The World My Mother Saw—and the One I See Now

Holding love, perspective, and truth in the same conversation

There’s something about the phrase bless her heart that carries layers, especially when it comes from a Southern daughter who means it with both tenderness and truth. When I say it about my mother, I mean it in the fullest sense. She was kind, generous, and deeply loving. But there was also this one thing that used to quietly sit between us, like a conversation that never quite resolved.

Whenever the news came on—and let’s be honest, it’s rarely good news—she would shake her head and say, the world is in worse shape than it’s ever been.

And every time she said it, something in me stirred.

Not anger, not exactly. More like resistance. A quiet, persistent voice in me that said, that can’t be true.

Because I’ve always loved history. Not just the dates and events, but the human stories inside of it. And when you really sit with history, when you let it unfold in its full weight and reality, it becomes very hard to believe that this moment right now is the worst humanity has ever seen.

I would think of the Colosseum, where people were literally torn apart for entertainment. I would think of wars that stretched across continents, of families separated, of entire populations living in fear day after day. I would think of the Holocaust, of unimaginable suffering, of loss on a scale that still takes our breath away when we truly allow ourselves to feel it.

And I would gently push back.

Not because I needed to be right, but because I needed the perspective to feel whole.

Now, looking back, I hold that tension differently. I understand more. My mother was navigating her own internal landscape—PTSD, Parkinson’s, the slow shift of a nervous system under strain. What she saw wasn’t just the world out there. It was also the world within her.

And that matters.

Because the lens we look through shapes everything.

I’ve noticed this more and more, not just in her, but in conversations all around me. Someone says something with certainty, and my mind instinctively begins to turn it, almost like holding a prism up to the light. What if that’s true… and what if it isn’t? What if there’s another angle? Another layer?

Not to argue.

But to understand.

Because life, as I’ve come to see it, is never one-sided. There are always two realities unfolding at the same time. The one we focus on… and the one we overlook.

Yes, there is hardship. There always has been.

But there is also something else happening.

Something quieter. Something powerful.

Something good.

I was reminded of this recently when I came across a conversation around mental health and medication. There’s a growing awareness—one that feels both ancient and new at the same time—that perhaps we’ve leaned too heavily on treating symptoms without always tending to the deeper rhythms of the body.

And it brought me back to my own story.

For over fifteen years, I lived with the belief that certain medications were simply part of my life. Necessary. Non-negotiable. They helped regulate my nervous system, especially through chronic pain, and I truly believed I couldn’t function without them.

Until one day, I stepped away.

Not gently. Not gradually. Cold turkey.

And I won’t romanticize that part. It was hard. Disorienting at times. My body had to relearn itself in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

But something else happened too.

I began to listen.

To my body. To my rhythms. To the subtle signals I had been overriding for years.

And slowly, I found other ways.

Ways that took more intention, more presence, more patience—but also brought a kind of wholeness I hadn’t experienced before.

And what strikes me now is this: the things we’re calling breakthroughs today… many of them are not new at all. They are, in many ways, a return. A remembering of what earlier generations knew intuitively, before we drifted so far into quick fixes and disconnected solutions.

That doesn’t mean medicine isn’t valuable. It is. Deeply so.

But it does mean we are expanding.

And expansion is not the sign of a world getting worse.

It’s the sign of a world waking up.

The same is true when I think about how we live our lives.

We talk about fuel costs, about travel, about all the complexities of modern living. And yes, those things are real. But so is this: we can cross the world in a single day.

That still amazes me.

The fact that I can board a plane and, within hours, find myself walking the streets of Istanbul—one of the places my soul feels most at home—is something my great-grandparents likely could never have imagined for themselves.

That’s not a small thing.

That’s extraordinary.

And yet, it’s so easy to forget the wonder because we’re surrounded by it.

We’ve normalized miracles.

But perhaps the most powerful shift I’m witnessing right now isn’t technological. It’s human.

There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way people—especially women—are beginning to see themselves.

For so long, many have tried to fit into systems that were never designed with them in mind. Structured environments that value productivity over presence, logic over intuition, output over alignment.

And something is changing.

I hear it in conversations with women who don’t even know each other, who live in different places, who have completely different lives—and yet they are saying the same thing.

Something feels different.

Like a door has opened.

Or more accurately… like a gate.

A wide, expansive gate that doesn’t just lead to another room, but to an entirely new landscape.

A place where you don’t have to force yourself into a shape that doesn’t belong to you.

A place where your way of thinking, your way of feeling, your way of creating… is not only valid, but needed.

And it always brings me back to the same question I ask at the beginning of so many conversations:

What do you believe?

Because our beliefs don’t just sit quietly in the background. They shape how we interpret everything. They determine what we notice, what we dismiss, what we expect, and what we allow.

If you believe the world is only getting worse, you will find evidence for that everywhere.

But if you allow yourself—even just for a moment—to consider that something else might also be true…

That perhaps, alongside the chaos, there is growth.

Alongside the noise, there is clarity.

Alongside the struggle, there is opportunity.

Then suddenly, the view begins to shift.

And that gate?

It doesn’t feel so closed anymore.

In fact, you might realize it’s already open.

Waiting.

Not for the world to change… but for you to walk through it.

Because from where I stand, the horizon ahead is not something to fear.

It’s something to step into.

With curiosity.

With courage.

And maybe, just maybe…

With joy.

The Joy Ambassador | Architect of Joy

Helping you find joy in unexpected places…
because joy doesn’t disappear, it just waits to be noticed.