Faith, Recovery and Poetry, A Veteran's Guide to Healing Out Loud pt 2

Marie Slider Henriksen stands at a crossroads of hardship and hope: a former U.S. Army medic who marched through trauma, addiction and identity upheaval, and emerged on the other side committed to expression, healing and purpose. In her military service, she saw the grit of life at its edge—aid given in helpless moments, what‑it‑cost moments of watching others suffer, and what it costs a medic to carry all that weight inward. In podcasts and interviews she recounts this service not as a badge only, but as a prism through which she later refracted her own woundedness. BabyBoomer.org+2BabyBoomer.org+2 Her early years framed this trajectory: foster‑care, instability, addiction (alcohol, drugs and food), physical and emotional pain. It's from that place she first turned to poetry—not as a hobby, but as a lifeline. “There is always hope in the fight,” she says. Amazon Music Her writing isn’t smooth or decorative—it’s raw, intimate, sometimes stark. She gives voice to the fissures: the cord of memory that tugs, the body that remembers what the mind would rather forget, the quiet flames of survival in places where light seemed only a rumor. The brand “SliderBabe” becomes her studio and her sanctuary: where poetry meets photograph, where remembrance meets reclamation. A typical poem might open in a landscape—wind‑blown dunes, mountains at dusk, hollowed interiors—and step into the event of memory, the tremor of loss or the swell of choosing to live. Her photographs echo the same aesthetic: not just images of places but images of passage—old roads, freezing rivers, sunset cliffs, the retreat of daylight and the forging of shadows. The visual and the verbal converse. One example: in the podcast “#99 – More Me Than I Used To Be,” Marie lays bare how she has dug beneath the façade of recovery to find a “me” she didn’t know, amid the wreckage of what she was told she should be. Amazon Music She speaks of setting boundaries—the first time in her life she claimed: This is mine. My body, my voice. And then she claimed the page, the camera lens, the microphone. Advocacy threads through it all: her creative voice is tethered to mission. Veteran suicide awareness. Peer support. Faith, too—not always easy faith, but faith that bends toward healing, toward community, toward art as an offering not just for self but for others. She appears on veteran‑oriented podcasts (“Interview 125 – An Army Veteran’s Journey of Trauma, Recovery & Finding Her Voice”) and opens the door for listeners to sit in uncomfortable truth and emerge changed. BabyBoomer.org In sum: Marie’s portrait is one of transformation. She does not pretend the past didn’t happen; she invites it in, asks it to speak, and then she writes it into beauty and into purpose. Her poems are not tidy—they’re reclamations of life, memory, body, faith. Her photographs are not just décor—they are visual hymns to survival and presence. SliderBabe is the meeting place of all those elements, and Marie is the shepherd of that space: the one who once carried the load, now carries the message that healing takes voice and voice can take many forms.