And So It Begins.....

I used to think my life was a series of broken chapters - stories that didn’t connect, losses that didn’t make sense, wounds that never quite closed. I thought I was just surviving one thing after another. But standing here now, I see it differently. I wasn’t breaking. I was becoming. Every grief, every unraveling, every moment I thought I was lost was quietly shaping the woman I am today. This is not the story of what happened to me. This is the story of who I chose to become because of it.

I am ready to tell my story now. Not because the memories no longer ache, but because they no longer own me.

Healing did not erase what happened. It taught me how to hold it.

For years, I processed quietly. I searched. I studied. I prayed. I unraveled. I rebuilt. I learned to sit with grief instead of fighting it. I learned to forgive without forgetting. I learned that wholeness is not the absence of pain; It is the presence of compassion toward oneself.

I once believed healing meant reaching a finish line.

Now I know it means arriving home inside yourself.

And only from that place can a story be told without bitterness, without blame, without the need to convince or defend.

Only from that place can truth be offered gently.

I was born into my mother’s third loveless marriage in 1957. Yes, her third. And it would not be her last.

I did not arrive into a home filled with welcoming, warmth or safety or celebration. Instead, arrived into turmoil, abuse, complexity, resentment, and emotional distance. Love, as I would come to understand it later, was not the foundation of my beginning. Survival was.

I didn’t know that then, of course. Children never do. They simply adapt. They learn the temperature of a room. They learn how to read silence. They learn when to speak and when to disappear. They learn how to become who they need to be in order to belong. I became very good at that.

For a long time, I thought my story began with pain. Now I see it began with awareness.

With sensitivity. With the early understanding that life is not always gentle, but the soul can be.

I am not writing this to expose my mother or condemn my beginnings. I am writing this because many of us were born into circumstances we did not choose, and we spend much of our lives learning how to choose ourselves anyway.

This is not a story about blame. It is a story about becoming. I am ready to tell it now because I no longer need it to justify who I am. I no longer need it to explain my worth. I no longer need it to prove my resilience. I've healed from that need. I tell it now because I finally understand: My story is not about what was done to me.

It is about what I built from it.

I will be sharing my story as I live it into words, one chapter at a time, allowing this memoir to unfold the same way my healing has: slowly, honestly, and with grace. This is not just the telling of a life, but the honoring of it. My hope is that somewhere in these pages, someone standing in their own rubble will recognize themselves, and realize they are not broken beyond repair. That they are not lost. That they are not alone. If my story can offer even one heart hope, one soul courage, or one life the belief that becoming is still possible, then every chapter will have been worth writing.

I look forward to the journey.