Welcome. I’m Danielle.
The typical labels you might be curious to know about me are the following: I live in southeast Nebraska. I’m a writer, a teacher. I keep wild, tiny humans alive. I read so much I’m always having to rearrange bookshelves and space in my home. I’m an HSP (highly sensitive person). I nurture a vegetable garden in the warm months and preserve things to survive the winter months. A good therapist saved my life, and I’m constantly spiritually exploring.
I grew up in a conservative version of protestant Christianity, but a little over a decade ago I accidentally got involved in a cult, and the spiritual abuse I experienced there ripped my life up one side and down the other. I used to keep another blog back in that lifetime, but after the cult I entered what some might say was a period of deconstruction in my life. During that period it became too vulnerable to keep processing in an online format.
I was too afraid of what people might think and how they might try to intervene. I was too fragile to withstand much outside resistance because the journey I was undertaking was incredibly complex and painful and required a re-examination of everything that I was and had believed up until that point.
Now I would say that I’m in a reconstructionist period of my life. I made it to the other side. It doesn’t mean that I’ve arrived. I’m still very much exploring, asking questions, admitting that I know less and less the further in I get. But I’ve learned to hold the questions, the dissonance (at least better than I used to). I care a little less what people think about what I say (still a work in progress). I’m ready to start sharing some of the things I’ve learned.
One of the things I’m learning is that list of labels I named for you isn’t my real identity. They are the surface of my life, some of the physical projections of what lies inside. My real identity is something much deeper and more profound. One of my goals on the journey is to become grounded in that identity and sense of being so deeply that I can move from one role to another, one task to another, or have all of those labels wiped off the slate of my life and still be able to retain my sense of purpose and who I am. To still be able to be fully present.
It’s a daunting task. One I can’t force. I can only take baby steps along the way and wait for wisdom to meet me.
This blog is my attempt to be vulnerable and transparent about pieces of that journey, to take ideas and resources that I’ve found and show you how I’m learning to apply them in my own messy reality. If it encourages your soul, you are welcome to pull up a seat on my virtual porch and join me. (Subscribe below)
Photos curtesy of Timothy Metcalf Photography
Danielle Klafter 