“A prudent man conceals knowledge,
Proverbs 12:23 (New King James Version)
but the heart of fools proclaims foolishness.”
I think I am finally learning that being known and being exposed are not the same thing.
For a long time, I thought they were.
And honestly, I am still learning this as I write it.
That feels important to say because I don’t want this to read like a testimony that has already reached its conclusion. I am not standing on the other side of everything that has happened to me, looking backward with perfect clarity and explaining exactly what God was doing the entire time. I am still processing. I am still realizing things. Sometimes I don’t know what I believe about something until I sit down to write on it before the Lord, and even then, what I write may simply be what I understand today.
So perhaps this is less of a finished testimony and more of a testimony in the making.
A record of what Jesus is revealing to me as I walk with Him.
And maybe the writing itself is part of that process.
I want to be honest about what I have lived through, what I have misunderstood, where I have been wrong, what I am still learning, and about the fact that I don’t need to make any of it sound more resolved than it actually is.
Because this is not ultimately written for an audience.
It is written before an Audience of One.
Jesus Christ.
When Being Known Became Being Exposed
For a long time, I believed that if I wanted someone to know that I was trustworthy, I had to tell them everything. Every thought, every feeling, every intention, every piece of context that might help them understand why I did what I did. I was a yapper, yes, but underneath the talking was something more serious: I wanted to prove that there was nothing hidden inside of me.
If I could just explain myself well enough, maybe no one would misunderstand me.
If I gave enough context, maybe no one would accuse me of something I knew wasn’t true.
If I made my intentions clear enough, perhaps I could finally be safe from being misunderstood.
I think that desire followed me for years.
In college, I often read the comment “vague” on my essays, confirming my insecurity that being persistently misunderstood was my inheritance, so to speak. This insecurity deeply affected how I communicated because the misunderstanding followed me into how I experienced school, relationships, friendships, and even the way I understood myself. I became increasingly determined to explain—to clarify, to give context, to make sure people knew what I meant—because somewhere along the way I started believing that if I could provide enough information, I could eliminate misunderstanding.
But there is a difference between being truthful and trying to control someone’s perception of you.
I didn’t know that then.
I just knew I wanted to be understood.
I Wanted a Cheat Code for Understanding
Looking back, I can see how much that desire shaped my spiritual searching.
I wanted a cheat code.
Astrology became one of those tools. I could look at someone’s natal chart and feel like I had a way to know who they were before I actually knew them. I could categorize people, interpret patterns, decide who I should connect with, and feel like I had some kind of additional access to what existed underneath the surface of someone’s personality.
I believed deeply in energy and the use of transmuting energy, often understanding emotions as energy in motion, which led to me using New Age terms where scientific terms were spiritualized to help root my spiritual framework in something tangible.
I meditated extensively, sometimes every day, with an emphasis on mental detachment. I practiced yoga and compulsively stretched. I believed in “alchemizing” pain—taking something painful and transforming it into something beautiful. This transformation was done through spiritual rituals, such as using sage or other natural plants as well as candle magick, or chanting specific sounds to anchor myself in the frequency of the universe. I became interested in intuitive and shamanic ideas, which made me feel more deeply connected to my Mexican ancestry, after having struggled to feel “Mexican enough” my whole life. Later, I became interested in ideas about ascending into another dimension through love.
I even became interested in “Christ Consciousness” while simultaneously distancing myself from the Abrahamic religions.
When I look back at all of this, I don’t simply see a foolish person who believed strange things. I see someone who desperately wanted to understand.
I wanted to understand myself, other people, pain, relationships, reality—everything that seemed to exist underneath what I could see.
Because I was intellectually capable of connecting these ideas together, I started building an entire framework for interpreting life. There were concepts everywhere: consciousness, energy, intuition, transcendence, healing, detachment, self-discovery. But having a framework for explaining life wasn’t necessarily the same thing as having a grounded way to live it.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
Because underneath so much of my searching was one question:
How do I get beyond what hurts me?
I was trying to find a way out of pain.
When My Framework Could No Longer Explain My Experience
Psychosis entered my life later.
I want to be careful with how I describe this because I don’t want to turn my experience into a clinical explanation that I don’t actually have. I had already been immersed in New Age spirituality for years before my psychosis, so I cannot responsibly say that those beliefs caused what happened to me.
But I can tell the truth about what I experienced.
