In this book, you will meet a little girl with big dreams who was bound and determined to do it all on her own. A little girl on a grown-up journey who found redemption, completion, and a new heart along the way.

At age 17, Tanya Simpson awoke in wreckage on the side of the road to the overwhelming reality that a car accident had stolen away both her first love and her identity. This book is the story of a forty-year journey of a broken girl searching for a new identity - first in music, then in ministry, then through a career in law and business - before finally arriving at the realization that identity does not revolve around what we do, whom we admire, or whom the rest of the world thinks we should be. Identity is so much more than all of those things.

In writing Up from the Water, Tanya came to understand that most of us tend to live our lives on the surface level, especially in a modern, Western culture that is dominated by social media. While we project a public facade of having it all together, most of us privately sojourn through life feeling hopelessly lost. Through weathering life's storms, we've been dismasted, our sails have been shredded, our rudders have been broken, we're taking on water, and we find ourselves adrift, tossed about at the mercy of wherever the currents and prevailing winds take us. It is only when we are willing and brave enough to cut the tether to our broken boats, jump overboard, and dive fully beneath the surface, leaving behind all of the lies that we've been told and the lies that we've told ourselves about ourselves, that we can emerge above the water and rise into the identity of who each of us is uniquely called to be.

This is the story of one woman's journey into and up from the water.