The Road to Happiness: Boundaries and Peace

In this episode, I talk about happiness and what it really looks like after betrayal, grief, community conflict, and years of hard lessons. A weekend spent learning to make sourdough becomes the perfect metaphor for growth. You cannot rush the rise. You cannot resurrect what collapsed. You feed what’s healthy and discard what’s toxic.

Living alone in my little house in the woods has brought loneliness, but it has also brought grounding, clarity, and the deepest happiness I’ve felt since 2019. I share why trusting yourself is the true road to happiness, and why forgiveness does not automatically mean giving someone access back into your life.

We explore boundaries, emotional maturity, rebuilding after chaos, and the powerful imagery behind the country song “Burning House” by Cam. Sometimes you can care about someone and still refuse to rebuild the house that already burned.

If you are navigating loneliness, personal growth, second chances, or learning how to protect your peace, this episode is about choosing steady happiness over familiar chaos.

Transcript

Sour Dough and Choosing Happiness

"Burning House" by Cam

Bunnie XO, Jelly Roll and Infidelity

Forms of Abuse in Relationships

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Good evening everyone. Only three days late, and I come without excuse. Very busy life, and I'm just going to take it as it comes. And if I can't do it, I can't do it. And as soon as my fortress is built and aligned, I will have more continuity to my timelines. But right now, as it is, life is busy. I'm having fun and I'm loving it. So here we go. I'm going to talk about happiness. This weekend I was at a friend's house learning how to make sourdough. Which it's kind of symbolic. You you just don't rush sourdough. You don't bully it into rising. You feed it, you wait, you let it ferment. And if you force it, it collapses. If you neglect it, it dies. If you tend to it consistently, it becomes something solid, nurturing, nourishing, steady. And we were kneading our dough and talking about past relationships. And the things I've walked through since 2019. The betrayal, the grief, the chaos, the rebuilding, retelling my story over and over again has got to stop. And I said something out loud that surprised even me. I said, you know, I live alone now. I'm in my little house in the woods, and it gets super quiet. Sometimes it's like painfully quiet. And I feel a loneliness loneliness. And sometimes I just want to run back. But then I realize how grounded I am, and I go, no, you don't, because I'm happy. I've actually been happier haven't been happier than I've been since 2019 when this all started. And that doesn't mean my life is perfect by any means. I've got hurdles, I've got problems. I've got things I'm still working through. I'm sure there are lessons I even haven't met yet. But the difference now is this. I actually trust myself. And that I realize is the ultimate road to happiness. Earlier this week, a friend called me and they were wrestling with whether to let someone back into a community space. Wasn't a romantic partner, not an ex. A colleague from an extracurricular circle their family was part of. And this particular person had been condescending, made gestures at crosslines, spread rumors, and just created a bunch of stupid tension that totally destabilized the entire group. And it was very disruptive. And now his alignment has kind of shifted. And then suddenly he wants forgiveness from the group, from the very people who absorbed the fallout. And the question becomes do we do we let him back in? And you know, there's a quote I saw recently. Like heal and rise. That that line is so strong and it's true. But rising does not mean you reopen doors that has already taught you what you needed to know. Like healing is not endless tolerance, healing is discernment, and that's just something that you have to kind of go with. And it's very hard to make the decision that I saw who you were, I saw how you treated me, yes, uh everybody does deserve a second chance. But is giving you a second chance going to disrupt my happiness? Because A, if I let you back in and I'm forced to trust you again, will you do it again and disappoint me? And you know, that's where I said to my friends, sometimes you have to really think about where you are in your life and where you want to be, and whether allowing someone back in your life is gonna make you ultimately happy. Did that person matter enough to give them a second chance? Did that person hurt you so much that you would never ever trust them the same way again? Will everything be the same if you do let them back in your life? And a lot of the times, I would say probably 85 to 90 percent, the answer is it'll happen again. Unless they haven't gone through the serious motions of therapy and understanding what drove them to do what they did, I think, and it's not a medical opinion, it's a personal opinion based on experience, it'll happen again. And do you want to disrupt the current happiness that you've built for yourself after all the lessons that you've learned in the past? So getting back to my sourdough story to tie this all in, it actually taught me something. You don't force a rise, you don't resurrect what collapsed, you start fresh, you feed what's healthy, you discard what's