When psychosis entered my life, the spiritual ideas I had already been carrying became intertwined with some of the most extreme and disorienting experiences I have ever had. I believed things that were not grounded in reality. I experienced myself and other people through an intensely distorted spiritual framework. At one point, I believed I was a “Taboo Virgin Mary.” I believed my neighbor was simultaneously the second coming of Jesus and the devil. I used PCP with him.
It was extraordinarily disorienting.
Sometimes the closest comparison I can make is to the man sitting in the chair in Get Out: conscious, overwhelmed, watching something happen without being able to make sense of what was happening.
I had spent so much time trying to understand reality, and suddenly I could not interpret my own.
That experience marked me psychologically, socially, mentally, and emotionally. I became accustomed to defending myself—even if the courtroom existed entirely inside my own head. I would replay conversations, reconsider motives, explain things that had already happened, anticipate what someone might think, and mentally prepare a defense against accusations that had not even been made.
I had learned to live as though I were perpetually on trial.
And yet, somehow, Jesus kept finding me.
Jesus Found Me
That sentence still amazes me.
Because when I look back at my life, I can see how often I was trying to find my way back to myself—trying to understand myself, heal myself, and become free—but Jesus was finding me.
Sometimes through Scripture. Sometimes through people. Sometimes through circumstances. Sometimes through words of wisdom that reached me at exactly the moment I needed them.
And, somewhat embarrassingly, sometimes through AI-generated videos on YouTube.
Even writing that makes me laugh a little.
But perhaps that is part of the point.
God cannot be limited by the delivery system I expect Him to use.
He is still God.
He knows how to reach His daughter.
That doesn’t mean every video, coincidence, thought, or circumstance is automatically a message from God that I need to decode. I have had to learn that distinction too. There was a time when I wanted everything to mean something immediately, and because I had trained myself to search for hidden meanings, I could turn almost anything into something that required interpretation.
Jesus has been teaching me another kind of discernment—one that doesn’t require me to live in a constant state of decoding.
Sometimes wisdom is simply knowing what is in front of me.
Sometimes the next faithful step is ordinary.
Sometimes I need to speak. Sometimes I need to be quiet. Sometimes I need to wait. Sometimes I need to move. Sometimes I need to rest.
And sometimes I just need to enjoy the life God has actually given me instead of trying to figure out what it is supposed to mean.
That last one has probably been harder for me than I want to admit.
Transparency NOT Over-Exposure
This is where Proverbs has become particularly meaningful to me.
“Wise men store up knowledge [in mind and heart], but the mouth of the foolish is a present destruction.”
— Proverbs 10:14 AMPC
And:
“The blessing of the Lord—it makes [truly] rich, and He adds no sorrow with it [neither does toiling increase it].”
— Proverbs 10:22 AMPC
I used to think that withholding information was inherently suspicious. If I didn’t tell someone everything, I worried that I was being dishonest. If I knew something, I felt an almost compulsive need to explain it. If I had a reason for something, I wanted the reason understood.
But Scripture gives me another category:
wisdom.
A wise person stores knowledge.
A prudent person conceals knowledge.
That isn’t necessarily deception. Sometimes it is discernment.
Not everything I know belongs in every conversation. Not every thought needs an audience. Not every wound needs to be explained. Not every part of me needs to be accessible to everyone.
That realization has been surprisingly difficult because I used to associate openness with integrity. Now I am beginning to understand that integrity is not measured by how much access I give people to myself.
My life belongs to God.
My heart belongs to God.
My story belongs to God.
My vulnerability belongs to God.
My words belong to God.
And if they belong to Him, then I have to let Him teach me how to steward them.
Sometimes stewardship looks like opening the door.
Sometimes it looks like closing it.
Access denied does not automatically mean something is being hidden.
Sometimes there is simply a door.
And wisdom knows that not every door is meant to remain open.
Jesus Himself did not entrust Himself to everyone because He knew what was in people (John 2:24–25). Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time to speak and a time to be silent.
So perhaps transparency isn’t telling everyone everything.
Perhaps transparency means refusing to lie about what is true while allowing God to determine what is wise to share.
That is a much more mature kind of honesty than I understood before.
Authenticity Without Performance
I wanted authenticity.
But I was still trying to control the way I was perceived.
That realization is uncomfortable because I thought I was escaping performance. In reality, sometimes I had simply turned authenticity itself into a performance.
I wanted people to know the “real me.” I wanted them to understand my intentions, my heart, my reactions, my reasons. I wanted to make sure that if someone walked away with the wrong impression, I had already done everything in my power to correct it.
But authenticity doesn’t require that.
