Becoming Who You Were Meant to Be — Kelly’s Journey Through Grief and Growth
EP. 09
In this powerful and deeply personal episode of Running Ahrens, Justin and Sarah welcome longtime friend, artist, and former Rule29 teammate, Kelly Allison. What follows is an honest, raw, and surprisingly hope-filled conversation about growing up in a rigid world, surviving the unraveling of a marriage, discovering love again, and losing it just as life was finally opening back up.
From singing in a college ska band to building a photography business from the ground up, Kelly’s story is anything but linear. She talks openly about financial abuse, parenting through grief, raising a non-binary child in an evangelical family, and what it means to rebuild when your whole world goes silent.
👆Some of Kelly’s Life and Work
Whether you’ve had to start over, draw painful boundaries, or just needed to remember you’re not alone, this one’s for you.
🎥 Kelly’s Work Reel
Takeaways & Talking Points
When the Picture Breaks: What happens when the marriage, motherhood, and life you thought you’d have falls apart—and how Kelly found herself through the cracks
From Ska to Studio: The creative journey from band life to building a thriving photography business with no roadmap, just vision, grit, and a whole lot of LinkedIn Learning.
Financial Abuse Isn’t Just About Money: How control, isolation, and loss of self can hide in plain sight, and what it takes to reclaim your voice
Parenting Through Grief: Raising kids (and choosing to raise one who isn’t biologically yours) while mourning the love of your life
Chosen Family & Queer Identity: Why Kelly calls her daughter “her everything,” and how she’s had to fight for her family in more ways than one
Faith, Boundaries & Estrangement: The cost of being fully yourself when your faith community, or family, won’t see you, and why she still leads with love
The Art of Becoming: Creativity as survival, healing, and resurrection—and why Kelly says she’s not done growing, even in the dark
Things We’re Learning (and Unlearning)
Boundaries are love in action, even when others don’t see it
You can start over at any age, in any circumstance
Losing someone doesn’t erase their impact, or your right to grieve
The families we choose often love us better than the ones we were born into
Being a “big feeling” person is a gift, not a flaw
Stats Worth Knowing
1 in 5 women experience financial abuse in a relationship (NNEDV)
Sudden cardiac arrest is the #1 natural cause of death in the U.S. (AHA)
LGBTQ+ youth who have affirming families report significantly lower rates of depression and suicide (The Trevor Project)
7 in 10 Americans say they’ve had to set a boundary with family in adulthood (Pew Research)
This is one of those episodes that stays with you. Kelly shows us what it means to hold grief and growth in the same hands, and reminds us that even in the unraveling, we are still becoming.
Listen to the full episode: