:42] And I know it can be so hard for other people to hear, but it's just it's the way things have gone. And over the years, if I ever reached out to them, it was just constant

[00:18:52] rejection. And the last time I saw them, they again brought up the fact that I am a sinner and need to return to the fold and I could not be part of the family until I did this. And I just went like not I metaphorically flip the table.

[00:19:08] Just sort of metaphor it just went, OK, you know what? This is conditional love. I don't want it. I don't want it. I reject it. And I was able to see both of them in person and just look

[00:19:18] both of them in the eyes and say, like, can you accept me the way I am? I accept you. Can you do the same? And they were just couldn't. And I just walked out. So that was years before I left the job, because honestly, I think

[00:19:33] I threw myself into my job to not have to face how painful that was. And that was again in and around early 2019. And that was the big year for me to leave the job end up getting, honestly, getting to acceptance on where I am with my family,

[00:19:50] with my origin family and then sit down to write this book that needed to come out. Wow. So do you almost kind of process it as a death in a way? I know they're not past, but it's such a severance. Yes. Yes.

[00:20:08] And I can feel myself being almost a little shy, a little apprehensive to even talk about this in theory with you, because I'm so used to there's a part of me right now that's trying to guard myself from what usually comes back in conversation of that's so sad.

[00:20:24] Oh my God. And that's something else I talk about in the book is that that victim cloak, the victim identity and people going, that's so sad. How can you even be that way with the severance from your parents and kind of like, here's a victim identity.

[00:20:38] Would you like to put it on? It's like they're putting it on me and I can feel myself just kind of like brushing it off because I need to be OK with it. Right. And I need to not reframe it for other people's experiences

[00:20:53] of perhaps having a beautiful or half decent relationship with their parents and thinking, oh my goodness, I can't imagine not talking to my parents. I say, yeah, yeah, and that's great. That's what you have. I have something different. Right. So it has been like a death. Right.

[00:21:11] They're in their late 70s now and I don't know if I've ever really shared this. It's been a little while that whenever I would see the obituaries in the back of the local paper, I would scan and see if people were dying from my parents' birth here yet.

[00:21:30] Oh, wow. And I would scan and be like, OK, there go the 1930s. There's a lot of 1930s that that's a ripe old age. And then I'd see someone in the 19, like early 50s or something and go, OK, well, they're younger than my parents.

[00:21:45] And you know, and it's just I've grieved them. We've said our goodbyes. Right. And I do feel that I chose my parents. I have my own spiritual, ethereal belief set, if you will, but I feel that my soul chose this family and chose these parents for these lessons.

[00:22:04] Right. And for that, I'm grateful. And I feel like we've done our work together. And then once they transition, then I'm not saying like seances, like literally talk to them. But like once their spirit is released from their body, I feel like they could have ease.

[00:22:22] We could have ease together because I know that it's their religion that has made them do this. Right. I know that it's their belief in a God that they feel they were choosing between God, who's going to give you life eternal or some kid that you had.

[00:22:40] And I just I don't stack up when it comes to that. And it's just like, OK, your version of God, that's huge. I'm not going to try. I do talk about in the book about trying to reason with my mom and it's not go well. Right. At all.

[00:22:54] She thought I was Satan and that was awkward. I just need to respect where they are with things and they're older. I don't I still don't think even late 70s is like old, old or anything like that. But they're seniors now.

[00:23:10] And I don't expect them to turn their back on a faith that they chose 50 years ago. Right. And I, you know, I hate to say it, but I suspect when I do pass, you probably feel a different kind of grief in that you'll probably grieve

[00:23:27] what you didn't have. We can talk again when they passed, I'm willing to be wrong. I feel like I've tried to take that angle of the again, that that sort of I'm definitely not an inner child healing

[00:23:41] expert at something that I've just started to dabble in that I found very powerful. But speaking to little Jessica and saying, hey, you didn't get the childhood that you wanted. You didn't get to play with those friends that you liked.

