I was born premature, into trauma before I could even name it. I lost my mother at three. The sexual abuse started after that. Then the physical. The verbal. The emotional. I grew up thinking 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 showed up, I didn't recognize it. 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 everything and everyone for me to actually look at myself. I didn't get handed healing. I did the work: piece by piece, pattern by pattern, until I could tell the difference between the coping mechanisms that kept a child alive and the person I actually wanted to be.
I don't hide from any of it. I talk about the abuse. I talk about what it turned me into. And I talk about what it took to come back from both. Because silence is what let it happen in the first place.
That's the foundation under everything I've built since. Not despite it. Because of it.