Beyond Surrender

Mandi Alvarado
May 17
7 min read

Beyond Beautiful: Disability, Liberation, Love

Season 3, Episode 3 - Beyond Surrender

🧭 Episode Summary

In this deeply personal solo episode, Amanda explores the reality that transformation often requires surrender.

But surrender isn’t always soft, peaceful, or aesthetically pleasing—it can involve grief, endings, and releasing things that once felt safe.

Amanda opens up about letting go of harmful theology, navigating the loss of relationships that required self-betrayal, surrendering people-pleasing habits, and redefining faith through a lens of authenticity, love, and liberation.

She also explores repentance, redemption, disability theology, and why becoming more of yourself may require shedding masks that others benefited from.

This episode is for anyone navigating change, grief, faith deconstruction, boundaries, and the messy middle of becoming.

💬 Key Themes

Releasing what no longer serves you
Letting go of people pleasing
Faith, repentance, and redemption
Queerness and spiritual authenticity
Grief and transformation

🚨Partnership

Intersectional Access has a partnership with Buoy, a company that creates hydration drops designed to support people living with chronic illnesses and conditions where maintaining hydration is especially important. Before agreeing to collaborate, I reached out to my community to hear about their experiences, and many people shared that Buoy has been helpful for managing symptoms and staying hydrated. One thing that stood out to me is their Chronic Illness Support Program, which offers people living with chronic illness 35% off their orders for life. If you use my referral link, you’ll Up to 31% off + free dopp kit on first order over $40. Everyone else will receive 20% off their orders. I do earn a small commission from purchases made through the link, and that support helps sustain the podcast and the work I do to amplify disability-centered conversations. Use this Referral Link.

📜 Full Transcript

Mandi: Welcome to Beyond Disability Liberation Love. I'm Mandi, your Queer Christian Disabled host.

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Mandi: In episode one, Beyond Emergence, we talked about transformation as becoming more of who you already are, not becoming someone entirely different, not fixing yourself, not becoming more productive or more acceptable, but becoming more aligned. Then in Beyond the Brain, Dr. Robb Kelly helped us explore healing through recovery, trauma and rewiring patterns.

Today we're talking about something transformation often demands - surrender. And surrender sounds beautiful until you realize it often involves grief, it involves endings and uncertainty. And sometimes it means letting go of things that once felt safe. Let's get into it.

Mandi: I love social media. I think it's a great tool for staying connected, especially staying connected across time and distance with friends and family. But I think social media has made the idea of surrendering feel incredibly shallow. We hear things like release anything that doesn't make you happy, protect your peace, cut off bad vibes. And while boundaries matter, real surrender is deeper than curating comfort. Sometimes what we release once helped us to survive. This could be a relationship theology, a coping mechanism, a community, and even an identity. And this is where I want to get personal.

One of the hardest forms of surrender I've experienced was letting go of theology I had been deeply indoctrinated with for years. For so long I existed in faith spaces that taught me there was only one acceptable version of holiness. And the more I became myself, the more distance grew between me and the community I deeply loved. And that grief was real. There was one friendship that deeply impacted me. After many years, many ups and downs, I told someone in my life about my same sex relationship and they told me they were unsure about where they stood on same sex relationships. Because of that uncertainty, they wanted to take what I describe as a lukewarm approach to our friendship. I told them honestly that I didn't feel emotionally safe in that dynamic.

How could I feel safe with someone who was uncertain about the legitimacy of my love?

I'll never forget their response.

They said they didn't feel safe being friends with me anymore because I wasn't willing to accept their arrangement. That moment felt deeply gaslighting. And leaving that friendship was painful. It wasn't empowering, and it wasn't glamorous. I felt a lot of grief.

Mandi: Surrender sometimes means releasing people you genuinely love. When staying connected requires self betrayal. I refuse to betray the love I share with my wife just to make someone else comfortable. Surrender can hurt, but it also can bring you closer to yourself.

One of the biggest things I'm actively surrendering right now is people pleasing. And this one runs deep. As a disabled woman, I learned very early how to not be difficult. Don't ask for too much, don't inconvenience people, be grateful, smile over, explain your needs, shrink your frustration. And people pleasing can look like kindness on the outside. But often it's rooted in fear. Fear of rejection, fear of being too much, fear of disappointing people.

