Why I Was Vulnerable
When everything narrows, the wrong things can start to feel like hope
I recently had the absolute pleasure of visiting again with Jane, the trauma specialist I saw during the first five weeks after Erik disappeared in 2023. I’ve written about her before. She saw strength in me that I thought had drained out and rolled lazily into the mud, drains, and potholes beneath my feet. She saw me in the fog of absolute devastation and heartbreak, and still she told me, “You are attacking this problem in a way I’ve never seen before. You are going to be more than okay. One day, I believe you will be speaking about what has happened here.”
When you’re melting into drains, you need someone to see the strength in you. It acts as a coagulant to stop the ooze.
Sometimes I take my metaphors too far.
When I saw Jane recently (April 2025), I went back to tell her that I was finally feeling fully like myself again, and I wanted to share what had happened over the past two years. I was scared I wouldn’t be able to do the story justice—the years, months, weeks, days, seconds… they all felt interminable while I was living through them.
As it turned out, it didn’t take all that long to summarize the most traumatic season of my life. Time has a way of marking the calendars of our minds and keeping score of all the big red circles meant to signify important events.
At the end of our meeting, Jane reminded me that when I first came to her, I was dealing with trauma upon trauma—and somehow, I came out with more clarity and a more valuable story than I ever could have imagined. I smiled because this time I knew it was true. And I knew why: God.
God and long, horrible hours and days and months and years—and, along the way, the beauty of nature, the purr of my cat, frothed heavy whipping cream in dark roasted coffee, and walks. A LOT of walks through dusty trails in the woods, praying, talking to myself to try to make sense of what happened, writing, crying, laughing, sighing… you know. Life.
When Jane mentioned the “trauma upon trauma,” I actually giggled. I had forgotten about the first trauma she was referring to. Until Erik, the trainwreck that came right before him was the most confounding thing I had ever experienced. That initial trauma didn’t just happen to me. It happened to both my husband and me.
It’s a long story, so I’ll have to go into journalist mode. Let me grab my cigar, cap, and whiskey, and I’ll begin. (That’s the standard journalist starter pack now, right?)
In 2020, during COVID and the summer of unrest, upheaval, and fire in the streets, my husband lost his university position for two reasons:
First, several years earlier, he had been chosen to become the chair of the department in which he taught, rather than another woman in the department who had vied for the position for years. When I say she vied for it, I don’t mean she worked hard for it. Or even worked much at all. She just talked about it a lot. What she did work at was bullying colleagues, putting students in compromising positions, and having her grad students teach her classes for her. Everyone knew who she was, and everyone—from the university president to the provost to three different deans—was scared of her because they knew she was litigious.
Second, this same woman mounted a mob to come against my husband because he didn’t post a black square on his personal Facebook page in support of BLM.
So: vengeance and the perfect storm.
Within two weeks, my husband—who began his career as an assistant professor and worked his way up to chair of the department and head of the School of Visual and Performing Arts, with zero marks against him throughout his entire career—was canceled. He was four years away from retirement.
We suddenly had to make two thousand decisions we didn’t want to make. Decisions about our house. Where we would live. What to sell and what to bring with us. When to start looking for new jobs. And—worst of all—we had to put down my very best friend, Mr. Bates, because he was already sick, and the vet told us, “He won’t be able to make a long-distance move.”
We couldn’t stay in our little town. While it had been a wonderful place to live while we worked at the university, there were no viable job options outside of that ecosystem. Once he lost his position, it felt like the entire structure that had sustained our life there collapsed beneath us.
Days after we said goodbye to Mr. B, we also said goodbye to the place that had been our home for 20 years.
We had so many friends in that small university town—colleagues, neighbors, and the kind of people you watch grow from toddlers to teenagers without ever even knowing their names. Ours was a busy home. I was always entertaining the girls in my Bible study, or friends from Rotary, or the students in the plays my husband directed. We were invited to weddings, birthdays, christenings, and some funerals.
In the end, only five men came to help us load the moving truck. There were others who cared, but—as you might remember—that summer was marked by fear. Fear of the virus, yes, but also fear of being seen standing with someone on the “wrong side” of the black square, or of being caught in the crossfire of assumptions no one dared to question. After all, doing so could produce mobs that ended in lost jobs.
