There are things that happened that nobody saw. Things said about me that were never true, and things done to me that were never said at all. Four decades of living inside all of it — not past it, not healed, not recovered. Honest.

This is not a story of survival with a neat ending. This is the middle of it. The part nobody writes about because it isn’t pretty yet.

These are my words. They always were.

— from my interior