The Embers We Carry

I have said it three times now in public.

The first time was on Instagram. A brief, carefully worded post. My heart was pounding when I hit publish.

The second time was in a book. Pages I wrote and rewrote and sat with and cried over before I finally let them go to print.

The third time was on a stage at a sold out summit in Calgary. Out loud. In front of a room full of people. My voice was steadier than I expected.

And now here I am saying it again. In your inbox. Still scared. Still shaking a little if I am honest.

That is what I want you to know before I tell you anything else, vulnerability does not get easy. It gets possible. And every time you choose to say the hard thing out loud, you go somewhere deeper into your own healing. Another layer. Another unravelling. Another piece of the story that gets to breathe instead of hide.

There was a season of my life when I went to the food bank to feed my daughters.

I was a finance professional. I understood money. I had sat across from clients and helped them build financial plans and investment strategies and futures that felt solid and safe.

And I needed the food bank.

I carried so much shame around that. The kind of shame that sits in your chest and makes you smaller. The kind that says I should have been better.

But here is what was actually happening:

I was going through a separation and divorce before I was even 30. My oldest daughter was 4, and my youngest wasn’t even 2. I had legal bills that climbed into the tens of thousands of dollars. Court hearings that stripped away what it was to be a Mother. I had stacked debt. I had two little girls depending entirely on me, and no support. I had a mortgage and bills and a life that needed to keep functioning while everything underneath it was falling apart. I split myself in two, the professional, who had it all together and the mother who was breaking in silence.

I was not reckless. I was not irresponsible. I was a woman doing the best she could with what she had while the ground kept shifting beneath her feet.

I wore survival like armor, giving the illusion that nothing was slipping.

That is not a failure. It took me years to understand that.

Writing it to be published changed something.

I have always been a writer. It has always been cathartic the way I can string words together. Words on a page have held me through things I could not say out loud.

I met a woman at a business conference a couple of years ago, we sat together, we connected. She is truly a beautiful soul. I learned about a collaborative book project she was creating, a collection of true stories about resilience, rebuilding, grief, love, survival, becoming, something in me said yes before my fear could say no.

Her heart is one of the purest I have encountered in business, and I trusted her. When she told me what she was building I knew immediately that my story belonged in it.

What I did not expect was how relieving, terrifying and challenging writing to be published would actually be.

I sat with the edges of grief that I’ve held for over a decade. I revisited moments that tore my soul in half, moments that changed me from the inside out. I wrote about moments I had never spoken out loud to anyone. I let the shame be visible on the page; the food bank, the survival mode, the years of holding it all together while quietly falling apart in the dark.

And somewhere in the writing, another layer of it healed.

That is what telling the truth does. It does not just help the person reading it. It finishes something in the person writing it.

The chapter is called The Embers We Carry.

And somehow — this still moves me — that title became the title of the entire book.

The Embers We Carry is a collection of stories about the small things that keep us going when life asks more of us than we thought we could carry. It is honest and raw and real in the way that only true stories can be.

I am so proud to be part of it.

I have shared pieces of this journey on Instagram, in this newsletter, from a stage, and now in print. And every single time it still feels vulnerable. Every single time there is a part of me that wants to pull back and say, is this too much?

Is this oversharing? Will people think less of me?

And then I think about the woman reading this who is in the middle of her own hard season right now. Carrying shame she does not deserve. Telling herself she should know better. Doing it alone because she does not think anyone would understand.

I keep telling this story for her.

I keep telling the story for little Kim who hid in the dark when really she needed love and to be seen.

The most dangerous thing about shame is the silence it demands.

And the most powerful thing we can do is refuse to be silent.

Thank-you for reading my heart if you’ve got this far.

If you want a copy of The Embers We Carry:

You can order it here → The Embers We Carry

If you are local to Lethbridge and would love a personal copy delivered by me, just reply to this email. I would genuinely love that!!

If this landed for you, if something in your chest loosened a little reading it, if you feel that you could use some vulnerability, honesty and being seen by women in community, com find me in the Money Room. That is exactly the kind of conversation we have in there. The real ones. The ones that heal something.

Come be part of something being built with intention.

Join the Money Room as a Founding Member

With love and a little bit of courage,

Kimberly

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Kim Manning is a financial advisor, Trauma of Money certified practitioner, the founder of Wealth Inside Out, and creator of The Money Room. She works with women at the intersection of emotional patterns and financial strategy, because real wealth is built from the inside out.