Silence Was My First Survival Skill

I spent my life hiding where I came from. Here’s what happened when I stopped.

I cried reading most of this while my son played downstairs (you can hear his sweet voice in the background of the recording). This is what the work looks like sometimes—stepping away from joy to face the heavy thing. To write the hard story. To set yourself free.

Today, I stood at the kitchen counter, waiting for my tea to steep, sobbing.

It was early—those sacred morning hours when the house is quiet and soft and still belongs only to me. Light spilled in blue through the window, and I was drudging through The Body Keeps the Score, reading about trauma in war veterans, skimming past the more gruesome details because my nervous system, especially in the mornings, is too porous for violence.

It wasn’t the trauma that undid me. It was what came after.

The author was describing how, in the late seventies, before PTSD was even a formal diagnosis, an increasing number of Vietnam vets were seeking psychiatric help. But there weren’t enough doctors to see them. So they were placed on waitlists and sent back into the world, still shattered, still suffering, asked to manage their lives with no tools or support. They went home and brutalized themselves and their families. The trauma kept cycling.

So the author created a group, a holding tank of sorts, just to give them somewhere to put their pain and their rage. He started with a circle of former Marines. The first man to speak said, “I don’t want to talk about the war.” And so, they didn’t. Not at first. They sat together in heavy silence. Until one man, after thirty minutes of air thick with the unsaid, opened up about his helicopter crash in the Vietnam jungle.

And that was it. The dam broke.

One by one, the others began to speak—urgently, vividly, as if the words had been waiting in their throats for years (because they had). They talked about the things they’d seen, the things they’d done. They returned the next week, and the one after that. They came because, for the first time, they weren’t alone. The stories they had once buried in shame and silence and fear became bridges. The room held their grief and didn’t look away.

That’s what collapsed me right there at the kitchen counter, face in my hands, sobbing over a mug of steaming English Breakfast. It wasn’t the violence or the grief, but the recognition. There’s something that happens in the body when you’re finally understood, when the thing you’ve carried alone for so long, living inside you as fragments, as disjointed flashes of terror and emptiness, is finally seen. Finally held. Finally met with understanding.

When your shame begins to shift, not because the story has changed, but because now, someone else has witnessed it.

They found resonance. They found relief. And God, I knew that feeling.

This is why I do what I do. Why I keep writing the hard things. Why I continue to share the stories that once lived as secrets. The stories about growing up in a meth lab. About my mother being in and out of prison for the first nine years of my life. About how the cops kicked down our door when I was three and dragged her out of bed while I was still tucked in beside her, blinking, confused, terrified.

About my dad, wide-eyed and strung out on meth for weeks at a time (and I do mean, weeks), twitchy and wild, then crashing so hard he’d fall asleep standing up, mid-step, like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly cut. He was all we had because Mom was locked up again, this time for crawling through a stranger’s window in broad daylight, trying to rob them, a shotgun aimed squarely at her chest.

I was scared. All the time. The kind of scared that keeps you up at night, trembling, staring into the shadows, choking on ghosts. I’d lock myself in the bathroom, clutching a piece of PVC pipe, just so I could feel safe enough to close my eyes.

I’ve spent my whole life carrying these stories alone. Tightly packed and buried so deep inside me they started to feel like fiction. I was terrified that if I told the truth, someone would finally see me. Not the polished version. Not the good girl who got good grades, who could pass as normal. But the raw, broken, too-much and never-enough girl who never knew safety. Who never got to be a kid.

And then what?

If they saw her, not only would I have to face the past, everything I’d been hiding and running from, but then, I’d no longer belong. I’d be discarded. Rejected. Shamed. I thought I’d lose the few things I’d managed to build—friendships, a sliver of stability, a little life outside the disaster of my home.

So I lied.

I lied about where my mother was. Traveling, I’d say, or visiting her sister, her brother, whoever. I lied about my father and what he did for work. I lied about our home and the mountain of stolen junk that filled every room, floor to ceiling. About how empty our cupboards were. About how hungry I often was. How fucking scared I was.

I tried to blend in with the kids who had juice boxes and lunches made with care. I wore the same clothes year after year, my pants too short, my shoes too tight. I got free lunch and the judgey stares that came with it. But at least they didn’t know the full truth.

At least they didn’t know everything.

Even in my twenties, after clawing my way through college, making the Dean’s List, graduating without a safety net and thousands of dollars in student loan debt (that I’m still paying off), I lied.

I got a job at Atlantic Records, the dream job. A coveted desk on the second floor with a bright orange swivel chair and a laminated badge, a fast-paced life in the music industry that looked so shiny on the outside. And it was. I was good at it. I was charming, competent, tireless. I could write a press pitch, walk a red carpet, and hold my own in a room full of men twice my age.

But I was also holding my breath.

