Braving Time

Braving Time is a vividly frank, absorbing account of a teenager on the edge of womanhood as she faces loss of her loved ones through death, mental illness, and physical displacement, and how it challenged her feeling of being held safe and connected to those she held dear in the world. This memoir expresses a universal theme of how we, as humans, internalize such losses, desperately wanting to find someone to fill the gap—someone to love us deeply, unconditionally; to lead us out of the dark night. We do not see that these lessons are here for us to learn to live authentically, self-reliantly, and with integrity. The elixir will be when we can trust in ourselves to take good care of our own self (our inner child), to rediscover who we truly are in our own right, and then to revive our essential self. This brings us into healthy connection/belongingness with others, and toward wholeness. This is not a story of wholeness—that would wait for another time. Rather, this is a story of resilience.