Hi, I’m Kayci!

The purpose of Heart of Healing is for people to read my story and feel less alone. I want people to continue having hope. Hope for better things to come, and to feel courageous enough to share their story so that it might help others going through the same or similar things. Keep reading to learn my story and what keeps me going. 

On the day my husband told me he wanted a divorce, my whole world crashed in on me. The rug was pulled out from under my feet and my face it hard on the floor. No matter how many times I tried to pull myself back up, I was unable to find solid ground again. My life changed forever, and I had to somehow rebuild it piece by piece. But this wasn’t the first time I had to start over.

When I was six years old, my mother died at the age of 36. The trajectory of everything after that, for me and my family, would never be the same.

I grew up in a rural town in central Pennsylvania, shielded by forests and mountains, and an overprotective family. In many ways, I was isolated from the outside world, unaware of both the beauty and darkness that lurks around the corner. My dad numbed his pain over the loss of Mom with alcohol, so my younger sister, brother, and I were left feeling neglected and unloved. Dad never played with us. Never cuddled with us. Never shared a meal with us. We felt our world was unsafe, precarious, and unpredictable.

I turned to writing as one of the ways to cope with the loss and my emotions. I began writing short stories about young girls who lost a parent and felt alone. The characters became my friends, my confidants, my trusted advisors. I wrote my first fairy tale when I was 15.

Our grandparents took care of us while Dad worked, but it wasn’t the same. Though we had all of our physical needs met (food, water, clothing, and shelter) I grew up feeling abandoned by my parents, and that to earn the love of my dad, there were certain conditions I had to meet to feel loved and get approval.

In my teens, the anger towards what happened to me and feelings of lack of love came out in the form of an eating disorder. I would go weeks without eating, binge uncontrollably, then excessively exercise to burn off all that I consumed. The self-starvation, binging, and excessive exercise went on repeat for years. I never went to counseling consistently, yet I was dying for help.

In college, I studied abroad in Mexico and Spain and fell in love with traveling. After graduating with a Bachelor’s of Arts in English at Saint Francis University, I went to pursue my Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Chatham University. I knew I had a story inside me and I wanted to get it out. But I didn’t have the confidence to share it with anyone.

I wanted to influence young people in positive ways, so I went back to Saint Francis to get my teaching certification in English Language Arts. i hoped to teach my students to love reading and writing as much as I did. I eventually met the man that would be my husband and we moved to Florida for teaching jobs. We bought a house and we got married. But I felt a disconnect with my husband, and it showed up in my trauma from my past.

The distorted eating slowly evolved into uber healthy eating and exercising, and my need for something to control became almost unbearable.

After four and a half years of marriage, almost nine years of being together, my husband told me the news two days after Christmas. Suddenly I was that six-year-old again, not understanding what had happened to one of the most important people in my life, how they could abandon me, why I wasn’t worthy of their love.

I spent the next few months picking up the pieces of my life, sometimes dropping them and creating an even bigger mess. But I kept moving forward. I began writing again. I began reading books and articles on personal development. I realized so many people have felt and feel the way I felt and feel. So many have issues with themselves in their present because of what happened to them in their past. Slowly I built up the confidence to write for publication.

This is how this website came to be. You will find an eclectic range of articles and quotes that I have accumulated over the years, ones that speak to me personally. They inspire change in positive ways. They inspire hope that there are better days ahead. They provide the courage to find what has always been inside all of us, the ability to love ourselves because of our inherent worth.

Many of the articles are about personal development, others are about relationships. Some are about distorted eating. There will be a few travel articles. I also have some health and fitness blogs here since I am a Certified Health Coach through the Institute of Integrative Nutrition as well as a Personal Trainer through American Council on Exercise. Read whatever topic you are most in need of at the time.

I want to tell everyone reading this that you are not alone. We all seek love. Even if you feel like the rug was pulled out from under you, you will find your feet again. It won’t be easy. It will take constant work to get back on solid ground. But you will do it. I hope that my experience and my stories will help you see that. There is always light in the darkness, and life can begin again.