I am beginning to understand it as something much quieter: being truthful about what is actually true within me while remaining humble enough to admit that my understanding is limited.
I can believe something deeply and still be teachable.
I can say that something hurt me without assuming I know another person’s intentions.
I can describe my experience without making my experience the entirety of the truth.
I can discover that I was wrong without collapsing into shame, and I can discover that I was right without turning being right into a weapon.
That feels much closer to integrity than the oversharing I once thought was necessary to prove that I was honest.
Real authenticity leaves room for humility.
And humility leaves room for God.
Stewardship: I Can Live While I Heal
This is probably one of the biggest things Jesus has been teaching me:
I can steward my life while I heal.
I don’t have to wait until everything inside of me is resolved before I am allowed to participate in my own life.
For a long time, I think I unconsciously treated healing as a prerequisite for living. Once I understood myself, once I resolved the wound, once I figured out what God was doing, once I knew what my calling was, once I knew the blueprint—then I could really begin.
But life kept happening while I was waiting for permission.
And perhaps God was already in it.
I can work while I heal.
Study while I heal.
Create while I heal.
Love while I heal.
Rest while I heal.
Dream while I heal.
Enjoy beauty while I heal.
Make mistakes while I heal.
There is something freeing about realizing that my healing does not have to become my identity.
My pain matters.
My healing matters.
But neither one is my god.
Jesus is.
And that changes how I understand stewardship.
My life is not something I need to perfect before I can offer it to God. It is something I can bring to Him as it is and allow Him to teach me how to care for it.
The Servant Is Not Greater Than the Master
“The servant is not greater than his master.”
— John 15:20
I don’t see that as insulting anymore.
I see it through gratitude.
Because being enslaved to sin never made me happy. It kept me in a desperation that was never filled. I was always searching, interpreting, transcending, healing, understanding, becoming.
I wanted freedom so badly, but so much of what I called freedom kept me centered on myself—my consciousness, my healing, my understanding, my ability to perceive, my ability to transform.
Jesus has been showing me a different kind of freedom.
To belong to Him is not another form of bondage from which I need to escape.
It is the freedom I was actually looking for.
And so I am willing to call myself His bondservant with gratitude.
Because I know the difference between being ruled by something that cannot satisfy me and belonging to Someone who loves me.
The servant is not greater than the Master.
I don’t need to be greater than Jesus.
I don’t need to master life.
I don’t need to master myself.
I want to belong to Him.
A Daughter Before a Doer
For so long, I felt like I had to be constantly interceding, constantly carrying something, constantly doing something significant for God. I looked at people of faith from the past—revivalists, intercessors, missionaries, prophets, pioneers—and sometimes I wondered if I was failing because I wasn’t always operating with that level of intensity.
But I am realizing that I am not called to imitate someone else’s relationship with God.
I am called to be a daughter of God first.
Then, from that identity, I can become whatever He calls me to become: a missionary, an evangelist, a prophet, a pioneer, a servant, an artist, a worker, a student, a friend.
The order matters.
Daughter first.
I think I needed to understand that because I had become so accustomed to measuring myself by what I was doing that simply being with God could feel insufficient.
But maybe being with Him was never insufficient.
Maybe that was the foundation.
Learning to Enjoy the Life God Gave Me
I think I have been waiting for permission to finally be free to enjoy now.
For so long, I felt like I needed to figure out the blueprint first. If I knew exactly what God was doing, then I could relax. If I understood my calling perfectly, then I could move. If I understood the timing, then I could live.
But what if I am already living?
What if this moment is not merely preparation for my “real” life?
What if this is my life?
That question has been unexpectedly freeing.
Even the ordinary interruptions have begun to feel different to me. Missing class, being late to work, getting distracted, having a plan fall apart—these things used to feel like evidence that I was failing to keep up with the life I was supposed to be living.
Now, sometimes, those moments re-ground me.
They remind me that I am a person before I am a project.
They remind me that I don’t have to spiritually optimize every moment of my existence.
They remind me that God is not sitting somewhere with a stopwatch waiting for me to finally execute the blueprint correctly.
Sometimes the interruption itself reveals what I have made too important.
Sometimes missing something externally helps me remember an internal priority.
And perhaps this is part of what it means to trust God’s timing: not assuming that every mistake or delay is secretly a divine appointment, but also not believing that one missed step has taken me permanently outside of His care.
I am on time for God’s timing.
Even when I don’t feel on time.
An Audience of One
Maybe that is why I no longer want to sanitize this story.