[00:23:55] You had to play with people in your own church. And oh, you didn't get to wear what you wanted to wear because that was probably a sin as well. And so I've been really trying to work from that angle because also now I have a child. Right.

[00:24:11] And a cousin had reached out to my mom and let her know, hey, Jessica's Jessica got married and she's also pregnant now. And are you going to what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do?

[00:24:27] And then that cousin called me and was furious and just so disappointed and said, I can't believe your mother blah, blah, blah. And I said, hey, I can't wear this. I can't. These are your feelings about my mother and I just have to stay in acceptance. Right.

[00:24:44] Because honestly, it's just it's disappointing to think about grandparents that haven't reached out to they know they have a grandchild. Yeah. But we don't exist. That's the way their religion works is there's a shunning that happens and the person is considered it's like I died first.

[00:25:02] I died a long time ago. Wow. Yeah, it's really trippy. OK, grass. I have a I talk about that in the book about what's it like to be shunned? And I remember writing that as well. I had some really powerful orchestral music on at the time

[00:25:19] and just tried to capture that in the book about what's it like being shunned? What's it like to be dead? Wow. But definitely not dead. Right. And just I was trying to relay that to my reader of how that felt from.

[00:25:35] I was probably late 20s whenever the first shall we say the first markers of being shunned came in so. Right. You did a beautiful job writing, like I said, but I think it's still for someone who hasn't walked in your shoes.

[00:25:51] It's hard to even wrap your brain around that. You know what I mean? To because as a mom, I'm thinking you better kill me if you want to keep me from my kids, right? Or if I ever have grandkids someday. So I have the opposite stance.

[00:26:07] So it's just hard to wrap your brain around. It is an especially now since becoming a mom and he's only nine months old. He's just a little baby. He's getting pretty big, but I tell him he's my little baby. Yeah, I look at him and I think not.

[00:26:20] This isn't every time I usually look at him and I'm like, you're so cute. Or why can't you sleep? Or but sometimes sometimes I'll look at him and think, wow, there could be a possibility that one day you wouldn't want to talk to me for whatever reason.

[00:26:38] And so I've been researching a lot on parenting styles to try to figure out how can I get the bond as deep as possible and be there for him and for him to know that I'm safe place.

[00:26:50] And that's basically my life's work right now, even doing this podcast with you is a stretch for me that the poor book, my four little book was my life for two years and it came out a month before I became a mom. And it's just almost almost vanished.

[00:27:07] You people would write me on reading your book. I'm like, cool. Talk about it in a year or something. I kind of I kind of can't because it's an absolute priority for me that he I don't need him to tell me everything, but I want him to know

[00:27:19] as he grows and develops that he can tell me anything. Right. Tell me you've shoplifted. Tell me you have a crush on your teacher. Ask me about creation and evolution and everything in between. Like let's just have conversations. Right.

[00:27:37] And I think from what you've been through, I have no doubt that you're going to establish that bond. I certainly hope so. I tend to be the type of person that does something when I set my mind to it. And like I said, nothing else matters right now.

[00:27:52] It's just trying to be that safe space for him. That's wonderful. I wish more people worried about their relationships. Not that mine is perfect with my kids, but I certainly try to keep the doors open. They think I'm strict though. So I'll have them read your book.

[00:28:13] Do it. But yeah, I wanted to touch on not to stay in the realm of grief, but I know you lost so many people so quickly. And one of them that really stood out to me was probably Naomi. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:30] And I'm not sure what aspect of it froze it in my brain, but it did. And I'm just wondering if all that loss so quickly. And this is an odd question probably, but did it help you heal faster in a way?

[00:28:45] Like, did you get the sense that life is too short? I need to overcome this and move on or did it affect you in a way like that? Or did it just affect you for what it was? Just grief and loss of people. Yeah.

[00:29:01] You know, that is a really interesting question. I hadn't really thought about that. And sometimes not sometimes. Well, I was writing it. I knew that the Naomi story needed to be part of the book because it is such a simple, a pivotal life changing event for me.

