Title: A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining

Author: Rachel E. Cargle

Read In: 2023

Description: A memoir on different areas in the author’s life, like faith, relationships, and education, where she starts off living within what’s presented to her, but then allows herself the space to reimagine how each area could expand and evolve to fit her true self better.

Purchase: Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Favorite Quotes:

While I did not have a name for this feeling at the time—I think we would call it ambition—I craved a different life from the one I had been born into. So, I began to reimagine something more for myself. Each step I took away from where I started and toward my vision of a different life led me closer to the place where I am now.

Or, perhaps, as for me, it was, after years of trying, testing, and pushing back against what was supposed to be, discovering the beauty of what could be when we give ourselves permission to sample a version of life on the other side of impossible. These realizations, these moments, these experiences, will often both break and fortify us, and the result is that we are never the same. We are reoriented in the world, invited to take the brave step to reimagine.