When I was a child, my life seemed perfectly fine from the outside. I was a shy child, but highly intelligent, good at school, playing and creating all day long by myself.
But this was only a piece of my fractured identity. A mimic I had to built and become, as a way where there was no way leading in safety. I lived through sexual and emotional abuse as a child, through years of dissociation and illness, through chronic fatigue that carried my teenage body into near stillness. I rebuilt myself more than once.
But what marked me most was not the trauma itself — it was the silence around it.
As a young mother, I witnessed what no parent should ever see: my own children experiencing what I had once endured — different circumstances, many others involved, yet the same at its core. This is where most stories end, or break, or collapse.
But ours didn’t.
The deepest wound was not the act of violence. It was the secondary trauma — the disbelief, the pressure to stay silent, the way truth becomes dangerous when others are invested in denying it. This part is almost never spoken about, yet it shapes survivors more than anything else.
I learned that healing does not begin when pain ends. It begins when someone truly sees you — when your experience is finally recognized and held in a way your system can trust. When that presence is missing, you must become it for yourself.