[00:29:18] And as I was reading it, you know, it's not mentioned on the back of the book that Jessica is at the side of a friend while they pass after an accident. It's not something that, you know, I've used to describe the book,

[00:29:36] but it's one of the longest chapters. Right. And it's incredibly detailed. I feel it was really important for me to write because of how it did change how I see life. Sure. It definitely changed me for just the concept of we can go at any point.

[00:29:57] And there's no warning sometimes. So yeah, yeah. And there's strength. There's strength in that. And I think that's why I was comfortable being able to practice my version. I'm not going to say I'm a Buddhist, but I've read a lot of the death meditation.

[00:30:12] I think that's why I was so comfortable being able to go, OK, so if I did leave today, which I know is possible because I've seen it happen. Right. Right. It was accessible for me because I had seen, I had experienced that with other

[00:30:24] people and I did try something that I called my echo design. Like can I control how I'm remembered? And I did have a number of years after Naomi passed where I became incredibly social, very, very social. Just not just parties, but yeah, kind of a lot of parties.

[00:30:45] How many people can I know? How many souls can I touch? I bought these mini spatulas that I love. They're great for getting to the bottom of a jar and I bought like 10 sets. And I gave them to all sorts of different friends and thought, OK, and

[00:30:59] then whenever I'm gone and they'll be in each other's kitchens ago, oh, my God, are these mini spatulas from Jessica? Like, yes, I geeked out on spatulas trying to be remembered by people.

[00:31:09] So there was a bit of a as I look back on it because it's been almost 11 years now since Naomi passed and I've definitely don't have that level of desperation to be remembered. Even writing the book at first is I'm going to write a book and I want

[00:31:26] to reach all these people and everything like that. And then it became so personal for me to have written this book that it's. I I keep in touch with less people. I know less people.

[00:31:38] I mean, it has a lot to do with becoming a mother and moving to an island as well. But I just I don't go to parties and I'm much, much less, less social because I'm comfortable with how I'm comfortable with how I'm doing rather

[00:31:52] than needing to have like the biggest funeral that people say, wow, there were hundreds of people. And do you feel like writing the book was looking in retrospect, was writing the book more about healing yourself? Do you think or was it more about helping other people or both?

[00:32:11] I will try to do a direct misquote of Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic as she talks about when an idea comes in and it needs like an idea will stop in with you and need to be expressed.

[00:32:26] And that's your creativity, whether it's a book or a poem or sculpture would have you. And if you don't express that idea creatively, it'll go to someone else or whatever. And she has a line in there where she says and don't write.

[00:32:39] She says something like she gets really kind of sarcastic. And she says something like, so help me, don't write a book because you think you need to help people. Don't do it thinking you're going to help people.

[00:32:50] And I remember reading it and I probably had like some sort of vision board up on the wall being like, I'm going to help so many people with this book. And then. Reading that kind of good. Well, is everything else in the book is resonating.

[00:33:04] And so that was that planted the seed for me to see it as it's. Yeah, it was my healing journey and not. It isn't a book that has turned into something that I can then try to sell you a course or get you to my website

[00:33:19] so I can coach you through your own self love journey. I could have written these stories in that way and tried to promote something or tried to assert my some level of expertise. But no, it was no, it was just my own healing that had to happen.

[00:33:36] And it became very personal even since the books come out. I think I've reached a different level of being able to talk about these things that I just didn't. How many people have said, I didn't know this about you? And it's like, mm hmm.

[00:33:51] Yeah, kind of the point. I did a great job at not talking about it. I do think that you probably could do courses on self love and self healing. Because like I said before, I think there's a pandemic, so to speak,

[00:34:05] of unworthiness that so many feel not worthy, not lovable, whatever. And I think it all starts the healing part of it. It starts with self love and we're never taught how to love ourselves. You always taught that it's kind of selfish to, I don't know,

[00:34:24] it's a weird dynamic with society. So that might be in your future. I hope that it's something that can be more common to be taught to current and future generations. So it feels like those of us that are becoming parents

[00:34:38] that are doing this work can introduce that at least the concept with our children and try not to have like that was too many negatives. I was going to say, try not to have conditional love, but to have unconditional love for them.