toxic. It's actually very simple, but it takes discipline, and living alone has been confronting. There's no distraction, no noise, no constant validation. Kind of just me and the quiet. But some people may say, ha, she's living alone, she's all by herself, she's lonely. But here I am on my podcast this evening, talking about it. Because in that quiet, I rebuilt. I actually rebuilt my standards, I rebuilt my boundaries, I rebuilt my nervous system. I stopped tolerating what's once what once destabilized me. And here's a fact even though I get lonely sometimes in this little house in the woods, I have never felt more grounded. And I'm more aligned than ever with who I am. You know, I'm even able to handle people better, which is, you know, it's a it's an amazing feeling when, you know, someone from my team comes to me, and before I get really aggravated, and now I take a step back, I listen, I'm able to think about it for a half hour, 45 minutes, and go, how can I respond to this? And typically when I respond to this, it's not what's in the betterment for me, what's in the betterment for you, but what's in the betterment for the business. Because we're all working as a team. And the same goes as with family and your friends. You have to work together to find a mutual common ground to achieve that ultimate happiness in wherever you are. And I'm not waking up with anxiety about who may disrupt my day now. And I'm walking into rooms where I feel respected. And I know I no longer need to chase or convince or tolerate chaos to feel chosen. You know, back in the rental house where I felt so alone, so stalked, so harassed, you know, I thought my avoidant may come back. And at that point in time, I may have accepted it because I was in such a mindless chaos, even though I was doing the podcasts. And I think if you go back in the podcast, you can probably sense my disarrangement, my feelings, my need to dive into the past and you know, give subtle subtleties about things. And now I can go back to the past and talk about it and take a lesson with me. And I feel it's because of this loneliness, aloneness that I've learned every lesson I needed to learn since 2019. You know, the painful ones, the humbling ones, the very expensive ones. And there'll be more. There always are. But when you really work on yourself, that road to happiness gets easier. There's a country song called Burning House by Cam. One of the quotes is, I had a dream about a burning house. You were stuck inside, I couldn't get you out. That lyric is emotional because it's so honest and real. Sometimes someone hurts you isn't a villain in your mind. You don't wish them harm. You don't necessarily hate them. You can see their humanity, you can even understand how they got there, but the house burned. In that community, the rumors burned it. The condensation burned it. The division burned it. Trust shifted, safety shifted. And when someone comes back asking for forgiveness, what they're really asking is access. Another line in that song is I walked in and said I loved you, but I couldn't save you. And you know, those words are very mature. You can care, you can forgive, you can wish them well, but you're not responsible for rescuing them from the consequences of their behavior. You are not required to rebuild the house for them. And that's a huge lesson that I've learned. These were seasons where I ran into burning houses and I tried to fix, I tried to save, tried to be gracious, tried to prove I was evolved, tried to keep the peace, and all it did was set me back. That song is very real. And it's so funny when we listens to songs, we hear lyrics, but we don't really hear the lyrics. And that's what I love about music is a lot of the songs are very personal in mind. And when you really sit down and grasp it and think about it and really see the story behind the story, you come to realize that you can relate so much more to different songs based on your life choices and your life lessons. And anybody that knows me knows that I'm a humongous jelly roll fan. I love jelly roll. But as soon as Bunny XO came out with her book, I dove into it. I read it. That girl has experienced so much trauma in her life, I don't know how she ever survived it. And when I read that Jelly Roll cheated on her for over a year, and she actually left and went across country and rebuilt herself, and he begged her to come back, and he continued to have that relationship when she returned back to Nashville. My heart sank. I actually thought that she was a tougher woman than that. And even though she really explains it in a lot of the interviews that she's done over the past week, I think she looks back and says, you know, I've done a lot of wrongs in my life. And I was given a second chance. And I'm in reading through the book, I think she's always lived authentically in her in her hurt stage. And maybe she doesn't detail exactly what she did to deserve a second chance. But for what I'm reading, I think she was a har you know, troubled person. But I do think that she helped people along the way. And I think she harbored a lot of the blame for his cheating on just that, that she also had a troubled past, and that in almost a way that she deserved it. And I don't think anybody deserves that. And you know what? Kudos to them that they got back together, they went to therapy, they're working