Kay Bruner

“spent most of my life trying to figure out to be good enough.  Now I had to learn how to be me.  I had to learn that my way of being was acceptable.  In fact, my way of being was beyond acceptable.  God had made me this way on purpose. My way of being was not a defect, a weakness, or something we just had to learn to work around.  It was, instead, a strength, and a resource that our marriage desperately needed.  Our marriage had had a lot of life on the surface, a lot of motion and production, but it badly needed a richer emotional life.  Without that, in the long run, it satisfied neither of us.  I had thought that Andy’s way was the best way, so I had tried to be Andy.  I denigrated and devalued myself as a result.  And that, I came to see, was a constant slap in the face of God, as if He had made me wrong and I had to fix myself. I had to learn to accept and welcome my own true self, the self that feels first and always.  I had to learn that, for me, feeling IS thinking.  When I accept my feelings, I find that they are telling me some kind of truth.  When I start with my feelings, I can follow them down deep into my soul, where Love lives and moves and has its being inside me.  My feelings are valuable, because they are attached to that deep understanding.”
― Kay Bruner, As Soon as I Fell: A Memoir