[00:34:55] Right. I think if you give your son anything, if you give him that, that's the foundation for everything. If he can love himself, he's going to do great, right? Yeah, because that's the biggest struggle that most of us have. It's so challenging.

[00:35:12] It's like we're taught to gauge ourselves or score ourselves on how much we can give away. Very true. Some friends of mine. It's almost as if we would get together and have like a competition for who could be the hardest on themselves sort of thing.

[00:35:32] But we called it wit, like witty banter, putting ourselves down, putting each other down. And now I just I'd prefer to have people in my life that we can openly say, I love you, you're doing great.

[00:35:45] I was texting with a friend just before I came upstairs to get online with you. And she's just lost her dad after like a long time with cancer and just sending her message and saying, love you, thinking of you. Love you too.

[00:35:59] Like in just being able to have comfort with the L word rather than I'm so stupid. It doesn't get us anywhere, does it? No, but you also hear a lot of people say, well, you can't really love someone else if you don't love yourself.

[00:36:16] And I don't think that's true. I think you can love other people and still struggle loving yourself. I do. I think it's one of the hardest things there is. And but maybe that's just my journey. I don't, you know, I don't know.

[00:36:32] But to me, I think that's where a lot of us struggle. Can be easier to love someone else as well. Yeah, we can gloss over the annoying things are actually cute. Well, love is blind, they say, unless it's for yourself.

[00:36:50] So it's like, why don't we have blind love for ourselves? Exactly. You know, so smiling in the mirror was a huge step for me because I would look in the mirror and instead of looking at all there's my friend and she's got this glow and I love

[00:37:04] I love what she's done with this or that. And then looking in the mirror and getting like a like, and just my eyebrows get really long like my dad's eyebrows always did and like ones out of place and like just looking in the mirror.

[00:37:20] And so now I try to just like look in the mirror and just be like, hi. So do you say I love you to yourself looking in the mirror or do you just say it random? I yeah, I didn't. And so I again, good old was it?

[00:37:36] Twenty nine. Yeah, I was coming into twenty twenty that I published an article about the love project. I'd written it almost a year previously and went, OK, I need to share this. I need to share this work.

[00:37:48] And then it was I don't know how would I put that? People loved it. A lot of people told me how powerful that article was for them. So I decided to do a video. Tell yourself, I love you, send me a video.

[00:38:04] And it I think I got about forty something videos back from friends. That's OK. And people I didn't know that was the weird fun part. And so many people did this in the mirror. I just said, tell yourself, I love you.

[00:38:22] And I got all of these people in the mirror with their phone. And I went, oh, oh, that seems really hard. And so I tried it and yeah, it was me kind of doing this like trying to watching my own mouth, trying to move.

[00:38:40] So I it wasn't part of my practice originally. But now I will do it. I'll look in the mirror and sometimes I'll just see this emotion in my eyes of just caring so much and early motherhood fatigue and like all of these things.

[00:38:57] And I'll look in the mirror and go, oh, I love you. Like you're OK. Like, oh, you kind of like I hug the mirror if I could. Oh my God, you need you need a hug. That's great. I don't think it's natural now.

[00:39:12] But at first it was yeah, I think I would just laugh. Have you tried it? No, it's I had a friend years ago that told me to do it. And I that's hard to do. I just you just feel awkward and you feel silly.

[00:39:29] I don't know. It's just yeah. And then you get to see your own awkward. I think I'm silly, which then is kind of fun because now you're just having an awkward moment. What I have learned about the whole tell yourself,

[00:39:40] I love you practice is no one needs to know. Right. Yeah. I certainly could send it to somebody. So you were very blessed that 40 people did that. Absolutely. No one. It does not need to be a social media moment.

