About Kim
If you’re in the middle of something hard… this space is for you.
Not the before.
Not the after.
The middle.
The part where life doesn’t look like you thought it would…
and you’re doing your best to hold it together anyway.
I’m a writer, a grandmother, and someone who has spent most of her life learning that hope isn’t a feeling you wait for — it’s a choice you make before you feel it.
I didn’t learn that from a book. I learned it the hard way. The only way, really.
I grew up the oldest of seven. Childhood shaped me in ways I wouldn’t fully understand until much later.
What it did come with, the thing I couldn’t have named then but can now, was God. Quiet, stubborn, present. An anchor I didn’t always understand but somehow never fully let go of.
I got married at 18, and if I’m honest, we were two broken people trying to make a whole. It didn’t work that way. It never does.
It wasn’t until I was willing to do the hard work on myself that anything between us could change.
This June, we celebrate 40 years.
Not because it was easy.
Because we stayed.
Life kept teaching.
A carotid artery aneurysm in 1996.
Dysautonomia in 2000 — invisible, exhausting, and misunderstood.
And then in 2008, on a Tuesday evening, as I was taking off my shirt, my hand found something that stopped the world.
Triple negative breast cancer.
One of the rarest, most aggressive subtypes.
Naturally… I had to be special.
What followed was the hardest year of my life — and also the year I finally started saying out loud what had always been true.
Chemotherapy.
Hair loss.
Fear at 3 a.m. that had no name.
And community that showed up in ways that still make me cry.
The medical care mattered.
But what carried me… was something else entirely.
Cancer didn’t end when treatment did.
Seventeen years later, I still spend two hours a day managing bilateral lymphedema — pump therapy, compression sleeves, and the unglamorous daily work of a body that keeps score.
I also live with dysautonomia.
I tell you this not for sympathy…
but because I need you to know:
I don’t talk about hope from a safe distance.
I live it on inconvenient Tuesdays.
Through all of it — the childhood, the marriage, the health, the decades of hard things — one thing never changed:
God was the anchor.
Hope was the thread.
And somewhere along the way, I began to understand something I couldn’t ignore:
People don’t just need help getting through hard seasons.
They need to feel seen inside them.
They need to feel seen inside them.
That’s where Hope Lives Now began.
Not just from cancer…
but from all of it.
It started as a CaringBridge journal during my own treatment.
It became a blog.
And it grew into a place for people walking through hard seasons, whatever those seasons look like.
Cancer.
Marriage.
Childhood wounds.
A faith tested… stripped down… and rebuilt without tidy answers.
If that’s you, you’re in the right place.
If you’re in the middle…
The waiting room
The long drive home
The quiet fear no one else sees
The trying-to-be-strong-for-everyone-else
You’re in the right place.
You don’t have to have the right words.
You don’t have to have it figured out.
You just have to keep showing up.
I’ll meet you there.
One of the deepest callings of my life is to come alongside people who are still in the middle
not the before,
not the after,
but the hard, holy middle —
with hope, honesty, and the reminder that you are not alone.
For years, I ran Fresh Impact Social Media Management, helping other people tell their stories.
It turns out all of that was training for this —
the story I was meant to tell
and the people I was meant to serve.
I write Notes from the Middle, a free Substack with weekly essays on faith in real life.
I speak to women’s groups, ministries, and gatherings of women in hard seasons.
I’m so glad you’re here.
Truly.
— Kim
ps My first book, Faces of Cancer, releases in October 2026. A second book is already in the works.