There is a wall in my home office that tells a certain story about me. My bachelor’s degree, with high honors. My law degree. Certificates for Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Delta Phi… Copies of law review volumes with my name printed inside as chief articles editor. A pro bono service award. Most days, these things fade into the room — wallpaper, almost. But every once in a while, lost in thought, I’ll glance up from my desk and find them there, watching. Reminders of a life lived loudly. Of a self that was celebrated, recognized, witnessed. Of a version of becoming that always came with applause.
I am building something different now.
Beneath those certificates, my desk tells a different story. It is laden with books I have chosen deliberately, carefully — pulled from shelves around the house and gathered here, in this space, because I wanted them close. Books on restorative justice. On trauma and healing. On the history of violence and discrimination and the long, slow work of repair. On how to take care of yourself when you spend your days taking care of others. Next to the books, a spiral notebook — pages filling slowly, steadily, with notes from my online certification modules. Evidence of progress, even on the days it doesn’t feel like any. And my laptop, open, always — where I learn and research and, when the words come, write.
They are here to inspire me. To drive me forward. Some days they do exactly that.
Some days they are just a lot.
I am a certified Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence counselor. I volunteer with a Sexual Assault Response Team. I take calls. I show up.
When I imagined this work, before I was doing it, I confess I imagined it differently. I think we all do. We picture Joan of Arc, riding off to save lost souls. We picture Olivia Benson, breaking down doors, getting survivors out. We picture ourselves as the turning point in someone’s story — the moment everything changes.
The reality is quieter than that. And stranger.
I am a woman sitting by a phone she hopes doesn’t ring. Four times a month, six hours at a stretch, I wait. And in the waiting there is a tension I wasn’t prepared for — because if no call comes, that is good news for the world. It means no one was victimized tonight. It means the phone’s silence is a kind of grace. But it also means I sit with a question that has no clean answer: if no call comes, what am I even doing here? Am I even an advocate?
And when the call does come — and it does — the work looks different than I expected too. The survivor doesn’t always need what I thought I had to offer. And I have to work, consciously and deliberately, not to internalize that. To remember that showing up is its own form of service, even when it goes unwitnessed.
Somewhere along the way, I lost the thread.
When I started this advocacy journey in the fall, it had been all fire. All drive and hunger and the particular joy of feeling like a student again — like a new part of the world was opening up to me. I was reading voraciously, writing regularly, absorbing everything I could get my hands on. I chased that victim advocate certification the way I chased the honor roll in high school. It felt like becoming, in the most alive sense of the word.
And then, quietly, it didn’t anymore.
Life moved in the way life does — work, family, friends, travel. The certification modules sat untouched. The books on my desk waited patiently. The blog went quiet. And I sat with a creeping fear that I recognized from other abandoned pursuits — the piano I no longer play, the cross stitch I set down and never picked back up. I was afraid I was losing this too. Afraid that the fire had gone out for good.
What I forgot, somewhere in the doubt, was the second word I forgot to give its due.
This blog is called Fierce Grace. Not just fierce. Both.
Grace is the quieter part. The part that doesn’t make for a dramatic origin story or a triumphant blog post. The part that shows up anyway, without an audience. That gets through a six hour shift where no call comes. That opens one module on a Friday morning not because it’s impressive or even particularly engaging, but because it’s there. That chooses the path again, and again, and again — not with fire, but with something steadier.
Someone once said that love is a daily choice. You wake up and you choose that person. Choose that commitment. I think advocacy is something like that too. Some days the choice looks like passion. Some days it looks like simply not quitting.
Both count.
There is something no one tells you about choosing a path like this — a voluntary one, outside of your established life and career, undertaken purely because you believe in it. There is no one there to tell you that you are doing well.
I spent years inside systems designed to recognize excellence. Universities that gave you grades and honor societies that inducted you with ceremony. Law schools that published your name in journals and handed you awards at graduation. Every step of those journeys came with external confirmation — you’re on your way, you’re doing it right, keep going, well done. The architecture of academic and professional achievement is built, in part, to keep you moving forward. The praise is load-bearing.
This path has no such architecture.
The most celebratory thing this journey offers me is a confirmation email when I complete an online module. The greatest accolade available is a perfect score on a post-module quiz. And some days, honestly, I take that 100% and I let it be enough. I let an auto-generated email stand in for the dean’s list. Because it has to. Because there is no guidance counselor checking my progress, no professor offering office hours, no cohort moving through the material alongside me on any kind of schedule. There is just me, and the work, and the question of whether I will show up for it today.
That is daunting. I will not pretend otherwise.
And the work itself asks something beyond mere discipline. That stack of books on my desk — on domestic violence, on the history of discrimination in housing, on campus sexual assault, on restorative justice — these are not light reading. They are not even Moby Dick, which begins to seem almost cheerful by comparison. They are heavy, necessary, important books about the worst things that happen to people. And I have to find, from somewhere inside myself, the strength and courage and curiosity to open them. Again and again. Because I want to. Because I believe it matters. Because no one is making me.
And when I finish one — when I close the last page of something difficult and true, when I pass another module and the confirmation email arrives — I notice something. A familiar pull. An impulse I have carried my whole life, through every version of becoming.
I want to write about it.
Here. On this blog. Into this quiet space, this audience of uncertain size, this page that asks nothing of me except honesty. The desire to process, to share, to say — I just learned something and it changed me a little and here is what it means. That impulse, I have come to understand, is not separate from the learning. It is how I complete it. It is, in its own quiet way, what I have always done — the same impulse that once sent me to my desk after finishing a Brontë novel, compelled to prove to myself, in my own words, that I had truly been inside it. That I understood. That it had moved through me and left something changed. The blog is that. A record of having shown up for the material. Of having let it in.
No one is handing me a certificate for that.
But I am still here, writing.
I will not pretend I have this figured out. I am writing this from inside the rut, not from the other side of it. Some days the stack of books feels like possibility. Some days it just feels like a stack of books. Some days I sit through a six hour shift, drive home in the dark, and wonder quietly what I am doing and why.
And then I remember.
I chose this. Not for a grade, not for a certificate, not for anyone’s approval or recognition. I chose it because somewhere in me there is a person who believes that this work matters. That showing up matters. That learning the hard things and sitting with the heavy books and answering the phone at 2am — or not answering it, and showing up anyway — that all of it means something, even when no one is watching.
Healing is not linear. I have written those words before, for others. I am writing them now for myself.
Neither is becoming.
If you are reading this from your own quiet rut — your own season of low fire and high doubt — I want you to know that the flame does not have to be fierce to be real. It just has to still be there. Tended gently. Chosen daily. Even on the days when choosing it looks like nothing more than simply not walking away.
That is enough. You are enough. Keep going.
The quiet flame still counts.