Grab a cup of coffee or tea. This one is a full essay. And it gets personal.
Over the last week I have had some loud thoughts and some very deep thinking. And in it all I discovered my origin story. The reason why I chose the Regency period. The reason why I write what I write.
Last year my goal was to live a simpler, slower paced life. To draw, paint, embroider. To detox from electronics. To play and bring out the inner child. That desire drew me back to Regency England and the stories of Jane Austen. And this year has been one of struggles, one after another. The thoughts have been harder to quiet. But this week something shifted. I discovered a merging of the deeper meaning behind writing both the Keep Moving Forward devotional series and my Regency romance novels. I thought they were separate things. It turns out they are not. They both come from the same place. The same place of healing. The same place on my journey.
And today I am going to share the origin of that discovery. The trigger behind it. And how I am healing.
For most of my life I would say I chose propriety.
Looking back, my mom taught us etiquette. I remember walking with a book on my head and making sure my posture was correct. She was very conscientious about all of us kids being well dressed and well groomed. We had family dinners at the table and knew where all the right forks and knives went because we all learned how to set a table properly. It was common manners. It was just how it was. There were not really rules, per se. And I never had any problem with that kind of propriety. In fact I still love most of those things today. It is one of the things I love about the past that I am sad to see dwindling in modern society.
There is one part of propriety that has always bothered me though. The judgment part. The snubs if you did not fit the mold. It is human nature but in some centuries it was very harsh. This is where I think we are fortunate as a modern society. Even though we have even more avenues for judgment with social media, there is always a group of people who will support you breaking the mold. Cracking the so-called mask of propriety. And this is the place I am coming from. This is why I write. This is how my characters are helping me break my own insecurities and my own masks.
This mask that wears my very own skin. I would love to put the blame on someone else. And in the past I honestly did, because I did not understand how it was created or why. But the deepest wound the mask created was done by me. I am my own harshest critic, my own harshest judge. The voice may at one time have been a parent, a sibling, a friend, a stranger. But now all those voices are my own. And over the past few years I have been praying, going to therapy, and learning discernment and insight.
Growing up there was no discernment. It was just who I was. Me, myself, and I. And all the voices of the three were just who I was created to be. I did not know that each version was a mask I was wearing. One voice to hide the fear. One to pretend that life was an episode of Leave It to Beaver. And one that was so harsh and so mean that I am surprised I never hurt myself. That was the one that made me believe I had no value. That I was never good enough. That was the one that kept me silent. And all during that time I never knew that was not how everyone else lived. The reason is, I never questioned it. Ever. I believed that was just how everyone was created.
And to be perfect, I needed to keep silent. So I did. And never told a soul.
Looking back at why I react the way I do, I realized something. If I had been born in the Regency era I would have passed Propriety 101 with flying colors.
Here is the definition so you understand what I mean: Propriety is the quality of behaving in a way that is considered correct and acceptable according to the social standards of the time. For me it meant I needed to present what the world needed to see. And nothing else.
My family was loud and lax. A bit hippie. My parents were post-war and older by the time I came along. I was the last of seven children. By the time I was born my mom was tired and I got handed off from sibling to sibling. I was naturally obedient. Never punished, never told what to do. I played and made art and spent quiet afternoons on the backyard swing with my dad, who got home from work at three. I absorbed silence on my own. I never had to be taught.
My first real memory of understanding what that cost was when I was fourteen years old. My older brother was in drug rehabilitation and our family had been asked to attend a family meeting at the center. I was scared. Actually I was beyond scared. I was terrified. My brother was fourteen years older than me. When I was around six, old enough to have memory, he was already struggling in ways that frightened me as a small child. I was a sensitive, empathetic kid and I took it all in silently. I never once told a soul in my family that I was afraid. To this day I have no idea why I stayed silent. I have no idea why I never talked to my parents or my older sister who was like a second mom to me. I just wanted to be obedient and never get in trouble. So I never told anyone anything. I never showed fear. But when I look back at photos I was always halfway hiding behind one of my parents' legs. It showed. Growing up in the seventies that was called being shy. Mental health was taboo. Honestly no one I knew ever thought about mental health, or so I believed until I was an adult.
