Let’s go ahead and start from the beginning. I feel like the backstory is important to understand how I came full circle to creating this online magazine. This is like a mini version of my personal testimony and how it led to the creation of Violet and Valor. Don’t worry, this will be the short version ;).
I grew up in a Christian family and went to church every Sunday and Wednesday. I remember learning bible verses and about the fruits of the spirit but it just didn’t fully click. I looked at it from a viewpoint of something I was supposed to know and memorized it but I didn’t fully FEEL it or understand it in the way that God intended me to. When I was 13 I said the prayer and asked Jesus into my heart and that feeling was the first spiritual breakthrough I’ve ever had. I truly felt the Holy Spirit and I was so excited for my new life with Jesus. That’s also the point at which the spiritual warfare came on HEAVY. No more than a few months after I was saved I started to feel like I was walking under a heavy cloud. Between teenage hormones, not understanding myself or my path in life and the heavy spiritual warfare I was experiencing I began slipping down a dark slope. It was around this time that worldly influence began to take hold over my life. I started worrying about my weight, my looks, what I wore, which boys liked me all while carrying a dark cloud of depression over my head. I didn’t understand spiritual warfare at such a young age so I started to slip further away from my relationship with Jesus, wondering where that initial feeling I felt when I was first saved went and why it felt so hard to access again. But I wasn’t praying, I wasn’t exercising my authority in Christ and I wasnt staying in the word. I was a teenage girl focused on teenage girl things and drifting further and further from Christ.
It was also around this time that I developed a love for magazines. I started letting the magazines tell me how to live and what to do and what to wear and how to act. When I was young, print magazines were the only available kind and I loved browsing through the pages and admiring all of the beautiful images, including the advertisements. In high school I would cut out all of the prettiest images and display them in a collage on the back of my bedroom door. I was focused on worldly glam and beauty and not on God.
I still went to church with my family but I felt less and less connected to God. My depression started to get worse and worse and a lot of insecurity creeped in. I just thought it was all a normal part of being a teenager and didn’t know what to do with all of my emotions which is what led to my love for writing. From my teenage years and on whenever I had a strong message I needed to get across to someone I would write it out in pages because I knew I could express myself better that way.
I have also always been an avid reader and storyteller. Ask anyone who knows me well and they will tell you I can turn a two minute story into a two hour story. During my worst days of depression I would read and write to get out of my own head.
Once my depression got worse and worse I wasn’t strong enough to say no when I was offered my first sip of alcohol at age 15. It wasn’t long after that I tried marijuana for the first time. The temporary relief I felt from my depression led me to wanting more. But once it wore off it left me more depressed and I was constantly searching for the next thing to bring me that feeling. I kept trying other things until eventually my parents found out and sent me to a wilderness camp for troubled teens when I was 17. The time spent in nature and away from my phone and magazines and peers helped me to heal and recover and when I got back I was ready to start my senior year of high school with a clean slate, but I was still not seeking Jesus.
It was only a matter of time before I let the world creep back in. After being out of the secluded environment I was in for a while, my lure to materialistic things resurfaced. I browsed through magazines and fantasized over owning the newest designer brands and having the perfect body and listening to trashy music and only going to church on Sunday but not seeking God at all. Not long after this I began drinking again. I managed to stay away from other drugs for years but my drinking got steadily worse.
I then went to college where I decided to major in Advertising so that I could create my own beautiful images in magazines. I interned at a local magazine and it brought me LIFE. I thought I was on the path to making all of my dreams come true. Working at a magazine was always the plan…. and then life happened. My drinking got worse and once I graduated college I decided to come back to my hometown of Atlanta and get a certificate in graphic design to fulfill my dream of designing for a magazine.
While I was back in Atlanta I got into a relationship with someone who was mixed up in some dark things. I didn’t realize it at the time we started dating but eventually after drinking with him for months and months and my depression getting worse and worse I went down a dark road and ended up battling severe addiction for a year and a half. At the end of 2012 a divine intervention occurred (another story for another day) and I began my path to recovery. This time, I got sober from everything including alcohol and stayed sober. I immersed myself into Alcoholics Anonymous and went to meetings every day. I studied the “big book” (AA’s version of the bible) and got a sponsor and worked through all of the steps. While this did help me in my recovery and my journey to getting well physically and mentally I still suffered from depression and I was still searching to fill that void in different ways and I was still too stubborn to seek Jesus fully. I prayed and talked to my “higher power” (as AA called it) but I wasn’t in the word and I wasn’t seeking God first. I dove into the self help section at the bookstore and read all of the self help books that were out at the time, which also led me into new age. I hilighted passage after passage from self help books and dove into new age beliefs and practices and genuinely thought it was getting me closer to God.
After 2 years of starting a solid foundation for my sobriety I decided to move to NYC to continue in fulfilling my lifelong dream of designing for a magazine. I started by working a graphic design position at a fashion brand in Midtown. I thought it would be a dreamy job but quickly realized it was my nightmare. I won’t go into the details here but if you know the fashion industry then you can probably guess that I just couldn’t hang. After six months of working there I left and spent the next 3 weeks in between jobs having yet another quarter life crisis.
I went deeper into new age and even started using cards for guidance. It was also during this time in between jobs that I used my downtime to start an online magazine. The fashion job made me realize I didn’t want a corporate ladder climbing job so I decided to take matters into my own hands and create my own magazine. I built the website and wrote a few posts and started recruiting my friends to write for it too. I found another job to pay the bill working as an assistant for an artist who was struggling with Parkinsons. While I took him to his doctor appointments I would work on the magazine in the waiting room. Within a few months I had 12 different women writing for the magazine on their own topics of specialty. I used pretty stock images and posted on a variety of topics. The magazine started getting a lot of views and I realized I was creating my dream on my own. I prided myself on “creating my own reality” and had no idea how far away I was from God. I was sucked into the new age ideology of being the master of my own universe and not submitting to God.
