“Too often, we forget to remember the little moments that make life worth living.”
— Anonymous
My name is Lainee Milar.
I’ve struggled with mental health issues since I was a little girl. So, when 2024 started and my emotional struggles got harder and harder to deal with, I shrugged it off as “normal,” assuming that my growing emotional instability was just a result of being a teenager and growing up. I kept my struggles a secret from my parents, not wanting to burden them with overdramatized stress or worry.
Big mistake.
Eventually, the pressure of the burdens I was keeping to myself became too much for me and literally crushed my brain, my body, and my relationships with many close people in my life. This led a series of painful events that took me from the ER to months of medicine, missed school, doctor visits, and therapy sessions.
Eventually, my broken body returned much to how it had been before, but for my soul, things were not so simple. There was no magic pill or therapeutic exercise that could mend what was left of the smoldering fragments of my heart and broken trust with myself, and as time went on it only seemed to worsen, with every bad day (not at all unfrequent), crying session (bless my poor friends who had to listen to my many, many crying sessions and still loved my through it all), and complications
that were constantly arising (a new weed is more than happy to replace the one you just dug up), I felt myself becoming only more lost and more distant than ever from finding the true peace that I most wanted in my life.
And then, Jesus showed up.
Not in a bang of lightning, but in a silent sunrise.
Not in a heavenly chorus of angels, but in the chords of a piano song played from the heart.
I didn’t feel His healing touch in a miraculous encounter, but in the hug from my friend when all I wanted to do was disappear.
I didn’t taste the fruit of the tree of life in a splendid vision, but in the brownies dropped off at my door when I was feeling low.
Jesus took my messy, broken, tragedy, and is rewriting my story.
We all have different stories. Different lost places. We all need a home. For me it was God. Your story will look different than mine, but I believe everyone can find a place where they find healing too.
This website is a place where I jot down some of the moments that have enabled me to continue every day on my healing journey no matter how much it hurts. I hope it may help you on yours. <3
The thirty-two degrees website is a gathering place of all the access points to my blog and other social platforms, where I post about the things, the little daily things, that have brought me closer to my Heavenly Father in my struggle with clinical depression and anxiety.
My prayer is that the scraps of light I tuck into the pages of this site can shine a bit of hope and love into your heart to help you find your way on your amazing, personal journey.
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“However late you think you are, however many chances you think you have missed, however many mistakes you feel you have made or talents you think you don’t have, or however far from home and family and God you feel you have traveled, I testify that you have not traveled beyond the reach of divine love. It is not possible for you to sink lower than the infinite light of Christ’s Atonement shines.”
President Jeffery R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (“The Laborers in the Vineyard,” April 2012 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)(Underlining added)