Healing is not a straight line.
It can still have a process.

Meet the author

About Shayla L. Bennett

Shayla L. Bennett believes people deserve the space to be honest about where they are—and the encouragement, truth, and practical tools to help them move toward where they want to be.

An engineer by profession and a problem-solver by nature, Shayla has spent much of her career making sense of complex problems, identifying what stands in the way of progress, and creating practical paths forward. But some of life’s hardest problems cannot be solved by analysis alone. As she learned through her own experiences with hurt and forgiveness, you cannot engineer your way around feeling. Sometimes the way forward begins by giving yourself permission to acknowledge what happened, understand why it hurt, and recognize the very real impact it had.

That realization helped inspire The Forgiveness Journal.

As a woman of faith, Shayla believes deeply in God’s call to forgive. She also understands the very human distance that can exist between knowing we are called to forgive and knowing how to authentically work toward forgiveness. Her writing makes room for that distance—for the anger, disappointment, questions, grief, and even resentment that can accompany genuine hurt—without allowing the experience to have the final word.

That balance reflects the way Shayla loves people. She is an encourager, advocate, truth-teller, and the friend who will cheer for you fiercely while refusing to let you settle for less than what is possible for your life. She believes compassion and accountability can coexist, that acknowledging pain does not require living permanently inside of it, and that what has happened to us does not have to determine who we become.

That belief is deeply personal. As a devoted aunt, Shayla wants her nieces and nephews—and ultimately every person her words reach—to have something she wishes more people were given: permission to be fully human, tools to navigate life’s difficult places, and the confidence to know they still have choices about what comes next.

Whether she is solving problems, encouraging someone she loves, or putting words on a page, Shayla brings the same heart to the work: tell the truth, make room for humanity, keep moving forward, and never stop believing there is more.

Through her writing, she hopes readers feel understood, challenged, supported, and ultimately empowered to choose freedom for themselves.