[00:39:56] Oh, yeah. Just to film yourself doing it is that's a lot. So yeah, yeah, it was a handful of them that that used the mirror. But even that I thought, oh, it was very powerful. And it was piecing together the narrative for that video

[00:40:13] that I started to talk about some of my past and my upbringing. And and yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. So if I were to ask you what the beauty in your mess is, what would you say? Gratitude, I think is where I've landed is

[00:40:32] I don't know if I fully believe it anymore, but I used to have a saying about the gift of grief and finding gratitude from grief. And I feel like that was a little bit simplistic, if you will, of specifically the grief of losing a person

[00:40:49] like someone dying and being able to go. I am so grateful that I had the time with them. I'm so grateful that I learned these things from them. I'm so grateful for my memories. And I was able to use that gratitude practice to look back on my

[00:41:07] upbringing and say, what am I actually grateful for? So we preached like we had to preach mandatory preaching. And because of that, you know, I wasn't allowed to go to university. Gosh, no, we wouldn't do that. But I've been able to have a pretty successful career.

[00:41:23] And I think it is from if I was shy, I couldn't be shy. You know, I was up on the platform and church doing demonstrations from the age of five. Oh, wow. I was speaking at doors from the age of five.

[00:41:37] And now I think five year olds, I see a five year old and it's just like, that's a child. That's a proper little child age. And so I'm kind of the beautiful aspect of it is that I have had courage to be able to speak.

[00:41:51] I have been able to share to quote unquote, like talk to strangers both in a career, which I was unable to advance quite a bit. And now just in writing a book and being able to talk to people. And I've always wanted. How would I put that?

[00:42:06] I've always been averse to getting preachy about my story about being like, oh, my God, you got to tell yourself I love you and it's really great. And you got it because it feels a little bit like, oh, my God,

[00:42:17] you really need to read the Bible and find God and Jesus will save you. Like it just feels a little bit preachy, but there's just in such so many messy stories to use your word of the beauty in the mess.

[00:42:34] Some people would read these stories and just be like there's some disasters in here, and it's just beautiful to be able to land in gratitude. And I just realized that it's kind of a compliment whenever people say, like, I had no idea. I had no idea.

[00:42:50] It is a compliment, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. No one was like, I've been trying to figure out why you're just so damn broken all the time. And you don't come across that way at all. It's broken. No. And not taking away from what you went through at all.

[00:43:07] You come across very vibrant, full of life, full of love. You know, so yeah, that's a tremendous. I'm here to live and I need to not live in the past. And I want to be completely honest. I do have my moments where I

[00:43:23] look at my beautiful son and think, how could anyone not want to know him about my parents? Right. Absolutely. Or I just I love myself and think, how could and then I just have to not. Right. I don't like shut it down.

[00:43:42] It's not like I bother it up and push it deep, deep down or anything like that. I just go, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's. These are valid feelings. And yeah, I do have that. Ongoing kind of bewilderment, especially as a being a parent now,

[00:44:00] I do feel a little bewildered at times that they could ever. Turn their backs on their their children. Right. Yeah. I just wanted to be able to say that I'm not I try to be authentic and I'm not going to sit here

[00:44:13] and be like, I'm great all the time and all my shadows are just bright, rainbow, prism light. And it's like, no, no, there's a certain heaviness that I am aware of very often that I would rather just name it. Just being a human. Yeah.

[00:44:33] There's times that waves of stuff is going to come over you. But you I'm guessing and I can't speak for you, but I'm guessing you're able to pull yourself out of that quickly now. Yeah. Or before it might overwhelm you, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:44:49] Just to be really mindful of it. And again, it's that victim cloak. I could feel sorry for my it's like flip the book open to a page and find if there's a reason I could feel sorry for myself, you know, or try to soldier on with the

[00:45:07] the strength that I found in I made these choices to get myself here. I could have gone back. I could have married a cult guy and been a quiet little life and had kids as often as I could and kept my mouth shut and gone preaching

[00:45:26] and wore dresses down to my ankles and. But I couldn't, right? Right. I just also couldn't and I accept that about myself and kind of admire that. Like, ah, Jessica. Yeah. Yeah, you couldn't. Well, and you wouldn't be the Jessica here today.

[00:45:42] No. Had you not gone through everything that you've gone through? No, I'm excited to be a mom now at this age having learned these lessons. And it's still very challenging. I'm still learning a lot about myself. And like I said, starting to dig into inner child work

[00:45:59] and things like that. But I'm really glad that I waited. That's great. So I did want to ask you to I know you talk about taking back the art of prayer. What do you mean by that? Hmm. I pray. I pray pretty often. I thought and thank you.

[00:46:18] Part of me is like, did that actually make it in the book? I felt like I wanted to write a whole book about taking back the art of prayer, but I had to do this memoir first. So part of me, you kind of you kind of got me.

[00:46:30] I'm like, oh, I did slip that in prayer to me. Mantras and intention setting. And it's part of of what has gotten me to where I am, like literally right now, even in terms of praying for a partner, praying for a son.

[00:46:50] And it's taking it back because the way that we prayed growing up was you could only approach. Well, first off, you pray to God, there's one God and he's white and he's in the sky. And you can't pray to him directly because you're a sinner.

[00:47:07] You pray through his son. So you're already not good enough to pray and then maybe he'll be able to get around to what it is you're asking for. However, taking that back is just sending sending wishes into the ether, basic,

[00:47:29] just so basic, just putting an intention out there. Repeating a mantra and knowing that I can do this, that it's it doesn't make me a sinner. I don't need to talk to a specific God. There's a lot to choose from out there.

[00:47:46] And being able to walk in the woods and express gratitude because the trees are pretty. That's prayer for me now. And it's not something that I do as a routine or a habit I don't have my mom or dad come into my bedtime as a kid

[00:48:07] to listen to my prayers. We pray together, so it's not rote. It doesn't have to be done a certain way. It feels very natural now of being able. Like I pray, prayed it for the strength to be as good of a mom as I can.

[00:48:24] I just don't need to be praying to a specific entity or acting like a sinner. OK, I was just curious what you meant by that. So thank you as we kind of wrap up today because I want to be respectful of your time.

[00:48:39] But is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would want to make sure that the listeners here? Oh, I don't have a bad answer for that. And you've already got me with the art of prayer. You blew me away that I fit that in.

[00:48:53] Just tell yourself I love you. Try it out. It doesn't need to be in the mirror and we can or do it in the mirror, whatever. Stronger than me. When you tell yourself I love you, you will be able to feel the authenticity.

[00:49:09] You will be able to feel who it is you're talking to and how we react whenever we hear it. And if there's anything that needs to change in life, if there's any discord, any reason, like if someone said I love you and you went,

[00:49:25] I don't know if you do because you already do this and that that inner voice can happen as well. And it can be a very, a very safe conversation. And again, no one needs to know you're doing it. It's very private.

[00:49:38] So do you think actually just repeating that to yourself? I love you. Starts changing the way you feel about yourself. Is that? Yeah. And I always use my name. OK. Just to make sure that it's the conversation. Yeah, I love you, Jessica.

[00:49:54] Otherwise, I love you could just be a Valentine's Day card that I'm reading out loud, right? Right. But to say I love you, Jessica, and it's just sort of it's cozy now for me personally, whereas at the beginning,

[00:50:07] it was I love you and there was kind of this like eye rolling like, oh, sure. Then why are we living like this? Why like, why are you going in the opposite direction of what you're meant to be doing and to be ready for that conversation?

[00:50:22] It's just it's worth it. That's very true. I hadn't thought about the inner conversation. I would start, but you're right. It would. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you really love yourself, you're going to act differently towards yourself. And that's why I ended up quitting that job.

