The Wildberry Letters: Letter Three

November 5, 2025

The Wildberry Letters: Letter Three

The Breaking Point

There are days you remember because they changed your life.

And then there are days you remember because they split your life in two.

For me, that day was June 28, 2025.

I wrote it down in my notes app that morning, like I always did when the numbers didn’t add up.

We need $1,175 for bills.

A quiet prayer. A quiet panic.

Before sunrise, I was already down at the food trailer, my second home, my quiet confessional. Pop pastries ready to go. Refilling sugar jars, and creamer for coffee. The air already thick with the summer heat, and a healthy spoonful of exhaustion in my tired soul. I had been awake since 4:00am. Again.

I moved on autopilot: heat, wrap, label, repeat. Hope disguised as ritual.

And that day, like so many before it, I told myself: Maybe today will be enough. Maybe today will save us.

It didn’t.

We made around seven hundred dollars. I don’t remember the exact number. I just remember watching it hit the total and feeling something inside me finally give out.

I walked into the food trailer after the market ended, shut the door behind me in the afternoon humidity, and broke down.

Not a dramatic break down. Not a storm of fury. A silent collapse. The kind where you can actually feel your body surrender before your mind does. The kind where tears don’t even feel like crying, but instead more like a release your nervous system has been begging for.

I slid down the wall in that tiny trailer, and sat on the floor and whispered out loud:

“I can’t do this anymore.”

I didn’t yell. I didn’t rage. I just… let the truth land.

I wasn’t angry. Truthfully, I was heartbroken.

Heartbroken that love hadn’t been enough to carry it all.

Heartbroken that my belief hadn’t been enough to build the vision I had for this place.

Heartbroken that grit had finally met its limit inside of me.

I came home that afternoon and did what people do when they’re drowning… I thrashed. I cried. I said things I didn’t mean. I yelled at Matt. I yelled at my kids. Something I promised myself I wouldn’t do. And it wasn’t because of them, it was because the life I had been fighting so hard for was costing me the parts of me that mattered most.

Later that night, I told Matt, “We’re done. Wildberry is over. Go back to the marine industry. I failed you.”

And I meant it. I meant it because I didn’t know what would come next. I just knew I couldn’t survive another season like this… not as a woman, not as a wife, not as a mother, not as a human being.

And then something unexpected happened.

The community, the same one I had been pouring myself into for years, showed up for us. People gave. Shared. Donated. Offered support without extraction. It was humbling. It was holy. It was the safety net we needed to breathe in that moment.

But here is the part that no one knew until now:

Even being saved didn’t fix the truth.

I was done with things as they were. Being held financially, while a miracle in itself, still didn’t change the emotional and spiritual collapse that had already happened inside me. It simply gave me the space to finally feel it.

So I went quiet. I pulled back. I didn’t have language for it then, but I understand it now:

I entered the cave. The cocoon. The descent. The Dark Night of the Soul.

I stopped looking outward for answers and started doing what I should have done a long time ago, I turned inward. Into the shadows. Into the grief. Into the old wounds I had been outrunning with productivity and purpose.

I faced myself. All of me. The abandonment wounds. The unworthiness patterns. The fear of disappointing people. The false salvation of overgiving. The belief that my value was in what I produced rather than who I was.

I thought I had lost my spark. But that day taught me something different:

My spark wasn’t gone.

It was buried. Buried under survival, under expectation, under everything I thought I had to be to be loved.

The breaking didn’t destroy me.

It set me free.

The truth is, healing changed everything.

And this was the day it began.

More soon.

💛Bridget