God- I just want to feel like myself again.
That was the quiet prayer in my heart as I sat in the back row at church this morning.
Short. Honest. And something He has heard at least 152 times over the last few months.
It’s been a little over four months since my hysterectomy.
Four months of hanging on.
Four months of learning.
Four months of being reminded that healing is rarely instant — it is layered, sacred, and slow.
And if I’m being honest? I’m just tired of the waiting.
I’ve had good days, yes. Days where I remember that I’m not living in chronic pain. Days when the voices of my closest people remind me that I am not alone and this season will not last forever. Days where I am thanking every person on my team 100x over for everything they are doing to help me figure it all out, hormones, eating disorder, and otherwise. Days when friends send worship songs at just the right moment while I’m driving to work in the morning or getting ready for bed at night.
And there have been hard days.
Days when I wake up and wrestle with God. When I question myself. When I wonder if I will ever sleep eight hours again, if my hormones will ever get their life together, if I’ll ever fully recover from my eating disorder & if I will ever feel steady in my own skin.
Will I ever feel like myself again?
Maybe the answer isn’t about going back.
Because the woman I was before surgery was surviving — clinging to hope and a heating pad, pushing through pain I had normalized for far too long.
I don’t want to go back to her.
She was brave.
But she was exhausted.
This kind of journey changes you. It marks you. It reshapes you.
And maybe that isn’t all a loss — maybe it’s transformation – into who God is calling me to be.
My friends still see me. My team still sees me. They don’t measure my worth by what my body has lost. They see my heart. My strength. My laughter. My presence. And if they can see me that clearly, maybe God does too — maybe even more clearly than I ever could.
When I look in the mirror, I don’t see someone broken. I see a woman who has faced fear and walked through it. A woman who has endured pain and chosen hope anyway. A woman who is still here — still believing, still healing, still fighting.
& Maybe “feeling like myself again” isn’t about reclaiming who I was before my eating disorder battles and hysterectomy.
Maybe it’s about meeting the new woman God is forming in me — steadier, softer, stronger in ways that don’t shout, but quietly endure.
After all, God does know exactly what He’s doing here. He doesn’t make mistakes. He calls us into the things that He knows only He can get us through & surrounds us with people who aren’t afraid to walk the hard road with us.
Healing is not ever going to be linear.
But faith is a solid foundation for the very things that feels not so solid. Like healing.
This season may be stretching me, but it is not destroying me. Although sometimes it absolutely feels like this season is trying to take me out.
The same God who saw every tear sees every small victory. And the big ones too.
He knows every desire of my heart. And even when I can’t see the whole picture, I can trust that He is writing a story that will one day make me look back at this season and question why I ever doubted Him.
I may not feel like myself yet….
But I am slowing becoming someone even stronger, even freer, and even more anchored in faith than ever before.
I didn’t lose myself in this — God is introducing me to who I was always meant to be.
- Taylor Kate
The Journey To A Great Surrender 