I don’t want to rewrite my past so that it becomes more palatable to someone else. I don’t want to turn my testimony into an argument or a defense of Christianity, and I certainly don’t want to make it a performance proving how healed I am.
I want to tell the truth before the Lord.
That is all.
An Audience of One.
And even that phrase makes me pause as I write it, because I am realizing that perhaps this is what I have been learning all along.
I spent so much of my life trying to make sure people understood me.
Jesus is teaching me to become more concerned with whether I am walking faithfully before Him.
People matter. Their dignity matters. Their feelings matter. Love matters. Truth matters. But I cannot control another person’s understanding of me, and I cannot make someone understand something simply by giving them more access to myself.
There comes a point where explanation becomes another form of control.
I think I am finally beginning to recognize that in myself.
I don’t have to stand trial in everyone’s mind.
God knows me.
He knows what I have done right.
He knows what I have done wrong.
He knows what I meant.
He knows what I didn’t understand.
He knows where I was wounded.
He knows where I was proud.
He knows where I was deceived.
He knows where I was simply confused.
And He knows how long this process has taken.
Mercy Is Not Disappointment
I am especially grateful for that.
Because sometimes I have been afraid that God is disappointed in how long it has taken me to heal.
But His mercy keeps meeting me here.
He keeps reminding me that I am not disqualified because I have taken time.
He doesn’t ask me to drown in guilt and shame as though punishment is the price of becoming holy.
“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment.”
— 1 John 4:18
I am learning that repentance is not the same thing as perpetual self-punishment.
Conviction can lead me back to God.
Shame tells me I should hide from Him.
Jesus keeps inviting me back.
Again and again.
I spent so much time believing that I had to somehow become worthy of the freedom I wanted, but Jesus keeps showing me that His mercy is not a reward for finally getting everything right. His mercy is part of why I can keep walking.
He is not eternally disappointed in me.
He is not keeping a tally of how long it took me to understand something.
He is not asking me to punish myself until I have suffered enough to deserve another chance.
He corrects me.
He convicts me.
He disciplines me.
And He keeps me.
That is different from condemnation.
That is love teaching me how to live.
I Don’t Need the Blueprint Anymore
I think this is where my understanding of freedom is changing the most.
For so long, I was desperate to get out.
Now I am desperate to belong.
Sometimes I am desperate for Jesus because I want Him to fix something. Sometimes because I want Him to explain something. Sometimes because I feel like He is the only One who truly understands me.
But increasingly, I am realizing that my desperation for Him doesn’t have to be justified by a problem.
I can want Jesus simply because He is Jesus.
Because He is good.
Because He is faithful.
Because He pursued me.
Because His mercy and goodness follow me.
Because He keeps making sure I know He is not finished with me.
And because I am beginning to understand that the life I was searching for was never found in having complete control over the blueprint.
It was found in trusting the One who wrote it.
I am not scared of failing.
I am not scared of succeeding.
I am excited to live.
I want to live out the life God wrote for me—not the life I felt I needed to write out by figuring everything out ahead of time.
I want to walk without having the whole map. I want to learn without needing certainty before I begin. I want to create without needing to know exactly what it will become. I want to love without trying to control the outcome. I want to serve without making service my identity. I want to rest without feeling guilty. I want to enjoy what God has given me without wondering whether enjoyment means I am neglecting my calling.
I want to live.
And perhaps that is the freedom I have been waiting for permission to receive.
The Narrow Road Is Surrender
Maybe this is what the narrow road means to me now.
Not simply choosing the correct answers.
Not becoming inaccessible.
Not becoming hyper-vigilant.
Not becoming so spiritually intense that I forget how to live.
The narrow road, at least as I am beginning to understand it, is learning how to surrender.
Surrendering my need to be understood.
Surrendering my need to control perception.
Surrendering my need to have the blueprint.
Surrendering my need to make pain meaningful on my own terms.
Surrendering my need to prove that I am healed, authentic, spiritual, or anything else.
The narrow road is not the road of self-erasure or self-exposure.
It is the road of surrender.
And perhaps surrender is not passive at all.
Perhaps it is an active decision to stop making myself the architect of a life God has already entrusted to me.
I am still going to make choices. I am still going to dream. I am still going to work. I am still going to create. I am still going to pursue what I believe God has placed in front of me.
But I don’t have to know everything beforehand.
I can let God reveal what comes next.
I can live.
I can learn.
I can repent.
I can return.
I can keep walking.
And maybe that is what I have been looking for all along—not a life without pain, but a life where pain no longer determines whether I am free.
