Why did I write this?

I didn’t write this memoir because I thought my life needed documenting.
I wrote it because pretending it hadn’t shaped me anymore was starting to feel like another way of disappearing.

For a long time, I learned how to survive by editing myself. I learned which parts were acceptable, which ones needed softening, and which ones were better left unsaid. I learned how to sound “fine” even when I wasn’t. How to keep moving. How to function.

Eventually, that stopped working.

This book exists because silence was costing me more than honesty ever could.

I didn’t want to write a redemption story. I didn’t want to package grief, addiction, or survival into something inspirational or instructive. Life didn’t move that way, and neither did my healing. There were pauses. Relapses. Long stretches where nothing resolved neatly. There were moments of clarity and moments of regression. There were choices I’m not proud of and versions of myself I had to stop running from.

I wrote this to tell the truth about those spaces, the ones that sit between breaking and becoming. The nights that don’t look dramatic but feel unbearable. The kind of survival that doesn’t announce itself while you’re living it.

This memoir isn’t about fixing the past.
It’s about telling the truth about it, without performance, without polish, and without pretending the damage disappeared just because I learned how to live alongside it.

I wrote this for anyone who has ever felt split between who they were and who they’re trying to become. For those who have learned how to function while quietly unraveling. For readers who don’t need answers as much as they need recognition.

This book won’t tell you how to heal.
It won’t offer a checklist or a clean ending.

What it offers instead is honesty, the kind that sits with discomfort, makes room for contradiction, and allows things to remain unresolved.

I wrote this because some stories don’t ask to be told loudly.
They just ask to be told truthfully.