The five men who showed up were real men. Men of character, strength, and deeply earned humor. Men who had fought real battles in life and valued true friendship. I feel compelled to list them without saying their names:
the police chief
a television director we had worked with for years
the head of student advisement
a man who owned an organically sourced restaurant at the local botanical garden and used to be a DJ when DJs at radio stations had to be some of the coolest people you’d ever meet
and the chair of another department who stepped down from his post because, “If this can happen to [my husband], it can happen to any of us.”
These were our heroes that day, and I respect them with all my heart.
Once we were fully loaded, my husband and I drove our truck as far from our little town as we could—all the way to the East Coast. Literally. We spent a year living just a couple of blocks from the beach in Virginia Beach, VA. I taught at the university where I had attended grad school, and together we helped a couple of friends develop the educational arm of their Christian theatre company. But by the end of the year, the money began to run low.
Throughout that year, my husband applied for several dean positions in arts programs across the U.S. While he consistently advanced to the first and second rounds of interviews, he was never chosen for the final cut. At one institution, a former colleague who served on the hiring committee told him, “You had a great interview, but they said you were too white and too straight to hire.”
Just when we thought the worst was behind us, the woman who had orchestrated the mob against my husband in the first place made sure his name stayed tarnished. She wrote a letter accusing him of racism and had it published in the most visible magazine in his field. It wasn’t enough to push him out—she wanted him discredited everywhere he might go. It was cruel. It was strategic. And it worked. He was marked. And we were starting to feel the weight of it everywhere.
In the spring of 2021, my husband did something I admire with the passion of a thousand suns: to provide for our family, he took a job at Chick-fil-A. At the time, we thought it would only last a couple of months—just until he could find something …somewhere. He had begun expanding his search to include the business sector, other areas of education, and possibly professional beach combing. (Just kidding. Kind of.)
Instead, he worked in the kitchen at Chick-fil-A for 19 months. He went from developing curriculum, advising, directing, leading committees, managing budgets, and fundraising, to rolling biscuit dough between 5 and 10 a.m., and breading chicken breasts for the rest of his shift. He lost 30 pounds, discovered he was allergic to latex gloves, and fell into bed before 8 p.m. every night so he could begin again at 3:45 a.m. the next morning.
He never complained, never missed a day, and he got promoted to a corporate training team that allowed him to travel from time to time. Most importantly, he became the kitchen dad to a group of the hardest-working and delightful young men and women you could ever hope to meet. We still see several of them regularly.
Even so, my husband was in shock the whole year we spent in Virginia. The following year, when we moved back to Missouri, his dad died of cancer, and he took on another kind of shock, another kind of grief, and a new level of existential dread. He felt like he was disappearing.
As for me, I didn’t have to work when we lived in our little town. I did work, but I didn’t have to. I taught communication classes at the university, served as a spokesperson for a regional business, and sat on the board of several community organizations with people I’d known for years.
Then, suddenly, I didn’t have access to any of those opportunities. And I did have to work.
But this time, I wasn’t working from a house I loved, with my little dog and friends surrounding me. After moving from a three-story house to an apartment by the beach, and then to the third floor of another apartment in suburban St. Louis, we had pared our life down in as many ways as we could.
As someone who loved to decorate, cook, and entertain, my life became very, very plain and very, very small. My husband was disappearing. I was disappearing. Our furniture and favorite wall hangings had long been gone. The pressures of finances, identity, future, and fear began to swirl like bony fingers in the air around us, threatening to choke what sense of normalcy and comfort we had left.
And just so I’m not too overdramatic—we did have hope. We trusted the Lord to provide for us, and He always did. We always had everything we needed, which made no sense on paper. But it was the truth.
I remember praying every night, begging God to give my husband a new job so he wouldn’t have to work in the kitchen anymore and begging Him to give me a good-paying job so I could feel more useful to him.
The longer the months wore on, the more I began to develop a suffocating fear:
I know God sees me and hears me. And… I think He’s ignoring me. I would rather believe He didn’t see me at all than imagine He saw everything—and still chose to abandon me.
I began to feel depressed. Agitated. Depersonalized and alone.
And that’s when I met Erik.
Coming soon:
In the next post, I’ll share what happened when a man named Erik entered this tender, unraveling season of my life. What he offered seemed like connection and understanding—but it became something far more complicated, and ultimately, damaging.
Because that chapter involves details I’ve never shared publicly, Part 2 will be for subscribers only.