Because I don’t follow Jesus because I finally figured out how to stop hurting.
I follow Him because I discovered Someone worth loving even in the middle of my hurt.
My healing is not my god.
Jesus is.
And when I embrace Him, I can keep moving forward.
Not because I have finally mastered myself.
Not because I have finally become perfectly healed.
Not because I have finally figured everything out.
But because I love Jesus.
He is my Lord and Savior.
He is the Lover of my soul.
And I think I am still learning what that means.
Perhaps I will always be learning.
Maybe that is okay.
Because this was never supposed to be a testimony about how I arrived.
It is a testimony about how Jesus keeps walking with me.
And so I want to leave this here—not as a conclusion to the story, but as a place to pause and thank Him for what I can see now.
Thank You, Jesus, for finding me.
Thank You for Your mercy.
Thank You for not treating the length of my healing as evidence that I am beyond Your patience.
Thank You for teaching me that repentance does not require self-destruction.
Thank You for teaching me that wisdom does not require secrecy, and transparency does not require exposure.
Thank You for teaching me that I can steward my life while I am still healing.
Thank You for reminding me that I am Your daughter before I am anything I accomplish for You.
Thank You for teaching me that I don’t have to be afraid of failing or succeeding.
Thank You for giving me permission to enjoy the life You have given me.
Thank You for reminding me that I don’t need the entire blueprint to take the next faithful step.
Thank You for reminding me that Your goodness follows me.
And thank You for showing me that freedom was never going to be found in becoming my own master.
I wanted freedom.
You were giving me Yourself.
And perhaps I am only beginning to understand the difference.
So I will keep walking.
I will keep learning.
I will keep surrendering.
I will keep loving You.
And I will keep writing—not because I have finally figured everything out, but because I want to remember what You are teaching me while I am still becoming.
The story is not finished.
But Jesus is still here.
And for now, that is enough.
The Narrow Road: Biblical Affirmations
- I can be open without overexposing myself. My vulnerability is something I steward wisely.
- I can be private without being deceptive. Not everything true about me needs to be shared with everyone.
- I can be considerate without minimizing myself. I can love people without making myself smaller.
- I can speak truth with love. I do not have to choose between honesty and gentleness.
- I can be misunderstood without abandoning the truth. God knows my heart even when people do not.
- I can receive correction without losing my identity. Being wrong does not make me worthless.
- I can admit when I am wrong and stand firm when I am right. Humility does not require self-betrayal.
- I do not have to prove my integrity through oversharing. My life can testify to what my words cannot.
- I can guard my heart without closing it. Discernment is not the same as fear.
- I can be fully known by God without needing to be fully understood by everyone.
- I do not have to manage everyone’s perception of me. I am responsible for walking in truth, not controlling how others receive it.
- My authenticity belongs under the lordship of Christ. I don’t have to perform myself, hide myself, or reinvent myself to be worthy of being known.
- I do not have to heal completely before I can live faithfully. I can bring my hurting heart to God and keep walking with Him.
- I can hurt and still love Jesus. My pain does not have to become the center of my life.
- I can choose wisdom while I am still healing. I do not need to understand everything before I take the next faithful step.
- I can surrender what I cannot control. Other people’s perceptions, reactions, and choices do not belong to me.
- I can let God transform my pain without making pain my identity.
- I can choose actions that glorify God and remind me of His goodness. My life is not merely about feeling better; it is about becoming more faithful.
- I can enjoy the life God has given me without believing that enjoyment makes me less spiritual.
- I can rest without believing that rest is failure.
- I can serve without believing that service is what makes me worthy.
- I can be a servant of Christ without believing that servanthood makes me less. The servant is not greater than the Master.
- I can fail without believing that failure disqualifies me from God’s love.
- I can succeed without believing that success separates me from God.
- I can repent without drowning in shame. God’s correction is an invitation back to Him.
- I can trust God’s timing without having the entire blueprint.
- I can take the next faithful step without knowing every step after it.
- I can be a daughter of God before I am anything I accomplish for Him.
- I do not have to become someone else to fulfill God’s purposes for my life.
- I can embrace the life God has given me while continuing to become more like Christ.
- I don’t follow Jesus because I finally figured out how to stop hurting. I follow Him because I discovered Someone worth loving even in the middle of my hurt.
- The narrow road is not self-erasure.
- The narrow road is not self-exposure.
- The narrow road is not performance.
- The narrow road is not transcendence.
- The narrow road is surrender.
- And I can walk it with Jesus.
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