Before You Read This

Before you read this, understand something.

You are free to interpret these pages however you want. Maybe you will think I am looking for pity. Maybe you will think I opened old wounds for attention. Maybe you will think vulnerability sells books. Maybe you will wonder if there is something I expect in return for taking the parts of my childhood I spent years trying to bury and placing them in your hands.

Think whatever you need to think.

Take whatever version of me you create in your mind and run with it. Your perception of me belongs to you.

I cannot control it.

And I no longer want to.

I did not write these pages to convince anyone that I suffered enough. I did not write them to compete with another person’s trauma.

There are children who survived horrors completely different from mine.

There are people carrying childhoods so heavy they still cannot speak about them. There are adults who cannot remember entire years.

There are people who remember everything. There are those who were beaten. Those who were neglected. Those who were humiliated. Those who were touched in ways no child should ever understand. Those who were abandoned. Those who were made into parents before they were old enough to understand what childhood was supposed to feel like.

Those who became the breadwinner. The mediator. The babysitter. The emotional punching bag. The disappointment. The family joke. The secret keeper. The one everybody borrowed from. The one everybody blamed. The child expected to carry grown people while nobody noticed she was drowning. This is for you.

For the child who learned to cry without making noise.

For the one who stood in a bathroom staring at their reflection and wondered what was so wrong with them.

For the one who became funny because being funny kept people from asking questions. For the one who became quiet because speaking always made things worse.

For the one who became angry because anger felt safer than admitting how badly they wanted to be held.

For the one who became useful because usefulness was the closest thing they ever received to love.

For the child who brought good grades home and still somehow was not enough. For the child who brought bad grades home and knew what was waiting.

For the child who was bullied at school and feared going home even more.

For the child whose family knew what was happening and chose tradition, pride, silence, or convenience over protection.

For the child who grew into an adult with anxiety before they even knew what anxiety was called.

For the one who learned to read facial expressions before learning multiplication.

For the one who hears a change in someone’s voice and immediately assumes they have done something wrong.

For the one who apologizes before knowing what they are apologizing for.

For the one who still believes love can disappear the moment they become inconvenient.

For the person who became everyone’s strong one and secretly resents that nobody ever asked if they wanted the job.

For the person who sends money home. Fixes the problem. Takes the call. Pays the bill. Keeps the secret. Breaks their back. And somehow still gets called selfish the first time they say no. For those who were used. Mocked. Bullied. Hit. Ignored. Compared. Controlled. Silenced. Shamed.

For those who spent nights crying into pillows and woke up pretending nothing happened.

For those who survived depression before they had language for it.

For those who carried anxiety like a second heartbeat.

For those who became adults and realized that some of the things they were told were “normal” were never normal at all.

These pages are for you.

I opened a wound I worked very hard to close. Not because I enjoy bleeding. Not because I want anyone staring at the scar.

But because somewhere there may be someone sitting alone believing that what happened to them made them weak, strange, damaged, difficult, or impossible to love.

I wanted that person to see someone standing on the other side. Not perfectly healed. Not untouched. Not pretending the past disappeared. Just standing.

I sit here now as an author. People see the books. The characters. The covers. The imagination. The worlds. What they do not always see is where some of that imagination was born. Before there were fictional kingdoms, there were places in my mind I escaped to. Before I wrote monsters, I knew what fear felt like. Before I wrote women surviving impossible things, I spent years trying to understand the girl who survived mine.

My life was not always beautiful.

Parts of it were hell.

And I refuse to decorate that word just because it makes people uncomfortable. But hell did not get the final sentence.

I did.

That does not mean everything healed.

It does not mean every memory stopped hurting. It does not mean forgiveness arrived.

It does not mean I woke up one morning completely free from everything that happened before. It means I am here.

Writing. Creating. Loving. Building. Becoming.

And maybe that is enough. So no—

you do not have to pity me. You do not have to admire me.

You do not have to understand every decision I made while surviving things you did not experience.

You do not even have to like me.

But if you recognize yourself anywhere inside these pages, please know this:

I see you.

Not because our stories are identical.

They are not.

Not because my suffering was greater than yours. Pain does not need rankings.

I see you because there is a particular loneliness in surviving childhood and then spending adulthood trying to convince yourself that you are finally safe.

And if you know that loneliness, then these words belong partly to you. Take whatever you need from them.

Leave whatever you don’t. Cry.

Get angry. Close the book.

Come back later. Underline something. Hate something.

Heal from something. Remember something.

But never let anyone tell you that what happened to you was insignificant simply because someone else had it worse.

A wound does not become painless because another person bled more. And survival does not require permission.

This is for every child who needed someone to choose them. For every adult still learning how to choose themselves.

And for every person who looked at the life they came from and made one quiet, terrifying promise:

It will not continue through me.

I cannot rewrite my childhood.

I cannot go back and protect the girl I was. But I can give her a voice now.

And perhaps, somewhere between these pages, she will reach another frightened child who grew up too soon and whisper:

You survived long enough to become the person you once needed.

That is why I opened the wound. Not for pity.

Not for applause. Not for permission.

For proof.