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 keep showing up anyway.
I’m a writer, a grandmother, and someone who has spent most of her life learning that hope isn’t always a feeling you wait for.
Sometimes it’s a choice you make before you feel it.
I didn’t learn that from a book.
I learned it in real life.
I grew up the oldest of seven. Childhood shaped me in ways I wouldn’t fully understand until much later.
What it did give me, even before I had language for it, was God.
Quiet.
Steady.
Present.
An anchor I didn’t always understand, but somehow never fully let go of.
I got married at 18.
We were young, and marriage has taught me more about grace, commitment, forgiveness, and growth than I could have imagined then.
Over the years, I learned that I could not control another person or wait for someone else to change before doing the work God was asking me to do in myself.
This year, we celebrated 40 years of marriage.
Not because every season was easy.
Because commitment has been built one ordinary day at a time.
Life kept teaching.
A carotid artery aneurysm.
Dysautonomia in 2000 — invisible, exhausting, and often 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 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 emotional.
The medical care mattered.
But what carried me was something else entirely.
Faith.
People.
Prayer.
Hope.
Cancer didn’t end when treatment did.
Years later, I still live with the long-term effects of treatment, including bilateral lymphedema and the daily work of managing a body that keeps score.
I also live with dysautonomia.
I tell you this not for sympathy.
I tell you 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 — childhood, relationships, illness, disappointment, rebuilding, and ordinary life — one thing has remained.
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.
That’s where Hope Lives Now began.
It started with writing during my own cancer treatment and grew into something much larger:
a place for faith-rooted encouragement, practical cancer support, survivorship resources, and honest hope for the hard seasons life doesn’t prepare us for.
Cancer.
Chronic illness.
Relationships.
Disappointment.
Waiting.
A faith tested, stretched, and deepened without tidy answers.
If that’s where you are, 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 don’t have to force meaning out of something that still hurts.
You can simply 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, practical help, 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 in the Middle, where I share honest reflections on faith, cancer, survivorship, hope, humor, and ordinary life.
I speak to women’s groups, churches, healthcare communities, and gatherings where people need permission to be honest about the middle.
My first book, Faces of Cancer: The Emotions No One Prepares You For, is coming this fall.
I’m so glad you’re here.
Truly.
— Kim