A kind reader reached out to me.

I received a kind email from someone who read See You Later, after purchasing it at my last book signing in Fortville. They enjoyed the book and as everyone has said, it was a hard read. It was hard to read about all of the pain I was dealt via my abusive childhood, only to then face the heartbreaking loss of the man who taught me how to love. Imagine living it. It was not easy.

If I ever start talking about my past, don’t mistake it for my still living there.

This isn’t small talk-it’s an excavation of dysfunction.

A descent into trauma within a childhood where love was not given and survival meant swallowing words and emotions.

To speak these truths is to hand you a map of a traumatic mineshaft I once called home.

I write, so that it helps explain why I am who I am.

Narcissistic fathers don’t just demand silence-they weaponize it. They twist secrets into shackles, gaslight pain into calling you difficult and rewrite history until your own memories feel like confusion.

For years, I carried my homes rage like cacti I couldn’t touch, causing my parents to mistake my survival for complicity.

But now, when I speak, it’s not nostalgia. It’s a reckoning. A refusal to let my parents version of me fossilize in the past.

This is what trust looks like after betrayal- Letting someone see the scars she called oversensitivity. Letting everyone hear the stories my parents swore I was making up to outsiders.

I am letteing everyone meet the child in me who still flinches at slamming doors and the adult who’s learning to shout instead of shrink. These aren’t wounds to fix-they’re proof of a resilience that terrifies my parents. They mistake my strength for bitterness.

And if your instinct is to minimize, “It couldn’t have been that bad” or romanticize, “Your parents did their best”, pause. Survivors don’t risk vulnerability to be debated. We share to be seen-to turn our whispered truths into a chorus that drowns out the gaslighting.

To everyone entrusted with these stories: Honor them. They’re not gossip-they’re lifelines. And to those still choking on silence: Your voice is a revolution waiting to happen. Find your voice and free it!