Ann reads a part of her upcoming memoir

Welcome And Book Updates

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Welcome to Real Talk with Tina and Anne. I am Anne, and I have a memoir coming out. I just finished my children's book, and you can get that on Amazon. And I really encourage you to look up the little bird who flew differently because it really came from my heart and my soul. And I really just want it to go out there. I have it for zero dollars on Kindle uh Unlimited, and uh it is in paperback form now. If you would like a copy of it. Uh, and honestly, I just want people, little kids, whoever feels different to feel like they can soar to. So really that's what the whole thing is about. And my imprint living differently is the same thing. It's all about just living differently. And it's uh a tree, my logo is a tree on a book because you know, our stories are where we're planted. And I just thought that I could read a portion of the memoir that I'm editing and rewriting and rewriting, and it's really close to coming out. So I was hoping that maybe I could read a portion of it to you, and it comes from the chapter. Uh, and and there are 44 chapters, and I have a letter to myself in the book. I have pictures in the back of the book that are called, you know, living differently in pictures, and I have quite a bit of acknowledgments to people. Um, and for those of you who know me, you might be in it. So anyway. The memoir is called Loving Differently. This is from the chapter about peace.

Defining Peace Beyond Survival Mode

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Peace is not dramatic, it is almost invisible at first. It is choosing not to argue with yourself all day. It is noticing that silence no longer feels like rejection. It is realizing that your worth doesn't rise and fall with other people's approval. And maybe that is why peace feels so unfamiliar at first, because when you have lived in survival mode, calm can feel unsafe, stillness can feel suspicious, rest can feel like failure. But slowly, gently, the nervous system learns a new language, and I used to be afraid to close my eyes at night, that I would shake in my bed, waiting for exhaustion to finally when sleep was never gentle. It was a surrender. The memories did not just visit. They chased me into the dark, and they met me in the quiet moments, right before drifting off, and then followed me into my dreams. Staying busy was easy. Work was safe, motherhood was movement, noise protected me, but stillness stillness terrified me. When everything slowed down and the house grew quiet, that was when my mind grew loud. Gradually, something began to shift, not overnight, not dramatically, but slowly I started replacing the thoughts that once flooded my mind with different ones. I prayed more. I sat longer in conversations with God, and I began to believe that peace might actually be possible for me. That belief mattered. For a long time I thought peace belonged to other people. I saw it in pastors and church leaders that assumed that they carried something sacred that I didn't possess. I believed the message that had been handed to me, and that I was somehow not good enough, and I quietly concluded that peace must be reserved for the worthy. Maybe that was why it never came.

Freezing When Asked To Pray

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One day I was visiting a former pastor. He was highly regarded within the denomination and had since become superintendent over an entire region. We were enjoying a good visit when he suddenly looked at me and asked, Why don't you pray? The question landed harder than he probably intended. I felt myself shut down instantly. Fear rose up inside of me. My body went still. My thoughts scrambled, and something inside me recoiled. It wasn't defiance. It wasn't unwillingness. It was the quiet panic of someone who believes that they are asked to step into a space that they didn't belong. I remember feeling exposed, like he had asked me to reveal something sacred that I wasn't sure I was allowed to hold. All the other messages rushed back at once. The belief that I was not good enough, not spiritual enough, not worthy enough to take up that kind of space. I had spent years believing that prayer belonged to people who had their lives more together, whose faith looked cleaner and more certain than mine felt. And at that moment, I did freeze, not because I didn't believe in God, but because I didn't believe I was enough. I said I couldn't. Not to mention neurodivergence still made me panic when I didn't know the script ahead of time. I've looked back on that moment many times. I believed I had failed the test. It was true. I was not God's. I wanted to impress the man I looked up to, that pastor. I felt as though he was measuring my relationship with Christ by my ability to pray aloud, and because I couldn't, I concluded that I must not be a real Christian. I left the office feeling defeated and deeply judged. At that point in my life, I still went quiet whenever I was put on the spot. I didn't recognize it then, but in hindsight, I understand it clearly. I told myself, Anne, you could never pray out loud in front of people. You struggled to speak publicly at all. I didn't feel worthy enough to offer a prayer in front of a man I viewed as deeply godly. There may have been other reasons, but I do know this. My inability to pray changed how I believed he saw me. I sensed it in the way that he treated me afterward, and in how the denomination viewed those considered distant from God. At that moment, I believed that was how he saw me too. I admit without hesitation that during that season I was searching and hurting, but I also know that I loved God with all my heart, and I believed in him. I wanted to please him. Truthfully, I was far more disappointed in myself than any pastor could ever have been. I walked out of that office carrying more than I had walked in with. I carried the belief that I I had just revealed something defective about myself. I believed that I had confirmed what I already feared. I was not spiritually strong enough, not bold enough, not worthy enough. That moment secured something in me for a long time. It shaped how I viewed myself in faith spaces. It made me shrink. It made me question whether I truly belonged. For a season my relationship with God became tangled with performance. I measured myself by what I could not do instead of what I deeply felt. I felt that Jesus loved me, but I let him down. What I understand now about peace is something I didn't know then. Peace is not the absence of fear, and it's not public confidence. Peace is not the ability to perform spirituality on command. Peace is the quiet knowing that you are freely accepted. And I thought peace was earned through boldness. I thought worthiness was proven through visible faith. I thought God's approval depended on how I appeared to others. I know now that trauma was speaking that day, not truth. My nervous system shut down because it had learned that being put on the spot meant danger. My silence was not a lack of faith. It was a protective response. And protection doesn't equal unbelief. But back then I didn't have language for trauma. I only had shame.

