There's one thing that has to come first. It isn't a plan. It isn't motivation. It's something harder — and more freeing — than either of those.
I'm not here to tell you how to do your impossible thing. I'm here because I've done a few of mine — and before any of them became possible, something had to happen first. Something I wasn't expecting.
Maybe you're reading this because you're ready to change something. Maybe you're here because something happened — something you did, or something that was done to you — and you're trying to figure out how to move forward from it. Maybe you're just starting to believe again that a bigger life is available to you.
Wherever you're coming from, I want you to know: I've felt what you're feeling. Not the details — those are yours, and they don't need to be mine. But the weight of them. The shame. The quiet voice that says you had your chance, or look at what you did, or after everything that's happened, who do you think you are to want more?
I know that voice. I lived inside it for a long time.
"Others believed in me before I believed in myself. That's where it started."
When I was working toward one of the most important goals of my life — a goal with no second chances, no going back — I realized something. I had been carrying a punishment I was giving myself. A sentence I had handed down for every mistake, every failure, every version of myself I wasn't proud of.
And then two people, in the same day, said something to me that I didn't know I needed to hear: the punishment is over. You can stop now.
That's grace. That's what this page is about.
I want to be careful here, because I'm not a therapist. I'm not offering a program or a method. I'm just telling you what I found — and what I found is this: you cannot build something new on a foundation of self-judgment. It doesn't hold. I tried.
Whatever brought you here — a mistake you made, a habit you can't shake, a relationship that broke, something that was taken from you, or simply the feeling that you've been sleepwalking through a life you didn't fully choose — the feelings underneath it are real. They deserve to be acknowledged, not buried.
But they don't get to be the judge.
You don't need to share your story with me. I don't need to know what happened. The feelings are what matter — and the feelings are something you already know better than anyone. The question is whether you're willing to set them down long enough to take one step forward.
For a long time I thought grace was something I extended to others. What I didn't understand was that I had to receive it first — from God, from the people who loved me, from something bigger than my own willpower. You can't pour from empty. And you cannot give yourself what you haven't yet accepted is available to you.
I was 353 pounds. That was real. The consequences of the choices that got me there were real. Grace didn't make those disappear — I still had to do the work. But it changed the energy I brought to that work. I stopped punishing myself into change and started choosing it. Those are very different things, and they produce very different results.
This is the hardest part. We are our own harshest critics. The world, frankly, doesn't spend as much time judging you as you imagine it does. The judgment that keeps you stuck is almost always the one you're administering to yourself. At some point — and only you will know when — you have to look at yourself with the same compassion you'd give to someone you love, and say: enough. The punishment is over.
"No matter what you have been through — God doesn't disqualify broken people. He uses them."
— Simon M. FisherSome people read something like this and something shifts immediately. A weight lifts. They feel ready to move. That's real, and if that's you, trust it.
For others, this takes longer. Much longer. The path back to yourself after a long time away isn't always a single moment — sometimes it's a slow, quiet accumulation of small decisions to be a little gentler with yourself than you were yesterday.
Both are valid. Both are the work. You don't owe anyone a timeline, and you especially don't owe one to me.
What I'd ask is this: don't skip this step. Don't read a page like this and move on to the "real" work thinking the foundation has been laid. The foundation is the work. Everything impossible you ever build will be built on top of what you do here — on the decision to stop judging yourself long enough to believe that something different is possible.
"The goal isn't to get moving before you're ready. The goal is to become someone who believes they're allowed to begin."
I also want to say something about faith — because for me, this process was inseparable from it. Coming back to church, going back to therapy, leaning on people who carried me when I couldn't carry myself — that was all part of the same thing. I believe in a grace that is bigger than mine. A grace that was available to me even when I had done nothing to earn it.
I'm not telling you what to believe. That's yours. But I'll say this: whatever you believe, the foundation of doing impossible things is the same. You have to accept that you are not disqualified. That your past is not your sentence. That something new is genuinely, actually possible for you.
I believe that. About you. Even though I don't know you. Even though I don't know what you've been through.
So that's where I want you to start. Not with a goal. Not with a plan. With this.
With the decision — even a shaky, uncertain, half-believing version of it — that you are going to stop being your own worst enemy. That the slate can be wiped clean. That whatever you've been through, and whatever you've done, you are still someone worth rooting for.
I'm rooting for you. I'm holding your hand as I go. Come with me when you're ready.
When you're ready — and only when you're ready — there's more. Declare your impossible thing, read the essays, or just sit with this a while longer.
Declare Your Impossible Thing Read the Essays