Brown Study and Wool-Gathering

This poem feels like a very personal declaration of who I am and who I am becoming.

I’m in a season of healing, but also carrying deep grief. I’m learning that strength and weakness, sorrow and growth, endurance and mercy can all exist in the same life at the same time.

The thoughts and lived experience behind this poem are my own, and I am the author of it.

I’m sharing it because it says something I’ve been trying to put into words for a long time

I Am Not Only Made of Endurance

I am not one thing.

Not one clean line,
not one tidy telling,
not one version of a woman
made easy for other people to read.

I have lived too long for that.

I have been soft
and I have been watchful.
I have spoken plain
and felt deeply.
I have wanted beauty
with tired hands.
I have carried longing
through ordinary days
and still noticed the sky.

There are parts of me
that learned in hard places.
Parts that still reach for gentle ones.
Parts that know how to enter a room smiling
while holding a whole private weather inside.

I am not ashamed of that.

I am not less honest
because I am layered.
I am not less whole
because I have changed.
I am not less worthy
because some of my strength
was born in survival
and some of my tenderness
was born in need.

Both belong to me.

I know what it is
to hunger for peace
and still feel the pulse of restlessness.
To love God
and still bring Him my unfinished places.
To want depth,
beauty,
intelligence,
warmth,
and still be drawn
to what is simple and true.

I am made of more than one world.

There is the woman
who knows grit by name.
Who has stood in kitchens and parking lots
and ordinary mornings
and felt whole chapters moving through her.
Who has learned that endurance
is not always loud.
Sometimes it looks like getting dressed.
Sometimes it sounds like laughter
returning after a long silence.
Sometimes it is nothing more glamorous
than staying open
when life has given you reasons to close.

And there is the woman
still becoming.

The one with longing still in her.
The one with tenderness still in her.
The one who has not gone numb,
has not disappeared,
has not surrendered her inner life
just because the years
have asked much of her.

She is here too.

She is the one
who still wants meaning.
Still wants honest conversation.
Still wants beauty that does not lie.
Still wants to walk into a room
not as what she can do,
not as what she has carried,
but as herself.

And that self
is not polished into one easy shape.

She is strength and hesitation.
Wisdom and wanting.
Scar and song.
A steady hand
with a trembling place beneath it.
A woman who has known weakness
without letting it make her small.

And I do not say this
as though I built myself alone.

I know too much now
of mercy for that.

The strength in me
did not come only from striving.
The depth in me
did not come only from sorrow.
The wisdom in me
did not come only from time.

I have been shaped
by the faithful hand of God.
Kept in places
I should have been lost.
Softened in places
I could have turned hard.
Carried in seasons
when my own strength
was not enough to carry me.

If I am still here—
still tender,
still hungry for truth,
still reaching toward light—
it is not my doing alone.

Grace has been at work in me.

So I do not speak now
as apology.
I speak as witness.

I am not one thing.
I am not finished.
I am not fading.

I am a living collection
of what endured,
what softened,
what broke,
what healed,
what waited,
what woke,
and what still rises in me now
asking to be named.

And I am learning
not to reduce that miracle
for anyone.

I am not only made of endurance.

I am made of mercy too.