Trauma In Faith Spaces

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I also need to be very transparent here because the leader in the church who abused me, a different person than the pastor I talked about, but the person in the church who did abuse me used God's love, prayer, Bible studies, and spiritual guidance as a way to earn my trust. So faith had become intertwined with vulnerability in ways that were confusing and painful. What was meant to feel safe had once been used to cross boundaries. And I didn't yet know how to protect. So when I was asked to pray aloud, my response was not simply about confidence or worthiness. My body remembered before my mind understood. Being put on the spot felt dangerous, even though I couldn't explain it at the time. For a while that moment hardened something in me. I pulled back. I became cautious in church spaces. I doubled my spiritual instincts. I assumed that those who spoke easily and prayed boldly possessed something that I would never have. Yet even in that season, God never withdrew. Looking back I see that my faith didn't disappear. It went underground. It became quieter, more private, and more honest. Eventually, that quiet faith became stronger than the performance that I once believed was required. Peace is not granted by another person's approval. Worthiness is not confirmed by another person's response. Peace comes when you stop outsourcing your belonging. That day in his office did not prove I was unworthy. It revealed how deeply I still believe that I was. Healing began the day I stopped agreeing with that belief. I have prayed with many people in the jail system, and I can tell you that their feelings of brokenness were exactly where they needed to be. Their inability to pray for themselves in that moment, or even to pray at all, wasn't failure. It was honesty. It was truth. There are many people who for who perform peace. They attend church every week. They lead, they speak as if their lives are perfectly aligned. But sometimes what looks like peace is simply practiced performance. Looking back now, I respect my silence in that moment more than I ever would have respected pretending. If I had forced myself to pray just to appear acceptable, I would have been betraying my own truth. And real peace, I have learned, never asks to pretend. When

