Close to a decade ago, I woke up crawling up someone else’s stairs after a Thanksgiving weekend recklessly packed with pills and alcohol, chain-smoking and hookah.

And, for the first time in a long time, I hunched over the toilet and threw up.

Maybe it was lack of sleep or the collaboration of many things I shouldn’t have had together—a toxic and deadly combo.

My body never reacts like this, I thought over and over.

That night, I fell asleep in tears—a sadness, lying next to someone. I could only describe my tears and my epic loneliness as homesickness, a longing and a lost and epically sad feeling that just rocked me to my core.

It rattled my body, my heart, my soul. I had felt it prior, but never to this extent.

A few days later, I snorted a pill in our living room. This wasn’t rare, but the reaction I had wasn’t one I was prepared for.

I went to snort water out of a bottle cap afterward to clear it up, and my nose burned like it never had before.

All of my body was screaming and shaking me into an awakening to stop. I had no idea my body was trying its best to protect something so sacred.

Afterward, I felt this fear. This awareness that something within me had shifted, had been rocked and was refusing all I knew.

This awareness, this sadness, this life-altering reality that I couldn’t just run from my own life anymore, from my own feelings, from my own toxic environment or relationship.

I had to tune in.

My body was rejecting all that I previously used to cope, used to live, used to feel good, used to not feel not good, used to be around him, used to be around myself, used to numb and flee and escape my own reality.

Something so much bigger was tugging at me.

Something within me was rattling me up to be who I was intended to be.

My greatest awakening. My divine intervention.

My body was rejecting all that didn’t serve me to take care of my miracle baby trying his hardest and his bravest to grow and thrive within me.

I carried guilt and worry for a long time. I worried my lifestyle would cost him his life.

The love I felt the moment I heard his heart, the moment I saw his face, the moment I sat in my car and had validation I was a mom—I loved him so fiercely.

More than I believed I ever loved myself.

I was a mess, a wreck, a lost and bewildered girl. But I was determined now, even in the midst of all the feelings of sobriety, to be the best woman I could be.

He fought for two months within me before I knew of his epic and beautiful existence.

He is a straight miracle.

To my son:

You were worth feeling it all once again.
Every single day.
You’re worth feeling it all for.

Thank you for waking my slumbered self up.
My life has never been the same.

Today, I’m celebrating and breathing in discovering you and beginning loving you. I am waking up to a new and hard, yet most divine and redemptive story.