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"Don't let the past steal your soul; we're all too precious to let that happen."

Some stories demand to be told—not because they're easy, but because they're necessary. This is where I excavate the truth from decades of silence, where survival becomes understanding, and where the messy, non-linear journey of healing unfolds in real time.

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What You'll Find Here

Raw Truth About Trauma Recovery
No sanitized narratives or clean linear healing stories. This is the slaughterhouse reality of processing childhood abuse—the jagged moments when carefully constructed walls come crashing down, and the miraculous acts of self-preservation that kept us alive.

The Neuroscience of Survival
How books literally rewired my brain to survive. How reading at 800 words per minute became a lifeline. How the same neural pathways that fire when we experience something also fire when we read about it—and how that saved a drowning child.

Literary Escapism as Medicine
From Dorothy's Yellow Brick Road to Jim Thorpe's victories, discover how inhabiting other stories becomes sophisticated psychological survival. The difference between healthy imagination and dissociative escape, and why some characters stay vivid decades later.

The Body Keeps Score
Even when the mind refuses to tally, our bodies remember. Preparing for my 11th surgery to repair the wounds of war, I'm learning that healing isn't gentle waves—it's collision, recognition, and the slow process of reclaiming what was stolen.

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Join the crew

Be part of a community of people who understand that the most profound truths often sit like boulders in our path, too massive to move, so we build elaborate detours around them. Until we don't.

If you've ever felt like you're living in someone else's narrative instead of your own, if you've used books as bridges between who you were and who you're becoming, if you understand that some wounds shape us not despite our strength but because of it—this is your story too.

Participate in the comments section, or support this work with a subscription. Your subscription doesn't just fund writing—it funds witness. It supports the radical act of refusing to let shame define the narrative. It helps create space where former escapist readers become creators, where the passive turns active, where observers become authors of their own stories.

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I won't promise you gentle healing or easy answers. I can't offer clean narratives or soft landings. But I can promise you this: every word here has been earned through survival, and together we're reclaiming our stories—one truth at a time.

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My story of redemption and healing, regarding the life impact of my physical, emotional and sexual abuse as a child and adolescent.

People

Survivor of severe childhood and adolescent physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Finally healing in my 7th decade, and hell bent on the preservation of democracy.