Recently I had a moment that exposed how deeply this fear still lives in me. A friend told me they have my back if I need help. And then they said something that genuinely moved me. They said, I don't want our friendship to feel transactional. I don't expect anything in return. This explicit show of kindness and love made me cry because I realized how often I move through relationships feeling like I need to earn care, like I need to repay. Kindness, like support always comes with strings attached. This friend probably has no idea how healing their words were. These words exposed how deeply people pleasing has shaped my relationships. Surrendering people pleasing means learning that love doesn't always require performance. And it's something that I'm still learning.

Mandi: Here's another hard truth. Not everyone likes your transformation. Sometimes people benefited from your masks. Sometimes people benefited from your silence, from your over functioning, from your lack of boundaries, and from the version of you that always said yes. And when you start becoming more authentic, relationships can be disrupted. Some people call boundaries selfish. Some people call honesty disrespect. Some people call your growth abandonment. Sometimes people only love the version of you that was useful to them. That realization hurts, and transformation often includes grieving those relationships.

As a queer Christian, I think about surrender differently because faith language has often been weaponized, especially words like repentance. People hear this word and think shame. But repentance simply means turning, realigning, changing behaviors that pull us away from who God created us to be. I've been thinking about redemption. Redemption isn't about becoming someone else. It's not about erasing identity. It's not about pretending parts of you don't exist. Redemption is about Reclaiming. It's about cleansing. Removing the shame, fear, and harmful patterns that create barriers between us and God. The things that create barriers between us and ourselves and between us and others. Redemption gives clarity and removes what distorts. It reveals what was always sacred. And I know there are many people, especially members of the LGBTQ community, who have turned away from faith entirely because they've been deeply harmed by. By people in religious spaces. And I get it. Many people were taught that surrendering to God means losing yourself or suppressing your identity, abandoning your queerness. That it meant shrinking yourself to fit someone else's interpretation of holiness.

Mandi: That is not the God I know. That is not the Jesus I follow. Surrender in Christ is not about legalism. It is not about religion for religion's sake. It is not about becoming less of yourself. True surrender is incredibly freeing. It allows you to honor who God created you to be. It allows you to believe in God's goodness. It allows you to know that you deserve God's blessings. And it allows you to understand that your love is not something to be ashamed of. It calls you to become love, to love yourself deeply and to love others. Well, that feels far more aligned with Christ than performance based religion ever did. I think about Jesus in Gethsemane. Not my will, but yours. That was surrender, and it was painful. But surrender created space for resurrection. And Jesus returned still carrying wounds. Wholeness did not erase scars. And that truth resonates with my disability theology.

Transformation can feel beautiful. When we talk about butterflies, but nobody talks enough about the chrysalis, the waiting, the isolation, the uncertainty, the shedding. Sometimes transformation feels like your life is being stripped down. Relationships, beliefs, dreams, and even identity shift.

Maybe you wonder, am I starting over?

Who even am I?

Sometimes starting over is sacred and that shedding is necessary. Sometimes God removes what no longer fits so we can become who we were always meant to be. And even when it hurts, that doesn't mean it's wrong.

Mandi: If you're in a season of surrender right now, I want you to know this. You are not failing. You are not broken. You may simply be shedding what no longer aligns. And yes, it may hurt, but that doesn't mean transformation isn't happening. Keep becoming, keep healing. Keep choosing authenticity. Keep trusting yourself and trust God. Remember, transformation isn't about becoming someone else. It's about becoming more fully yourself. And sometimes surrender is the doorway that that gets you there.

Mandi: Before I go, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for continuing to show up for these conversations. Thank you for listening, sharing episodes and sending messages. This podcast grows into something deeply meaningful because of you. Your support truly means more than you know.

And speaking of exciting things happening in this community, a brand new Mandy Mail is going out this evening at 7pm Eastern. Mandi subscribers will get sneak peeks, behind the scenes updates, and early access to everything I'm building. If you've been thinking about signing up, make sure you sign up before tonight's message goes out. You're going to want to be on this list because my newest sticker bundle is almost here. It's called Don't Hide the Pride and is designed for anyone who wants to celebrate Disability Pride, LGBTQ Pride, and allyship in a fun, bold way.

Subscribers of Mandi Mail and members of my Beyond Beautiful Collective Facebook group will get first access to purchase the physical sticker sheet starting tomorrow, Monday, May 18th. Then on memorial Monday, May 25th, the digital sticker pack will be available to the public.

Mandi: If you want early access and sneak peeks, make sure you sign up for Mandi Mail today and join the Beyond Beautiful Collective on Facebook. All links will be in the show notes. I cannot wait to share this launch with you. Until next time, remember, Disability Liberation Love are always Beyond Beautiful.

💌 Stay Connected

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