Because still, my mother would come up. And what could I say? That she was back in jail? That she got arrested (again) while I happened to be visiting from college? The cops came to the door with flashlights and tight voices and put handcuffs around her wrists.

I was twenty years old, but in that moment, I was a child again. Crying. Screaming. Begging them not to take her. Begging her to stay. She yelled, “Don’t worry! They can’t keep me,” over her shoulder. But they did.

She missed my college graduation. So I didn’t go. She missed me landing my dream job. Missed the tour of my first real office, the click of my shiny gold heels in elevators, the thud of ambition pulsing through my veins. And even though I got there, against all odds, I felt like a fraud (still do). Like someone was going to find out any minute that I came from chaos. That my parents were addicts. That I’d grown up in rooms full of rot and rage and loss.

I couldn’t risk being exposed and people seeing where I came from. What if I lost everything? I thought maybe I’d even lose my job because surely someone who comes from such a shitshow doesn’t deserve to work at such and important company.

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And I loved my parents. God, I loved them.

Which made the lying harder. Pretending they didn’t exist. Shifting conversations, changing subjects, telling stories that were all surface. I did it to protect myself. But I hated it. I hated pretending that they weren’t mine, that I didn’t come from the mess. Because the truth was, I did. And I loved them anyway.

It wasn’t until I met the man who would become my husband that I started to tell the truth.

We’d been dating for a while, and we were walking through a quiet forest of tall pines in Grass Valley, California. There was snow in patches where the sun hadn’t touched. We were both wearing thrifted coats we bought in the Haight—his too big, mine wool and wine-colored and grazing my ankles. The air was sharp and clean. We were talking about childhood, memory, the past.

I told him a little about mine, enough to feel the first flicker of panic rise, and he looked at me and said, “Why don’t you write about it?”

“About what?” I said.

“This. Your life. Everything.”

“Why would anyone want to read about that?”

“Because a piece of it is in all of us,” he said.

I didn’t believe him at first. Who would want to see the world I’d worked so hard to hide?

It took me three years to even begin. But when I finally did, when I finally sat down and wrote the first chapter of what would later become my memoir, I felt something shift. Like I’d cracked a window in a room I didn’t know I was suffocating in. Like air had returned.

And now, nearly a decade later, I’m finally releasing it into the world. One chapter at a time. Each piece, a letting go. A breaking of the silence. Each word, an exhale I didn’t know I’d been holding.

And the response has not been shame or exile or loss—the severing I thought it would be. It’s been a welcoming and an acceptance, just like the vets.

Resonance. Relief. Recognition.

People writing to me to say, “This feels like my story.” People finding themselves in my words. People beginning to write their own hard truths because they saw mine and thought, maybe I can, too.

That’s the thing that gets me. That’s the thing that cracks me open every single time. That telling my story is helping people write theirs.

This is the real power of this work. The way truth-telling becomes contagious, the way resonance makes room for release.

And even after all this time, I still cry when I write. Not always out of grief, though there’s plenty of that. But often from relief. From the way it feels to finally speak what’s been locked in my body for decades. I cried three times just writing this piece because I’m finally letting it move. Letting it breathe.

That’s the thing about trauma. It stays tucked in the body until you give it permission to speak. To shake. To rise. And writing, at least for me, is the doorway. But I don’t just mean journaling. I mean writing while staying anchored in your body, even as the story threatens to pull you under. It’s not easy. It took me years to figure out how to write my truth without dissociating, without abandoning myself mid-sentence.

That’s why I created the Fear to Flow Framework, not just as a guide, but as a lifeline. It’s a practice I built for myself first. A way to write the hard things without collapsing. A way to stay with myself while doing it. And now, I offer it to others in hopes that they can also be freed from the stories that haunt them.

Because this isn’t just about my story anymore. It’s about yours, too.

It’s about the story that won’t leave you alone. The one you think about when the house is quiet and the baby’s asleep, the one you carry like a secret weight, the one that causes you to rage or run or hide from the people you love. Maybe it’s the thing that scares you most. Maybe you’ve told yourself you’re not ready. That it’ll hurt too much. That you’re not a “real” writer. That it’s too late.

But it’s not.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that you don’t have to be fearless to write your story. You just have to be willing to feel. To stay. To take one breath and one sentence at a time.

And you don’t have to do it alone.

This work, this sacred, soul-rattling work, is why I’m here. Why I keep showing up, even when the voice in my head says, shut up, stay small. I hear that voice, but I don’t obey it anymore.

I let the tears come. I let the truth come. I let the light in, in hopes that it helps others do the same. Because healing doesn’t happen in our heads. It happens in the body. In the shaking hands that keep writing anyway. In the tight chest that softens, just a little, with every sentence. In the breath you didn’t realize you were holding until the moment you finally let it go.

That’s what this work is. A return and a remembering. A way back into the body you’ve spent years trying to escape.

And maybe, just maybe, a way home.

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If you want to learn more about the memoir I’m serializing here, read this.