Hear Our Voices
Meet the people who are growing in their courage to share their stories— the joys, the pains, the truths of life as it really is.
Meet Izzy.
I can't imagine myself being a quiet person! If I was a quiet person I don't know what I would do.
God gave me this extraverted personality— this curly hair, these long arms, and long legs…but I’ve never felt like I’ve quite fit in. I compare myself to the people around me. Sometimes I find my identity in who others are, instead of trying to find myself for who I am.”
Growing up, I was always nitpicking myself. I guess you could say it was like self-condemnation. I was telling myself things about me before other people would, because I felt like if other people told me, then it would make me feel worse. I was like, "If I can get it first, then no one can tell me nothing bad about whatever it was.”
Meet Eliel.
In my experience, it is so easy to get wrapped up in following— so easy to get wrapped up in “oh my gosh ten people just followed me…Oh my gosh, a thousand….I have ten thousand followers!
Oftentimes in culture, if I love somebody and if they don't love me back after a week or two months or so…that's it. It’s so easy for me to be like, “I don't love them anymore because they didn't reciprocate that back to me.”
Meet Will.
What has brought me joy for most of my life, honestly, is sports. For me, there is nothing greater than just competing, especially with my friends. Whether it was basketball, baseball, football, I just love the competition.
I thought I might play a sport at the University of Arkansas. But then I got a diagnosis from my doctor that I would never see again.
I remember it was me, my mom, and my dad in the room and it was a two-hour car ride back to our hometown. That was the quietest car ride of my life.
Meet Cindy
I’ve always had this image of being super put together. Everyone who has known me for the past twenty years of my life probably saw me this way. And then the pandemic hit. For a long time, I was suppressing a lot of my emotions. I was definitely feeling a really deep sense of meaninglessness and I was just googling about meaning and meaninglessness.
For the longest time, I thought that life was about reducing suffering, and happiness, right? That's what we're always told in school. And by, even, parents, "I just want my kid to be happy." That's like the meaning of life! So I was always trying to avoid suffering.
But suffering is a part of my story and a part of a lot of people's stories.
Meet J.T.
I'm wired for the fight. When I see trouble, my first instinct is to run towards it, not away from it.
I see a world that is caught in a mode of hyper-reactivity. It’s basically, "I want you to feel what I feel! And if you don't feel it, you must not have any feeling for me!"
I see a lot of pain. I see a lot of trauma. I see that we have inherited and entered the pain of not only of our foremother’s and our forefather’s woundings, but the reaction to those woundings has called renewed woundings and fresh trauma in our world today.