by Midwest Mimi

Red taught me to trust.

Blue taught me to survive.

Purple exposed my truth.

I grew up believing the world was safe.

That good things happened to good people.

Bills got paid.

Love stayed steady.

That is the red lens.

Then life stopped playing by those rules.

I tried to build the kind of life I was raised to believe in.

Marriage. Family. A future laid out in front of me.

But when the adoption fell apart and we lost the girls, everything cracked.

The house was so empty. Their absence lived in the silence and tore at my heart.

The life I thought I was promised disappeared.

That kind of break changes what you believe.

It changed me.

Divorced at 25, my parents let me move into their rental property.

A clean slate.

A restart into everything safe and expected.

Instead, I walked out the door.

I wanted to burn every rule that ever betrayed me.

So I chose a world that didn’t pretend to be fair.

A world where you win by outsmarting whoever stands in front of you.

That is the blue lens.

I came alive under the pressure.

My pulse synced with adrenaline and every move demanded sharp instincts.

School had always come easy to me, and the game did too.

Hustling only turned up that volume.

Competing with myself made me a force worth calculating for.

The streets became my proving ground.

Survival demanded everything I had. Unapologetically.

I stopped drawing.

I stopped creating.

There was no room for softness.

I used to think that was purple.

I thought seeing both sides meant I understood everything.

Turns out, that was only step one.

Becoming a mother broke me open in a way I never expected.

She wrapped her tiny fingers around mine and suddenly I wasn’t bulletproof anymore.

Softness was no longer a danger.

Softness was a duty.

I still moved through the world like survival was my only language but love kept interrupting the sentence.

By the time illness hit, Rae’s dad had been gone for over a year.

He cheated. I took my daughter and left.

It was the two of us, learning how to stand on our own feet.

Then I got sick.

The kind of chronic illness that steals independence you earned the hard way.

My body betrayed me, attacking itself while my immune system self-destructed.

A battle inside me that forced me to accept help even when I would rather break.

I remember sitting crumpled on the cold bathroom tile one morning while the room spun.

Survival looked so different from here.

It was still a fight but one my intellect couldn’t win.

Slowing down forced me to figure out who I was when I wasn’t performing strength.

I had to stop surviving long enough to decide how I wanted to live.

Healing was quiet, but once I learned to listen it whispered that I belonged in a life built from strength and guided by hope.

Choosing myself changed everything.

I finally found a life I could live in without breaking.

The purple lens lets me see the truth.

What to protect.

What to release.

What is worth fighting for.

Years later I met my wife, and we built a family from that truth.

A family bonded in love.

Yes we struggle.

Yes money is tight.

But we face every challenge together.

We show up.

We protect our kids.

We give them what they need and show them who we are.

This is what purple looks like.

I do not fit in one world anymore.

I learned too much to go back.

Purple is survival with hope.

And I earned every shade of it.

Mimi 🌿❤️