on it, and they've come out the other side quite lovable. I don't know. I'm hearing a lot of rumors, so I don't know what to think about that. So I didn't want to pass judgment because there's a lot of back and forth on TikTok. But but then she had her interview with Sharon Osborne and they were talking about cheating. And you know, Sharon Osborne put up with a lot with Ozzy Osborne, and again, Sharon excused it and said, you know, that's road life. I, you know, saw all these celebrities, my father, and that's what they did when they're on the road. You know, someone came up to Ozzy and say, Can I suck your dick? He'd be like, Yeah, sure. And she just put up with it. And she put up with it until there was an emotional connection a few years back, and then she finally left, but then she returned. And, you know, ultimately these two ladies uh summarized the interview in saying that sometimes you just love so much, someone so much that you just can't live without them. And I just don't know what to think about that. I think you sincerely have to love yourself, and I think if you don't love yourself, I think there's a certain level of narcissism that kick kicks in with you that you're trying to achieve other goals than actually loving yourself. So you're streamlining yourself away from happiness and just riding the wave of success. Things that happen good to you. So your life is constantly tumultuous, but is it truly happy? And you know, I hope for their sakes it looks like Sharon Osborne did have a happy life with Ozzy, but I don't think I would ever want to be, I wouldn't be paid a billion dollars to have a relationship with something like that. But, you know, it just it just blew me away. It just I I feel that it was, you know, Bunny talking about her escort life, Sharon Osborne talking about the rock and roll life. I think they have a lot of young followers as well who listen. And I just wish they would have didn't, not that they condoned it, but they they didn't not condone it. And we cannot keep living in this same lifestyle where we allow and we this to happen because it's it's just not fair to us or fair to the young girls who's seeking relationships, or boys too. I mean, boys are just very much the same. Boys do fall in love, boys fall over head over heels, and boys also receive a certain amount of you know domestic abuse in some cases as well, where they're so in love with that person that they can't break the tie. So it happens both ways. And I just really think that Bunny and Sharon are old enough to know better that you know, try to teach our younger generations to have some self-respect, that no one should ever hurt you, where you have to say the words, I wanted to kill myself. I said it, and in Bunny's book, she said it, and Sharon Osborne said it as well. And oddly enough, Sharon Osborne went nuts when Ozzy had his emotional relationship, so much so that her kids submitted to her into a nuthouse. So it's just not a fair thing to happen because it does send you bad shit crazy. I'm an example, and there's so many other women out there that are examples of, and men, I say women, but I also mean men, that you know really lose a lot of mental health and mental capacity because of cheating, being unfaithful, and being disrespectful to your partner. And there's so many forms of abuse. You know, there's sexual abuse, and I even think cheating falls along those lines. If you're cheating and not being honest about it, you know, you're not allowing your partner to take care of their sexual health if you're out straying. Are you out protecting yourself? Who are you out with? What kind of people are you sleeping with? You know, if you're not being honest and transparent, that's so abusive in a sexual manner. I know for myself at 48, having to go to my doctor's office and him saying, We've got to send you for sexual transmitted disease tests or STD tests, and walking into life labs, it was just so humiliating because those are the only tests on my list. And I had lived as a mom and a wife. I cooked, I worked, I did the chores at home, and I took care of family. So I didn't know that I would ever, ever, ever have to be in that position until I was put in that position. It was so humiliating. It was awful. And then there's, you know, emotional abuse, family ostracization where, you know, no one's allowed to talk to you, or they have to have a hate on for you because you made the decisions that you had to make for your own happiness. And that's actually very worse. Like I look at my children, then they weren't even allowed to say their father's eulogy. And I just found that very abusive as well. It was horrible. No one asked them if they wanted to talk about their dad. And that's just not cool in my eyes. And I think that's the very reason why I would probably never talk to them again, even though they related to me as, you know, just like my mom and psycho and all of that. I just think you did such a horrible thing to my kids that that's just absolutely unforgivable. Because the person that gave the eulogy, I think they walked in 22 years, they walked into our house twice. And we spent a couple of hours with them maybe during the holidays in the summer. They truly didn't know the person that he was or the family guy, or just even the guy that he was in everyday life, what he liked, what he enjoyed. So there's