hi i'm rachel
Finding healing in the heartbreak and beauty in the becoming.
I was about seven when it all started—though no one knew it then, not even me. One moment I was laughing on a hammock, the next I was flat on the concrete, headfirst. I still remember how the world spun as I tried to stand. I cried. My dad, like many millennial dads before him, brushed it off: “You’re fine. Rub some dirt on it.”
But I wasn’t fine. And no amount of dirt was going to fix what had just begun inside my body.
The pain didn’t show up all at once. It started quietly—whispers in my sleep, a throb in my knee, a heaviness that followed me from the inside out. At first, no one believed me. Doctors said I just wanted attention. Teachers thought I was lazy. My parents thought I was being dramatic. Even I wondered if maybe they were right. I couldn't sleep. I’d sneak Tylenol PM from my mom’s cabinet just to sleep at night and pretend everything was normal during the day.
Eventually, my mom started to see what others couldn’t. She took me to specialist after specialist until finally, someone found it: a bruise on my brain, the size of a golf ball. Still, nothing changed. No real treatment. No answers. Just more dismissals. More silence.
Years later, in my early twenties, I fell off a horse whose stirrups hadn’t been tied. That ER visit finally gave my pain a name: fibromyalgia. I was handed prescriptions and a diagnosis like it would fix everything. But it didn’t. Instead, I found myself in a wheelchair, doped up on medications that made me feel like a shadow of myself.
So one day, I started weaning off—one med at a time. I started moving my body again, even though every step hurt. I looked like the picture of health, but inside, I was still fighting the same invisible war.
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It wasn’t until I met my husband—during a messy divorce and the most painful season of my life—that things started to shift. I was a single mom just trying to survive. He was a tall, dark and handsome German man who believed in good food and intentional living. He noticed the pain I tried so hard to hide. And instead of running from it, he pulled me in close.
He cooked for me. He challenged the way I ate and lived. He whispered things like “food is medicine” long before I ever believed it. But slowly, I started to feel it. Something was changing. The fog began to lift. The flare-ups became less crushing. I wasn’t healed, but I was finally beginning to hope.
And if you know anything about me, you know—once I believe in something, I go all in.
I started reading every label. Researching every ingredient. Swapping out one toxic product at a time. Not because it was trendy—but because my life depended on it.
Today, I’m a wife of ten years.
A mom of three wild, joy-filled boys.
The founder of a successful ethical dog breeding business.
Still in pain—but still choosing to show up, heal, and help others do the same.
I’ve learned something I wish I had known as that little girl lying on the concrete:
There is pain in the process of a miracle.
Jesus didn’t heal James, His disciple, not because He didn’t love him, but because the world needed to see what faith looks like even when the healing never comes. That story has shaped my life. Because healing, for me, isn’t just about becoming pain-free—it’s about becoming who I was always meant to be.
This blog is where I share that journey. Not from a mountaintop, but from the messy middle. If you’re in the thick of it too, I want you to know:
You’re not alone. And your healing—however slow, however hard—is still holy.
