When a religious professional reaches this moment, the one where the call feels blurry and the exhaustion runs deep, what they are experiencing is grief. Not failure. Not weakness. Grief.

The grief of disconnection. From themselves. From the spirit that called them into this work. From the community they came to serve.

I know this grief because I have lived it. I know what it is to be in a religious institution that does not have the language for who you are, and to not yet have the language yourself. I know what it costs to keep showing up for everyone else while something in you goes unmet and unnamed.

That knowing is what I bring into this work.

I am an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, a certified death and grief doula, and a national organizational leader who has spent years inside high-stakes religious systems. I understand the systems, the call, and the particular loneliness that lives at the intersection of the two.

But the truest thing about me might be this: I am someone who tends living things. I make art from fragments that seem like they do not belong together. I knit, slowly and with intention, building something strong one loop at a time. I study plants and what they are already offering. I cook food I first learned to love in Thailand, feeding the people around my table. I am a bonus parent to two young adults who chose me as much as I chose them. I am married to another UU minister, Rev. Ali K.C. Bell, which means I understand this life from the inside of a household that lives it every day.

All of it, every bit of it, is practice for this work. Learning to find the thread in the fragments. Learning to tend what is still alive. Learning to stay present with something that is not yet whole.

The After Practice exists because discernment is not a panic response. It is a practice. And everyone who does this sacred, costly work deserves someone in their corner who actually understands what they are carrying.