I digressed. Back to when I was fourteen and the moment I learned how to consciously put my mask on. Before this I wore one naturally, without even knowing it, hidden even from myself. But this was the first time I could recall ever really making the decision to put one on. I actually told my mom a version of I was afraid. I told her I did not know what to say and I wanted to talk to my school counselor before we went to the family session. Her answer was a fast and absolute no.
What happens in this home stays in this home. We present what needs to be seen to the outside. The inside mess stays inside the family.
My mother was a beautiful soul and I know for a fact she loved me and would never have intentionally wounded my emotions. I know that now with every fiber of my being. But that day I was wounded and shut down and afraid and did not know how to explain it. So I did not. I kept silent and put that mask on so tight to make sure it would never show anyone what the inside looked like ever again. Because I wanted to please my mom more than anyone. And above all I was obedient and wanted to be good. Because to me that was how I could show her I loved her.
It was a distorted way of thinking but in that era we did not know better. And if there was knowledge available I did not have access to it because I stayed silent. That was the day I learned to tie the mask on tight. So tight that I am still struggling to take it off forty one years later. And to understand why she responded the way she did I had to go all the way back to her own childhood.
It took me caring for my mom in the last years of her life to have two years of deep healing conversations between us. Some about her childhood. Some about mine.
My mom was born in 1930. She grew up during the Great Depression and came of age during World War Two. The world outside her home was already uncertain and frightening. And the world inside her home was not a refuge from any of that. What she endured as a child was devastating. And understanding it made her parenting valid. Not necessarily right. But valid.
She watched her own mother receive shock therapy in the dining room as a little girl of twelve. I cannot even imagine the horror or the nightmares that may have followed. The fear that one day that could be her own child. What happened to her mother was a taboo subject outside their home. And honestly inside it too. They rarely spoke of those things.
There was another trauma my mom carried at the same age. In the spring of 1943, in the middle of the war, her father drank and gambled away the mortgage on their home. A house that held seven children. The world outside was already at war and the world inside was crumbling too. Thankfully her uncle, the postmaster general at the time, was able to save the family from becoming destitute. But her mother had taken her along when she went to find out the news, knowing the truth would be delivered more gently if her youngest daughter was present. My mom absorbed all of it. She had fears and those fears were passed down. I understand why and how now as an adult. But as a kid it was different. I did not understand. I was hurt by words and actions I could not trace back to their source. And they were formative.
Wow. I need to stop for a moment. Right now as I am revising this blog on its third pass, I discovered a full circle. That on the day I asked at fourteen about speaking to someone about my brother, one of my mom's deepest childhood fears had come to fruition. Her child had followed in her father's footsteps. How had I not seen that before? More than likely because I was centered on my own trauma. But now that my mom is gone the understanding is profound. She kept silent because it was survival. And she taught me to keep silent because that was all she knew.
One thing I know for certain. Trauma carries. It passes from one generation to the next not out of cruelty but out of survival. You do what you can with what is in front of you. You do your best. And sometimes propriety is the mask we wear to let the world know we are not broken. But sometimes the mask becomes the problem. Especially when the mask starts lying and twisting the truth. The emotional truth. The Godly truth.
The problem with a mask is we do not always know we are wearing it. And that mask is the hardest to take off because it truly becomes a part of you. The part of you that wants to keep hiding is still that little girl crouched behind her parents' legs. Clinging to the mask because it is all she has ever known. And the longer she hides the louder the harsh voice gets. It tells you that you are worthless. That you have no value. That you have no proper place in the world. And the cruelest part is that all you ever wanted was to fit in. To belong to that perfect world of propriety. But the mask convinces you that you never will. And then life adds more on top of it. Your body changes. Age happens. Things you did not choose and did not want. The inside starts showing on the outside. The mask begins to crack. And the shame of that is real and it is hard and it hurts. But that cracking. That is not failure. That is the real you finally finding a way out.
And when she gets out you have to be ready. You have to let it spill. You have to share your story. You have to find someone who can help you pick up the pieces. You have to pray. You need hope. And for the first time in your life you need to shed propriety and speak your emotional truth.
