I don't hide from any of it.

I was born premature, into trauma before I could even name it. I lost my mother at three, and the abuse that followed took every form: sexual, physical, verbal, emotional. I grew up believing it was normal, because it was the only thing I knew.

Nobody teaches you what real love looks like when love was never modeled. When it finally showed up, I didn't recognize it, so I pushed it away. I built walls and called them strength. I picked up narcissistic patterns because control was the only safety I'd ever known. That wasn't who I was. It was who I had to become to survive.

It took losing nearly everyone and everything to make me look at myself honestly. Healing was never handed to me. I built it the way I've built everything else: piece by piece, pattern by pattern, until I could separate the coping mechanisms that once kept a child alive from the person I actually wanted to become.

I don't hide from any of it. I speak openly about the abuse, about what it turned me into, and about the work it took to come back from both, because silence is what allowed it to happen in the first place.

That's the foundation under everything I've built since. Not despite it. Because of it.