For a long time, my world looked red.

Red meant safety.

Red meant rules.

Red meant if you did the right things in the right order, life would hold.

I grew up believing love was supposed to look one way. Marriage came before sex. Babies came after weddings. Families stayed intact if you followed the script. Faith wasn’t just spiritual. It was structural. Red was the color of stop signs and warning labels, but also of protection. If I stayed inside the lines, I believed I would be okay.

I wasn’t being reckless.

I was being faithful to the framework I had been given.

I married young because I believed marriage was forever. When that marriage ended because of complicated grief, it didn’t just break my heart. It broke my understanding of how the world worked.

Blue came after my first marriage ended, when I was surviving grief and the quiet fear that I had done everything right and still lost everything.

Blue didn’t replace Red. It destabilized it.

Blue showed me that following the rules does not guarantee safety.

Blue was rebellion and freedom, but it was also survival mode. I was faithful to the idea of marriage. I was faithful to the values I had been raised with. But my life no longer fit inside the tidy box Red had promised me.

I was hustling. I was surviving. I was trying to hold everything together for my daughter. I gave everything I had to my second husband. Loyalty. Labor. Love. I believed we were surviving together.

I later learned he had two families.

Me and Rae.

And another woman and children I never knew about.

Blue tried to break me over and over. It was the season where the ground kept shifting. Where trust felt naive. Where faith felt confusing. Where I learned that doing the “right” thing didn’t always end well.

But Blue also taught me to ask questions.

Questions about what I actually wanted.

Questions about who I was when no one was watching.

Questions about whether survival was the best I could hope for.

Purple came quietly.

It didn’t arrive as rebellion.

It arrived as alignment.

By the time I met Thy, my defenses were already worn down. Blue had stripped away the illusion that love could be earned through obedience. I wasn’t looking for fireworks or rescue. I was looking for honesty.

So when I started dating her, I didn’t make an announcement. I simply introduced her as my girlfriend.

And to my surprise, my parents didn’t react any differently than they had when I introduced Raeleigh’s dad years earlier.

That moment mattered.

It made me realize how much of the fear had been living inside me. My parents had evolved, too. Quietly. Imperfectly. With love.

My dad still believes being gay is a sin. He hasn’t changed that belief. But he believes his love for me matters more than his judgment, and that judgment belongs to God, not him. It is a very kind way to love a daughter while staying honest about his faith.

That, too, is purple.

Purple is where intention replaces obligation.

It’s the way Thy and I built a family on purpose. My daughter. Her son. Our baby. Not because a book told us how, but because we chose this life. It’s the way we navigate mornings with three kids. The way we share space quietly in the evenings. The way we can sit in the same room doing our own things and still feel deeply connected.

Purple is not perfect.

It is honest.

I miss church sometimes. I miss the music. I miss the community. I haven’t felt welcome there in a long time, so I haven’t gone. But that doesn’t mean I stopped talking to God. It doesn’t mean I forgot how to pray. Faith didn’t leave me. It changed color.

Red gave me values.

Blue gave me questions.

Purple gave me myself.

I didn’t abandon who I was.

I integrated her.

And for the first time, my life feels sustainable. My family feels real. My love feels true.

This is the color I live in now.