For so long, my very own body felt like a ruined place. Desecrated. Not a temple but a tomb. I lived inside skin that felt haunted — a house where sickness pooled in the corners, where blackness spread across every wall. I did not trust it, did not belong to it, did not believe it could hold anything good.
When I became pregnant, that belief sharpened into terror. How could anything pure grow in soil so poisoned? How could beauty, how could wholeness, come from a body I had been convinced was only a site of shame, disease, and ruin? I carried not just the child, but the fear that I would pass on the rot, that nothing untouched or sacred could survive in me.
And yet.
Life stirred anyway. A pulse beneath my ribs, an impossible defiance. The small flutter of feet, the rhythm of a heartbeat that was not my own. Out of the ground I had sworn was barren, something holy was planted. Out of a body I believed only carried darkness, light began to move.
Relearning innocence is not simple. It is not the return to a childhood untouched by harm — that door is gone. But there is another door, one that opens into a fiercer kind of innocence: the kind born from ashes, from defilement, from the miracle of growth where no growth should be.
Joy can be planted again. I know this now, because it happened inside me. It happened despite me. And every day since, I have been learning to tend that soil, to believe that even what was desecrated can become a garden.
“To bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes,
the oil of joy instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”
— Isaiah 61:3
B 🤍
Leave a Reply