Propriety is the mask. And I am still learning to take it off. Writing is one of the places I am doing that work. Which is funny, because the ideas come fast. The words in my head are always ready. But I have dyslexia and dysgraphia, and getting them from my mind onto the page is where the challenge lives. And sometimes it is really challenging to have my creativity and my hands at the keyboard work together. Some days I cannot even read back what I typed because the letters are all off. Computers have helped so much. I can now voice text what I want to say directly into my writing program. I have grammar programs that help me find where periods and commas belong and where run-on sentences are hiding. That has been the greatest blessing. And with the help of editors, beta readers, and proofreaders I have a team that makes my writing possible. That makes a dream come true. A dream that the voice told me for years was never mine to have.
And even though I am improving, that terrible voice keeps coming back. Sometimes I still listen. Sometimes I put the mask back on. But I am much quicker to take it off now. Much quicker to catch myself. And that too is by the grace of God giving me the strength to keep moving forward. To step outside of propriety and be who God has always intended me to be.
That is exactly why I write the characters I write.
I chose the Regency period because I love its manners and grace and charm and simpler living. But they also had social standards that forced them to mask up daily. I wanted my characters to be avant-garde. Ahead of their time. To break those rules little by little and show who they really are. For the inner light to shine so bright that everyone forgets there is an outer shell at all. Beautiful loving souls living for emotional truth in their love for God and others.
The Vows of the Heart series is not a period piece. It is a character study of people breaking the mold of society, set in the period. And I am so excited to share them with you.
But before we go any further I have a question that has been sitting on my brain. And I really want to know what you think.
Do you believe the people of the past truly followed the rules of society? Do you believe they behaved the way we understand propriety to be as the history books tell it?
Because I will be honest with you. I do not think we will ever really know. And here is why. We only have snippets. The letters that survived. The diaries that were never burned. The accounts written by those with enough access to put words on paper. But what happened inside the homes? Behind the closed doors? In the conversations nobody ever wrote down?
I believe all of those things existed then. I feel most certain of it. I believe we just do not have the records to prove them. People are still people and we as a group have not changed that much in how we feel across all these centuries.
So today I write them down. My truths. To share with those who wish to read them. Because there is only one thing I am truly certain of. In my own family there are definitely people who did not follow the rules. I have a family of eccentrics. So many of them out of step with everyone around them. Living, breathing humans fighting the standards of propriety. Some loudly. Some quietly. All surviving. All unusually in their own way. And all of them still loved. Even when it was hard to love. And even when it was as easy as breathing. We are all part of the story.
I believe if it was true in my family's history then it was true in the Regency era as well. That both extraordinary women and men existed fighting to remove a mask. History just did not always bother to write them down.
So I am writing them down now.
My books are clean. Every door is closed. I hold that line firmly and without apology. But I write characters who have lived through real things because the women reading these books have lived through real things too. Helping my characters take off their masks is helping me take off mine.
That is what writing has become for me. Not just storytelling. Healing.
Which brings me to the closing of this elegiac testimony. This morning's scripture was 1 Samuel 16:7.
The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.
I do not think that was a coincidence.
And as I pause to reread this blog I hear it. The voice of propriety shouting. Do not post this. People will judge you. They will roll their eyes at how foolish you are at your age. You are too much. And the most frightening one of all. You are just beginning and the few readers you have will abandon you.
Such lies the demons breed.
The voices are loud but I know deep in my soul that they are lies. And I am choosing to keep their mask buried today. I shut them down reminding myself that it is only fear and insecurity. And it is okay to let it go and keep moving forward. Because my dreams are within reach as long as I step out of propriety and out of my own judgment.
I will always move forward.
So here I am listening to God. I'm posting.
If this resonated with you, the Keep Moving Forward devotional series was made for exactly this. You can find it at audreyraymondbooks.com/pages/keep-moving-forward-devotionals
If you are in a hard season and could use some support, visit audreyraymondbooks.com/pages/resources.
Winning Lady Beatrice releases June 20, 2026. Order your copy at audreyraymondbooks.com.