Hi, I’m Adriana.
A pilgrim on a sacred journey.
I am Adriana.
Over the course of my life, I have lived through experiences that taught me, slowly, that a life can hold more than one truth at once.
I was born after the death of my father. At twenty-two, I became a widow when my husband died by suicide. I have encountered unexpected death in different seasons of my life.
I have known migration, motherhood in survival mode, loss and love—and the strange work of building a life alongside things that cannot be undone.
For a long time, I thought healing would mean leaving some of those things behind. But the past does not change. Our stories remain with us. What can change is the way we see them—and the way we see ourselves within them. That is slow, patient work done in the present, and I have come to believe that this is where the future begins to change.
My faith is rooted in Jesus Christ, and it is inseparable from the way I see.
For me faith is neither abstract nor a way of escaping the complexity of being human. Scripture, for me, was never meant to rule over our humanity, but to meet us within it. It taught me to look directly at suffering without making suffering the whole story. It gave me language for lament, mystery, incarnation and hope—and revealed to me a God who enters the complexity of human life rather than asking us to escape it.
Perhaps that is why I am continually drawn to the places where language seems to run out.
I write and tell stories about what it means to be human: the losses we carry, the beauty we overlook, the relationships that shape us, the questions we cannot resolve, the faith that remains when darkness surrounds us, and the parts of ourselves and our lives we sometimes experience long before we know how to name them.
I am interested in what becomes visible when we learn to look again—especially at the intangible things we so easily miss.
Not everything can be repaired. Not everything can be explained.
But sometimes, a different way of seeing can change the way we inhabit what remains.
1981
The Fatherless Girl
Born in Santa Maria, RS, Brazil.
My father died before I was born, leaving an absence I would spend years learning to recognize. His absence shaped parts of my story long before I had language for what I was carrying. Growing up fatherless became one of the first places where I learned that what is missing can shape us as deeply as what is present.
2004
The Widow
At twenty-two, I became a widow.
My husband died by suicide, and I found myself carrying a kind of grief I had no language for. His death did not simply bring loss back into my life; it changed the life I thought I was going to have.
I had to learn how to keep living without pretending that what happened could ever be undone. And now, as a mother, I was watching my son grow up with the same absence I had carried as a daughter: the loss of a father. And perhaps the hardest part was realizing that something I had known all my life was now beyond my power to protect my son from: he, too, would grow up without his father.
2013
The Immigrant
I left Brazil with my two children and the hope of the American Dream, believing that a new place might also offer a new beginning.
But crossing a border did not mean leaving my story behind. In the years that followed, I experienced divorce, financial abuse, betrayal, and the difficult realization that survival can travel with us—even when everything around us has changed.
That season also forced me to examine some of what I had been taught about faith. At times, religion and doctrine had given me rules for enduring what required compassion, courage, and change.
Leaving one country taught me something I would have to learn in many other ways: a new beginning does not erase what came before. Sometimes we change our surroundings long before we learn how to inhabit ourselves differently.
2023
The Pilgrim
I have walked the Camino de Santiago three times.
The first, I walked alone in solitude. The second, I returned leading others and discovered the beauty of community among pilgrims. Most recently, I found myself on the road for a third time, simply following my heart and trusting that faith sometimes whispers an invitation to walk toward what seems impossible.
The Camino heals.
Not because pilgrimage erases what we carry, but because it creates space to encounter it differently. It has become part of the way I live and understand my faith—not as an escape from ordinary life, but as a practice of paying attention. It gives me space to be present, to reconnect, recalibrate, and rewire body, mind, and soul.
Walking has taught me about the limits of control, the weight of the stories we carry, and the responsibility of inhabiting a life no one else can live for us. It reminds me not to miss the privilege of being alive—here and now.
The Camino is gentle. Along the way, I have encountered Jesus one day at a time, in different ways—not as someone rushing to fix me or explain what hurts, but as a presence beside me, giving me the freedom to keep walking, questioning, noticing, and becoming.
Perhaps it is this strange coexistence of beauty and brokenness, of what is unfinished and what is already whole, that keeps drawing me back to the quiet of Galicia and away from the noise of the world.
The Camino is alive.
2024
Girl, Arise!
This is Grace.
Not the kind that makes everything that happened right, or asks me to believe that everything was meant to be. Some things were wrong. Some losses remain losses. Grace did not rewrite my story.
It changed the way I learned to inhabit it.
I no longer believe I have to become someone else in order to be worthy of love. I have learned to hold more of myself at once: what is beautiful and what is unfinished, what I understand and what remains a mystery, the woman I have become and the little girl whose story still lives within me.
My faith in Jesus has not given me an explanation for everything. It has given me a place from which to live with what cannot be explained.
The girl once defined by absence grew into a woman who no longer allows absence to define her.
I am still walking.
Still paying attention. Still becoming. Still learning what it means to be fully human while remaining open to the divine, all the days of my life.
Buen Camino.
