When your too tender, too quiet, too much- and exactly who God meant you to be.

All my life, I’ve never really felt like I fit in.

When I was a little girl, my favorite thing wasn’t playing tag or dolls or whatever everyone else was doing. It was sitting with my neighbor’s elderly mother who had dementia. She couldn’t talk, and honestly, that was part of the peace. I loved just being near her—coloring in silence, no pressure to perform or keep up. That quiet companionship meant more to me than most conversations ever could.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but I know now: I was always a little different. A little quieter. A little older in spirit than my age could explain. And when I was diagnosed with cancer, that difference only grew. People often assume the illness changed me—and it did, in some ways—but truthfully, I was already a bit odd before cancer ever arrived.

Now I’m a 41 (almost 42) year old woman, wife, and mother of three boys, and that same feeling lingers. I still don’t quite fit. I’m often the one who doesn’t get the inside joke. The one whose thoughts go too deep, whose questions make people uncomfortable, whose silence is often misunderstood. Even my own family sometimes shakes their heads at me.

I’ve always felt alone in a world that’s too loud, too fast, and honestly—too full of color some days.

But here’s the thing: the one thing I cannot bear is for anyone else to feel as alone as I’ve felt for most of my life.

It’s made me notice the ones others miss. The quiet ones. The odd ones. The broken-hearted ones. The ones who smile through pain or talk a little too much because they’re afraid of silence. I see them. I feel them. I was them.

Maybe that’s why I do what I do. Why I sit with women in crisis, why I hold space for hard stories, why I answer messages at 11 p.m. when someone says, “I don’t know who else to talk to.”

Because I know what it’s like to feel like a stranger in your own skin. To feel too much and not enough at the same time.

So no, I may not ever be the one who fits in—but maybe I’m not meant to.

Maybe my calling is to make space for others who feel like they don’t either. Maybe being the “odd one” has been the holy setup all along.

Because in a world that rushes past the lonely, the still, the quiet—I’ll be the one who notices. Who slows down. Who stays.