✦ SELF-REFLECTION | THE JOURNAL
I’ve always been a fixer. The kind of person who sees a problem and immediately starts mentally building a twelve-step plan to solve it. Someone’s upset? I’ll figure out why. There’s tension in a relationship? Surely there’s something I can say to make it better. Somebody doesn’t like me? Well, give me approximately three business days and I’ll come up with fourteen possible explanations for what I did wrong. For years, I convinced myself that keeping the peace meant I was doing the right thing. What I didn’t realize was how often I was sacrificing my own peace in the process.
Recently, I finished reading Forgiving What You Can’t Forget by Lysa TerKeurst, and something about that book changed the way I looked at my own experiences. Not because it gave me some magical formula for fixing everything, but because it helped me understand that maybe fixing everything was never supposed to be my responsibility in the first place. I had spent so much time trying to understand other people’s actions, justify my feelings, and figure out what I could have done differently that I hadn’t given myself much room to simply acknowledge that certain things hurt. And sometimes they still do.
When I started sharing some of those realizations publicly, something unexpected happened. I felt lighter. I wasn’t exposing anyone, telling every detail, or asking people to take sides. I was simply being honest about what I was learning. Forgiveness doesn’t automatically repair a relationship. Setting boundaries doesn’t make someone cruel. And you can genuinely wish someone well while recognizing that having them in your life might not be healthy. What surprised me even more was hearing from people who recognized themselves in what I wrote. That’s when I started wondering how many of us are carrying the same feelings but convincing ourselves we’re the only ones experiencing them.
How many mothers feel overwhelmed but hesitate to admit it because they’re afraid it sounds ungrateful? How many people struggle with family relationships but feel guilty acknowledging that those relationships hurt? How many of us are exhausted from trying to be understanding, forgiving, patient, and agreeable while quietly wondering when we’re allowed to have feelings of our own? Somewhere along the way, I think we’ve confused having an uncomfortable emotion with being a bad person. We feel resentment and call ourselves bitter. We need boundaries and worry we’re selfish. We experience anger, guilt, or frustration and immediately start searching for reasons we shouldn’t feel that way. As though every emotion needs to be defended in a courtroom before we’re allowed to acknowledge it. And listen, as a recovering overthinker, I could probably build an entire legal case against myself before breakfast.
One of the biggest lessons I’m learning is that having a feeling and acting on that feeling are two very different things. Being angry doesn’t give me permission to hurt someone. Feeling overwhelmed doesn’t mean I’ve failed as a mother. And recognizing that a relationship is painful doesn’t automatically mean someone has to be the villain. My faith has become an important part of understanding that distinction. I’m learning to bring the uncomfortable parts of myself to God instead of waiting until I’ve figured everything out. Sometimes that means acknowledging my own mistakes. Other times it means accepting that I cannot control someone else’s choices, perceptions, or willingness to change. Which, for someone whose natural instinct is to fix absolutely everything, is both incredibly freeing and wildly inconvenient.
And that’s how The Things We Don’t Admit began. Not because I’ve reached some extraordinary level of emotional maturity or unlocked the secret to a peaceful life. I’m still a wife, a mother, a Christian, a reader, and a woman who can spend an embarrassing amount of time replaying a conversation that the other person probably forgot five minutes after it happened. But I’m also someone who believes we need more honest conversations about the complicated parts of being human. The guilt that comes with motherhood. The relationships we grieve even when the people are still alive. The exhaustion of people-pleasing. The uncomfortable realizations that come with healing, forgiveness, and personal growth.
I don’t want this to become a place where we blame everyone else for our struggles or justify every reaction. I want it to be a place where we can acknowledge what’s real, take responsibility for what belongs to us, and learn from one another. I’ll be sharing personal experiences, lessons from books, reflections on faith, and probably the occasional story about something ridiculous I’ve said or done. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that personal growth doesn’t have to mean taking ourselves seriously every waking minute.
So, if you’ve ever felt guilty for needing a break, struggled to forgive someone, worried too much about what other people think, or found yourself holding on to something you desperately want to release, I hope you’ll find something familiar here. I can’t promise I’ll always have the answers, but I can promise that I’m willing to keep asking the questions.
Maybe the things we don’t admit are the very things we need to start talking about.
With love and a little grace,
Ashton ♡
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