Adreeahna Bree

Stop living as though you are the last person you’ll take care of. You deserves to be protected, rested, spoken to with kindness, and faithfully tended to. Perhaps this has been the invitation all along. Whole time, the love of my life... She's been walking beside me. Whispering, "I've got you."

Last year, I read 221 books. Not because I was chasing a reading goal, but because grief had made itself at home in my life. What began as a place to disappear for a while became something I never saw coming. Somewhere between hospital visits, late-night chapters, and stories written by Black women, I found pieces of myself waiting for me. And at Indie Love: Margins & Melodies, I realized the pages had been leading me toward something far greater than escape all along.

People kept telling me, "You're different," after loss. What they didn't understand was that grief wasn't just breaking my heart—it was changing what I had capacity for. It taught me discernment, boundaries, and the courage to stop abandoning myself. Somewhere between the heartbreak and the healing, I stopped searching for who I used to be and started getting to know the woman who remained. As it turns out, she was living in everything she once prayed for.