Breaking Chaos With Boundaries

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you enter treatment or begin healing, there are things that must change. There is a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous about changing people, places, and things. The idea is simple but profound. Remove what keeps you sick, step away from what feeds the cycle. At my sickest, I had a strange ability to find the sickest people in the room and attach myself to them. Looking back, I don't think it was accidental. It was familiar. It was recognition. I found others who were searching and hurting, just like I was. Many people who desperately want peace unknowingly recreate chaos because chaos feels known. It feels predictable. Even when it hurts, it feels like home. And I was in those rooms because I truly wanted change. I wanted calm. I wanted something different. But peace was not yet part of my atmosphere because survival was all I knew. I knew how to function inside chaos. I knew how to perform being okay. I knew how to keep moving so I didn't have to sit still long enough to feel what lived underneath. I have to be honest here, what I was chasing in those rooms was not entirely different from what I had chased before. I chased it in bars, in relationships, and flirtation and dancing three nights a week just to feel alive. I chased moments that gave me a temporary high or numbed the parts of me that hurt. Some of the choices that I made in search of relief are not necessary to detail here, and they don't need to be. What matters is this. I was searching for peace in places that could never hold it. I was never going to find peace while remaining environments that required me to abandon myself in order to belong. I know not everyone's path looks the same, but for me, healing required something deeper than simply wanting peace. It required harder questions. What had to change if I truly wanted something different? I was never going to find it where I was. I had to stop recreating familiar chaos. There is a cost to peace. But peace was not just a realization. It was not a soft spiritual moment where everything suddenly made sense. Peace required separation. Peace required change. It required me to stop repeating what felt familiar. Even when what felt familiar was slowly destroying me. Trauma repeats what it knows. And what it knows often feels safer than what is healthy. I didn't wake up one day and consciously decide to live in chaos. I simply gravitated toward what felt normal to my nervous system. Calm felt foreign, safe, felt suspicious. I surrounded myself with people who were searching the same way I was searching, hurting the same way I was hurting. We called it depth. We called it loyalty. We called it understanding, but often what we were doing was bonding over wounds that none of us knew how to heal. There is a strange kind of intimacy that happens when broken people find each other. It feels honest, it feels deep, it feels like finally being seen without having to explain yourself. We recognize pain in one another without needing words, and for a long time, I mistook that recognition for healing. We shared stories that bonded us, you know, trauma bonding. We laughed hard. We held space for each other's hurts, and in many ways, those connections were real. But what I didn't understand at the time was that shared pain doesn't mean it's healthy. While everyone in the room is still bleeding, no one knows how to stop the bleeding. We comfort each other while unknown while unknowingly reinforcing the same patterns that keep us stuck. We normalize chaos because it's the only language that we all speak. We all we call intensity authenticity because calm feels unfamiliar. And it was not about that. I was part of it. I gravitated toward peep toward people who were trying to outrun something they could not quite name. There was comfort in not being the only one who felt lost, but there was also a hidden cost. We were bonding around our wounds instead of learning how to live beyond them. It is difficult to admit that sometimes the people who understand you the most are not always the people who can help you grow. That realization felt like betrayal not just toward them, but toward the version of myself that had built belonging around shared pain, because stepping away from those dynamics felt like abandoning people who had once felt like home. But healing required me to ask a question I'd avoided for years. What kind of connection was I choosing? There is something deeply uncomfortable about stepping out of chaos when chaos is what your body recognizes as home. Even when you say you want peace, your nervous system may still crave the familiar spike of adrenaline, the rush, the high, the distraction, the intensity that drowns out silence. And to become honest about that. Some of my coping behaviors were not about joy. They were about escape. Some of my relationships were not about love. They were about avoiding loneliness. Some of my choices were not about freedom. They were about numbing. And here's the truth that took me years to understand that peace cannot exist in the same ecosystem as survival mode. You can't heal in an environment that keeps reopening the wound. I had to begin recognizing patterns. Who drained me? Who stirred chaos? Who required me to shrink? Who fed the version of me that was still trying to outrun pain? Healing required environment shifts. It required boundaries. It required saying no to invitations that would have once felt like oxygen. It required allowing silence to exist without immediately feeling it. Peace is not passive. Peace is chosen over and over again. And sometimes choosing peace feels like loss before it feels like relief. That realization marked the beginning of understanding the cost of peace, because peace is often romanticized as something gentle, something that arrives like a quiet sunrise or a soft answer to a prayer. But the truth for me was different. Peace required loss before it brought relief. It required separation before it brought calm. It required me to release environments, rhythms, and even relationships that had once felt like survival.