After 2 years in NYC I was over it and needed a change (I love NYC but not everyone is meant to live there for long periods of time and you don’t always know you’re one of the people who isn’t until you try). So I moved to LA, in an apartment right across the street from my best friend. I got a job as a counselor at a Malibu rehab and also kept working on the online magazine. Just as the magazine was really starting to make headway God humbled me again. I suddenly developed what I can only describe as a mysterious illness. I was dealing with terrible symptoms and saw every type of doctor and specialist in LA and ran numerous tests and they all came up empty handed. One doctor even suggested that I see a psychiatrist because she assumed I was making up my symptoms since her labs and exams showed nothing. Joke was on her because I was already seeing a psychiatrist too and on multiple medications to deal with depression and anxiety. Eventually I decided enough was enough.
After two and a half years in LA I decided to leave and went to stay at a family beach house in south GA so I could work on healing myself for a few months. I fasted, tried various healing methods and walked barefoot on the beach every day and magically, my body healed. Sometimes you just need nature and rest. It was through this isolation and rest that I began to slowly start growing closer to God again. Through this process I let go of the online magazine I had worked so hard to build (I can see now that it wasn’t the right time because I had a lot of spiritual healing to do and life lessons to learn before I was ready to create a new magazine aligned with God’s purpose.
After healing my body on the coast of South Georgia, I felt a pull to go to Portland, Oregon that I know now was a word of Wisdom from God. I couldn’t explain it to anyone I just knew that I had to go there. So I applied for a job online, did a phone interview, and miraculously got the job just from the phone interview (that never happens for me I’m not usually a great interviewer). So I packed my bags, shipped a few boxes and flew to Portland where I found an apartment a few days later. Just two months after moving there, I met my soulmate/life partner/now husband. I was in my early 30s and he was in his late 30s and we both had been through a lot of life and knew what we wanted and it was clear from the second date that he was the “one”. A few months after that I got pregnant with our first child and a few months after that we were married. Needless to say, the call to move to Portland was one of the most rewarding experiences from following intuition that I’ve ever had.
Shortly after we met in 2020 life changed as we (and everyone else in the world) knew it. Lockdowns, riots, loss of jobs, etc. The current events at the time began shifting my views and opening my eyes in ways I didn’t even know they were closed to. It was through this awakening process that my eyes also began to be opened to the deception of new age. Due to the unsafe environment we were living in the middle of with the Portland riots and our eyes being opened to whats happening in the world and the cultural climate of Portland, we decided to move to the south to be near family and we got married on the coast of South Georgia, where I had healed myself just a year prior.
I had our first daughter in February of 2021 and again, my world and views were forever changed. I had no idea it was possible for me to love someone so much and though I had been through hard things before, motherhood brought out a strength and stamina in me that I didn’t know existed. Motherhood also taught me how to have more patience and grace than I ever thought possible. I think this transformation happens to many mothers and it leads to our Grit and Grace mentality. We will do anything for our children and yet we also contain a compassion and love so strong and forgiving at the same time. I imagine that is how God feels about us, his children, and becoming a mom brought me even closer to God.
I started praying more and getting back into the word. After having 2 kids under 2, we decided to move to Chattanooga, TN to start a homestead. A year after moved my husband lost his job and I decided I would get my real estate license as a way to make an income and have a flexible schedule to be with my kids. I finished real estate school, aced my exam and joined a reputable office in the area. Just one month later I got pregnant with our third child, unplanned. I got really sick and was unable to contribute to my real estate team and got fired from it. I also realized my gifts were not in the type of tasks and numbers real estate agents handle and that it felt more like a chore than something that lit me up.
I had been feeling disconnected in recent months from my true purpose creatively when God woke me up in the middle of the night and gave me a sudden burst of inspiration reminding me of my love for magazines/blogging and my passion for helping other women and my love of storytelling. God gave me the intuitive feeling that women need an online space that focuses on sharing women’s testimonies and storytelling: reading the stories of other women and telling their own. God also gave me the name: Violet and Valor. When I heard the name in my head I knew what valor meant but I didn’t know what violet represented until I looked up the symbolism… and it tracked with what God put on my heart for this online space (more on that in my next post).
I’ve been through many trials and experiences in my life that have shifted my perspective and given me a lot of grit and grace, and I am sure that whoever is reading this has also been through things that have led to the same. I can’t wait to tell my own stories on here and I am also excited to read and share the testimonies and stories of many other women as well.
I want this space to hold the testimonies of women everywhere. A platform where experience, strength and hope can live through the words of women and the stories they have to tell. While the range of content and story topics may be wide, the overall mission they set to accomplish is the same – to inspire, uplift, and strengthen women mentally, physically and emotionally through portraying the glory and grace of God and allowing us all to see how God is working in our lives.
It’s always been fascinating to me how sometimes God will show us early on what our purpose is through our passions and gifts, but that the route to figuring out exactly how to utilize those passions and gifts can be a long one, with a lot of twists and turns along the way, but all necessary to settle into the purpose he has for us. This is all just a glimpse of my story and how I came to create this space. I can’t wait to see how God uses the testimonies and stories of women everywhere to bring hope and light to others and to help them draw near to Him.