I did not start out loud.

As a child, I became deeply aware of how finite our time here really is, after witnessing things no child is prepared for. It made me quiet. I hid from attention any chance I got, retreating into my own imagined worlds instead of facing how fragile everything actually was.

I carried that quiet into my teenage years, along with a harder question underneath it: who am I, really? Part of that question was about my own femininity. For years I saw being a woman as a burden rather than something to become.

College cracked it open a little. An ocean away from home, surrounded by cultures and stories different from my own, I finally got to choose who I was instead of simply being who I had always been.

I got married, and with limited means and a meager paycheck making the cost of flights back to Tahiti nearly impossible, returning to the comfort I had known my whole life was no longer within reach. New land. New people. No tribe.

What I no longer had access to, I slowly began learning to build instead. New friendships in place of the old ones. New rhythms in place of familiar ones. I did not know it yet, but I was already practicing the very thing I would one day invite other women into, creating something new out of what was missing, instead of waiting for it to return.

But it did not happen all at once. Underneath, I was still navigating pregnancy after pregnancy without a single hand from my old life to hold onto, still quietly searching for who I was.

There was a season where I could not even open scripture. God met me somewhere else entirely, through other books, other voices, until He led me back to Him in His own way, on His own timeline. It taught me something I would need soon: my relationship with Him was never actually dependent on the usual forms.

2020 cracked things open even further. In the stillness, I stopped being afraid to question what I had believed for years without ever asking if it was true, including how I related to my own faith community. That questioning led me to the thing I had been circling my whole life without naming it: freedom. Freedom is what makes peace possible. Freedom is what makes real flourishing possible. Without it, none of that can grow.

It was not until my late thirties that I finally understood the beauty of being a woman, the very thing I had spent my teenage years resenting. My perspective evolved, shaped by God's nudges along the way, until I could finally love who I am, simply because He loves me exactly as I am.

Somewhere in all of that unraveling and rebuilding, God turned me around and invited me to walk beside other women as they find their own footing, their own stepping stones, back to Him.

That is the heart behind Wake Wonder.