[00:50:40] I was hurting myself. It was self harm to be able to work that much. And I just told myself I literally told myself shut up. Here's a pair of shoes. I turned into that. Oh, wow. Here are some shoes. You're fine. Here's a new outfit. It's OK.

[00:50:57] Let's look at cars. Do you need a new car and the whoever whatever aspect of myself that I was having the conversation with was just like, what? I don't want these things. I want your time. Do you think some of that was to prove

[00:51:13] that you were worthy and maybe if your parents heard about how successful you were that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that was the thing about having that that big house on my own. And there was one guy that I dated very briefly,

[00:51:27] but he came to pick me up and he walked in the door and went, oh, shoot, now you're going to amasculate me. Oh, wow. Yeah. So that was what's redder than a red flag. That's a pretty good one right there. Yeah. Yeah. That was a pretty clear indicator.

[00:51:43] So we didn't get too many dates, but I would immediately if anyone said, oh, you live here on your own, the three bedrooms, double garage, you live here on your own. And I would consistently say, oh, yeah, but you know,

[00:51:56] what's funny is like my parents don't even think I'm successful. Look at all these things I have, but my parents still don't love me. Ha ha. And that was before I did the deep work. Right. I thought that I was I thought I was coping

[00:52:09] or I thought I was accepting or maybe there was part of me that was trying to start to talk about it. But I all I could do was try to find levity. But yeah, that used to be part of my dialogue about they're still not proud of me.

[00:52:22] And it's like, you know what? Maybe they are. I have a public Instagram account. My mom's on Instagram. She at one point knew my Instagram handle. Maybe she checks in. Maybe they are quietly proud. And then they probably have to pray away this in

[00:52:37] for thinking that they're proud of me. I don't know. Right. But I really don't I don't know. So I just try to kind of leave it alone a little bit because what matters is really what I think. Right. And what you have in front of you, your son

[00:52:53] and your husband and your family. So yeah. Yeah, it's great to grow my own family now. Well, I thank you very much for today. I loved reading the book. Like I said, you're a beautiful writer. And I think anybody who reads it's going to be pulled

[00:53:08] into what's going to happen next. And I thank you for sharing with us today as well. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thank you. As we wrap up today's episode, I hope Jessica sharing her knowledge, experience and wisdom has helped you in some way.

[00:53:25] One thing I wanted to point out that's important for me and especially for those of you who know me is Jessica's current religious beliefs are very different than mine and that's OK. So you might ask why am I pointing it out?

[00:53:38] Well, that's what the beauty in the mess is all about, right? It's that you can be different from someone else. You can believe very differently. You can have different backgrounds, different upbringings, you name it. But you can still respect them and you can still

[00:53:53] learn from them. And what a beautiful thing that is. And I think the main takeaway from this episode with Jessica for me was her sharing her journey of how she cultivated self love and self acceptance. And I think that's one of the most important journeys

[00:54:08] many of us are going to have or do have ahead of us. And I think that's the key to so many other things in this life. I think once you master that, a lot of the other things are going to fall in line.

[00:54:20] And I think that's why it's one of my focuses for my life, at least. And I also love how writing was one of the tools that helped Jessica unlock these gifts. I also loved how she found gratitude for her past, which once haunted her and embarrassed

[00:54:37] her. And now she finds strength in having overcome it and she's grateful for it because of all the lessons it's taught her along the way. So what stood out to you? I'd love to hear from you as always. I hope this episode helps at least one person.

[00:54:51] And with that, I hope you have a blessed week, my friend. Thank you for listening to The Beauty and the Mess. If you enjoyed what you heard, please share it with a friend. And if you haven't already, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast

[00:55:07] on your favorite pod player. If you have any questions or comments, any topic ideas you would like to hear about, or you think you would be a great guest on the show, you can reach me directly at thebeautyandthemess.com. Thanks for listening.