a lot of emotional abuse in families as well, and you know, when I left a relationship of the same, and and a lot of the times women and men, a lot of the times women, the average is that they'll go back seven times to an abusive relationship before they finally end it. And I think it has a lot to do with family pressure, feeling like they're not enough, and that they can't survive on their own. And we have to help these people rise up and see the goodness in themselves and not allow them to doubt themselves that they can't try to find their happy too. It is a struggle, and it is hard financially, mentally, emotionally. It is so damn tough. Sitting alone at night in your thoughts without drinking or drugs, which I've never taken, but drinking I did, or any type of stimulant, and just sitting in your thoughts and saying, What do I want and need to be happy? I think very few of us sit in our thoughts and ask those questions. A lot of us sit in our thoughts and rewind to the past, rewind to the past without seeing what the past really looked like to them. And that's why I say for myself, I'm finally living kind of the life that I've always I'm kind of like a vagrant, not really. I, you know, I support myself. I'm in this big, beautiful house until May, and then I'm going to the trailer to live, and that'll be another test for me. It may drive me absolutely up the wall being in a small space, but I may make the space even better. That I'll absolutely love it when May comes and I can spend those glorious months outside around people I know that love me, that care for me, that we have a lot of fun. And then I'm back here again, and I don't know if I'll make many. Relationships between now and May, but I'm hoping next October I can get involved more in the community where I will actually meet people and enjoy my winter here. Right now I'm just enjoying the drives. Last tonight I just went and looked at a beautiful sunset off Lake Huron, took some photos, took a time lapse. When I drive and I see the windmills and I just see the open space, I smile. And I don't think I've smiled like that since 2019, 2018. I'm just so damn happy. And I want to see anybody listening, and my friends, and my family, I want to see them smile like that too. But the biggest thing you gotta do is take the chance. Take the chance and fly. Don't let anyone tell you where you should be, or don't let generational thoughts dictate where you need to be. Don't let anyone bully you into thinking this is where you need to be in order to feel love from people, because love is natural. The people that love you and want you in your life will never disappear, no matter what anybody says. I've experienced it. I've experienced it big time. You know, I had a separation where a lot had happened between us, and my kids continued to talk to my ex-husband, and I'm very proud of that. And I'm very proud that they stood by him when he went through his battle with cancer. There is no need for that type of domestic abuse. And believe me, when I get into the story of what happened, I was not a very good mother when we first separated. There was a lot of secrets revealed, and I took a lot more offense to it than I should have. And I was not a very good mother. I distanced myself completely because I ran out of trust from everybody, and that was just wrong. And with my therapist, I learned to discuss better, talk better, treat better. And then also I learned that they have to make their own decisions, and I kind of have to ignore the decisions that they make and start focusing on me and what's best for me in my life. Now, this year I actually laugh at my therapist because I've told her that, you know, I started with her in January because I always had a therapist in Ottawa and then I decided I wanted face to face. And then I just looked at her, I said, From the moment I met you, you ripped my world apart. And she laughs, and I said, Yes. I said, I have never gotten rid of so many people in my life since until I met you. And she just laughs and she said, But you needed to do that in order to continue your road for yourself. She didn't say the road to happiness. I can't exactly remember what she said, but she said you needed to shed all of these beliefs that you believe that you needed in your life in order to thrive and live the life that you wanted to live. And I am. I'm just, I don't know. I want to sing from the rooftops tonight about how happy I am because life is just great. I don't have a partner. I see my kids when we see each other, and I love spending every minute with them when I do. But now I'm on my own road. And I hope it's a long road. I hope it's not a short one. And I hope that I can continue to feel like I'm constantly growing and thriving and just living this journey that God put me on this earth for. Because in the beginning it was just me, and in the end, it'll be just me too leaving. So when someone asks me now whether to let someone back in who's once created havoc, my answer is simple. You know what? You can forgive without reinstating, bringing them in back into your life. You can care without collapsing your standards. A short wave, hey, how you doing? And you can rise without reopening the fire. Happiness is not found in who comes back, it's found in the strength to say we rebuilt something solid here, and we're not lighting it again.