For me, survival mode has felt like living under the weight of an ever-growing, tangled mess. Every unsettling interaction compounded it. I couldn’t untangle it, and I couldn’t leave it alone. After decades of debilitating confusion, I’m finally recognizing patterns
How a Narrative Protects Predatory Behavior The Branding Becomes the Lens I am recognizing something in real time: the story about someone can matter more than what they actually say and do. When someone is characterized unfavorably by a person
Something does not become untrue because somebody more influential tells the story differently. I have spent a lot of my life attempting to reconcile the version of events that prevailed with my lived experience. Influence seems to determine which version
The Binary The archetypes seem to move through life inside a rigid binary: winners and losers, heroes and villains, right and wrong. In their accounting for outcomes, there seems a lacking awareness for the possibility of their own poor decisions,
I’ve been sitting with a word that has always troubled me, a state of “being” that feels out of reach: happiness. There seems to be so little capacity out there to make space for those of us whose life experiences
I’ve been reflecting on how, in my family—and unironically, in the family of the man I had children with—belonging was not rooted in mutual care, nuance, or individuality. It was rooted in alignment with the people who had decided, and
Letting Go Each day, I live with the ache that I may not see my children again. We may not have another real conversation or moment of closeness. That may be the outcome when children grow in a system that
My sons learned, by design, to have zero tolerance for their mother. Ordinary acts of parenting—direction, correction, consequences, even simple questions—were rejected and reframed as manipulation or control. I once read a message from their father telling them, “Disregard your mother.” And