Saying No To The House

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I really believed that if my biological mom accepted me, I would finally feel peace. I also believed that if I were ever given the choice for peace, I would choose it without hesitation. But life doesn't always present peace in ways we recognize. Before my adopted mom died, she went through a season that felt like panic. She had always been a woman in control, but she had been sick, and something shifted. I don't know if that was the reason for the choices that she made, but they felt sudden and desperate. She came to me one day and told me she had met a man and that they were going to get married. I met him and instantly felt uneasy. I kept trying to understand why she was making such abrupt decisions. She had lived decades without my dad, and suddenly she wanted to marry and leave the home she had worked so hard to build, the home that was fully paid for. She told me that I could have the house. She said she was moving in with him. I was completely sideswiped. I had no time to think through what was being offered. And at that point in my life, I was still deeply unhealthy. I was not making good decisions. I was living away from the area, working multiple jobs, wandering emotionally and physically. My husband and I were separated. She suggested that my childhood best friend could move in as well and that we would share the house together. My best friend was willing, but I was hesitant. You would think I would have jumped at the opportunity, a paid for home, security, stability. Instead, I took a friend with me to visit the house. We sat in the living room, and all I felt were the memories of my past. The weight of everything that had happened there, the history between my sister and me, the echoes of old panorama. That lived inside the walls, I called my mom and said one word. No. I have looked back at that moment many times and wondered how I could have walked away from something so practical, so financially wise, something many people would have considered a gift. From the outside, it likely made no sense. Her marriage didn't even last a year. Eventually, she would have returned and I may have found myself needing a place to live anyway. She had given up my dad's Navy pension and the other financial securities when she married that man for only eleven months. When that ended, she was left financially vulnerable. And there was a strong possibility that after she passed, the house might have become mine to do with as I wished. But on paper, you know, it it did look like an opportunity. It looked like security and peace. But healing knew that peace doesn't live in a building. Healing was leading me away from structures that looked secure but felt empty. That house may have offered walls and permanence, but it could never have been a home. When I drive past that house now, I do feel regret at times. I do feel a sense of loss. I would have loved to hold on to the memories of my dad and my sister, to walk through spaces that once carried pieces of us, but the weight of the pain was heavier than the comfort of those memories. Saying no was costly, but it was also the beginning of peace. It was harder financially. It made no logical sense given where I was emotionally at the time. Even now I am surprised that I had the clarity to say no, but I did. Peace asked me to stop recreating familiar chaos, and that was harder than I expected. I had to change my environment. I had to move on in order to find peace. I began to recognize patterns I had never questioned before. The people I gravitated toward, the environments that felt exciting but left me exhausted, the coping behaviors that looked like freedom on the outside but were really ways of avoiding stillness. Peace required me to slow down enough to see it, and slowing down meant feeling everything I had spent years out running. It meant setting boundaries where I had once offered endless access. It meant stepping away from the conversations that revolved around pain without movement toward healing. It meant choosing different rhythms, different relationships, and sometimes choosing solitude. Peace was not passive. Peace was a decision. Peace now feels like the absence of that constant anticipation. It feels like the absence of internal chaos, the absence of an overstimulated nervous system. My body no longer lives in a permanent state of alert. Peace is something I don't take for granted. I know what it costs. I know how easily it can be shaken. And I've realized that I don't want anything to take it from me again. There have been many things in my life that have tried to disrupt it. Loss, conflict, uncertainty, storms that could have easily pulled me back into old patterns, but I no longer look only inward or outward to find peace. I rely on God for it now. I rely on God for it now. Peace is come with a calm that only God can give, even in the middle of a tumultuous storm. It is not the absence of hardship, it is steadiness within it. Now, that is part of my peace chapter.

Memoir Purpose And Closing

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But like I said, that's only a few pages. It is over 200 pages of my heart and soul. The next chapter is worth. I would compare this book to the Body Keeps the Score plus many other people's memoirs. And and the whole point to it is just for people to be able to latch on to this and hold it and underline it and say, you know what, this is a lesson that I need to take with me. I need to grow from this. And I hope that it can help somebody. In the back of the book is a picture of me and my sister. You can't see her face because you never will. And I have a picture that she drew me. But it's a picture of the two of us hugging, and we were little. It was before anything happened, and you have to read the book to know the story. But I have always dedicated everything to her, and I always will. And she is one of the reasons why I do this. There is always purpose in the pain. And there is always hope in the journey. I'll let you know when the book comes out. And I'll read more as we go. All right. Until next time. I'll see you later.