I did not know I needed help.
That is the honest truth of it. And I think it is the thing most people never say — not because they are lying, but because when you are in the middle of it, you genuinely cannot see it.
Six months after losing Lucy Grace, I was functioning. I was getting up in the morning. I was showing up. I was doing the things that needed to be done. By most external measures — including my own — I was fine.
But fine is not the same as okay. And okay is not the same as free.
I was not surviving well. I just did not know it yet.
What grief does that nothing else does
Grief strips away your coping mechanisms.
For most of my life I had managed — quietly, competently, invisibly — a set of deep fears I did not even have names for. Fear of not being enough. Fear of not being truly loveable. Fear that the people I loved most would eventually find me too much or not enough or somewhere in between.
I was driven. I out-worked almost everyone around me. My goal — if I am being completely honest — was to over-achieve. Some people might call that perfectionism and I would have pushed back on that label. I did not think I was perfect. I just believed, somewhere underneath everything, that perfect was the target. And anything short of it was missing the mark.
The performance was the protection. If I worked hard enough, achieved enough, showed up well enough — maybe the fear would not catch up with me. Maybe I could outrun it.
But grief does not let you outrun anything.
It takes everything you have just to get through the day — and suddenly the fears you had been quietly containing for years had nowhere left to go. They came out sideways. In the way I kept score in the wrong direction. In the insecurity that kept whispering — even on the good days — that it was only a matter of time.
I was not just grieving Lucy Grace. I was grieving a version of myself I had worked very hard to maintain — and could no longer hold together.
The moment I could not explain away
It came in the middle of a conversation I was not expecting.
Someone who loved me — someone who knew me well enough to say the hard thing — held up a mirror.
They pointed out something I did not want to see. That even when things were good — even on the days that should have been easy, the moments that should have been enough — I was not holding onto those. I was keeping score in the wrong direction. Cataloguing the evidence for my fears rather than the evidence against them.
They were not saying it to be cruel. They were saying it because it was true.
And something in me went very quiet.
Because I knew — in the way you know things you have been trying not to know — that they were right. I had been doing this for a long time. And this was not just grief talking. This was something older.
Your mirror moment may have looked nothing like mine. Maybe it was a conversation with someone who loved you. Maybe it was something you noticed in yourself in a quiet moment. Maybe it was a pattern you could not explain away anymore. The details are different for everyone. But the feeling — of seeing yourself clearly for the first time and not being sure you liked what you saw — that part is not mine alone.
The conversation that changed things
Not long after — rattled and raw and not entirely sure what to do with what I had seen in myself — I called a trusted friend. A fellow pastor’s wife who knew both my world and my heart.
I did not call her because I knew I needed help. I called her because I did not know what else to do.
She listened. She did not fix it or explain it or tell me what it meant. She just stayed in it with me — and then challenged me to focus on one small thing I could ask of the person I loved that would bring me peace. Something specific. Something reachable. Not the whole problem — just one thing.
That was the first time in a long time someone had helped me narrow the overwhelming down to something I could actually hold.
And then — gently, almost as an afterthought — she asked whether I had talked to anyone. A counselor. Someone trained to help with what I was carrying.
I had not. The idea felt like an admission of something I was not ready to admit.
But I went. And something began to shift.
What I found when I finally looked
I want to be careful here — because this part of the story is not a quick before and after. It was not a single conversation or a single session that changed everything. It was slow. It took years. The kind of change that does not announce itself but you look up one day and realize you are standing somewhere different than you were.
What I found — slowly, over time — was that the fears I had been carrying were not the truth about me. They were stories I had absorbed somewhere along the way and never stopped to question. Agreements I had made without realizing I was agreeing to anything.
Lies. Not dramatic ones. Quiet ones. The kind that whisper rather than shout. You have to earn it. You are only as good as your last performance. If people really knew you — all of you — they would find you to be too much or not enough.
I learned to recognize the moment the fear was driving instead of the truth. Not perfectly — not overnight — but slowly. I learned to slow down the narrative in my mind and ask a simple question: Is this actually true? Or is this the fear talking?
I learned to receive the good days rather than waiting for them to be taken away. I learned to trust what people showed me rather than bracing for the moment they would show me something different. I learned — and this was the hardest — to let people see the real version of me. Not the driven, achieving, gracious version. The afraid one.
This did not happen quickly. Healing like this rarely does. It was years of slow work — recognizing a tendency, naming a lie, choosing truth instead, backsliding, trying again. The kind of change that does not feel like change while it is happening and then one day you look up and realize you are standing somewhere you could not have imagined.
And what I found at the end of that slow road — or at least at the place I am standing now — was freedom.
Not the absence of fear. Not perfection finally achieved. Just the quiet, steady ability to look at the fear and choose something else. To believe — actually believe, not just say — that I was enough. That I was loveable. Not because I had earned it. Because I was.
That is not a small thing. That is everything.
Why I am telling you this
Because I spent a long time believing that asking for help was a sign of weakness. That a woman of faith should be able to carry her grief with more grace. That what I was feeling was not bad enough — not clinical enough, not dramatic enough — to warrant the kind of help that required sitting across from someone and saying I am not okay.
If that is where you are — I want to say this as clearly as I know how:
You do not have to be in crisis to need help. You do not have to be falling apart visibly. You do not have to hit a wall before you are allowed to ask someone to walk alongside you.
Sometimes the sign that you need help is simply that you are not thriving. That you are functioning but not free. That you have been managing something for so long that you have forgotten you were managing anything at all.
Grief has a way of revealing what was already there. And what gets revealed deserves to be healed — not re-buried, not re-managed, not pushed back down until the next time it surfaces.
If this post resonates with you — if something in you went quiet while you were reading it — that quiet is worth paying attention to.
You are allowed to ask for help. Even now. Even if what you are carrying does not have a name yet.
Because God is not finished with your story.
And sometimes the next chapter begins the moment you stop trying to write it alone.
If you are looking for a place to start — the Old to New Creations Journals were designed for exactly this kind of slow, intentional work. And if you are in a hard season right now — grab the free Prayer List — prayers for yourself, your spouse, and your kids for the ordinary days and the ones that knock you down.
