There’s a version of my life I used to present to the world.
I had a degree. A house. A good job.
I ticked all the boxes that were meant to mean “you’re doing well.”
But behind closed doors, I was drowning.
Years of drug and alcohol use masked, managed, hidden in plain sight were the only thing keeping a lid on what was rising in me.
But it wasn’t just the alcohol. Or the drugs.
There was the self-harm no one saw.
The way I punished myself with food either by starving or stuffing, controlling or collapsing.
The way I picked at my skin. The way I tried to disappear inside my body.
The shame ran so deep it became a daily ritual. A quiet self-destruction that felt like control.
And beneath all of it the trauma I had spent a lifetime trying to forget.
The abuse.
The moments that should never happen to a child.
The things I never told anyone.
I had buried them. I’d told myself they didn’t matter anymore. That I was fine. That it was over.
But my body remembered.
And no amount of alcohol, food, or pretending could keep it down forever.
Then came the night I almost lost my husband.
I found him moments from death.
And in that moment, something inside me cracked for good.
It wasn’t just heartbreak. It was a rupture that pulled every buried truth to the surface.
I looked at my children and I saw it: the cycle. The pain repeating.
And I knew this lie I was living, it wasn’t just mine anymore.
It was leaking into them.
That was the moment it got real.
Not the moment I went on retreat.
Not the day I sat with a medicine.
But the moment I saw, with absolute clarity, that there was no going back.
This wasn’t a breakdown.
This was a reckoning.
This was the fire that burns everything that is not yours to carry.
And this was the beginning not of healing in the way I once imagined it,
but of becoming someone I had never allowed myself to be.
The unraveling didn’t look sacred. It didn’t look graceful.
It looked like crying in the kitchen. Shaking in the car.
It looked like confronting everything I’d spent years running from.
This Substack isn’t a timeline of healing.
It’s not a collection of insights.
It’s a space where I speak from the places I never planned to say out loud.
The places where the real work begins.
I’ll be sharing a short series of writings over the next few weeks letters, really.
They’re not polished. They’re not pretty. But they’re mine.
And they’re true.
This is the beginning.
Not of the path I chose,
but the one that chose me when I had nowhere left to hide.
Thanks for being here.
We go from here, one truth at a time.
