(I started this on my birthday in June of this year and of course, have taken my time being ready to launch this a couple of months later)Today I turn 35 and today seemed as good of a time as any to start this. This being a blog that I desire to see grow into a resource, a place of reflection, and a starting point for other adults who are just starting their journey towards reconciling the childhoods that wounded them. I, myself have been on a journey over the last ten years trying to find peace with my broken and wounded childhood. It’s taken an incredible amount of work and emotional labor to be the person I am today, and the work while difficult, has been worth it in the long run for me.

Life, as each of us who have faced difficult childhoods can share, just patently isn’t fair or easy. We were dealt an unfair hand and expected to know how to play them correctly at a tender and young age. Robbed of our youth and forced to grow up way too early, just to survive in this world.

Allow me to share with you a small glimpse into who I am. I hope you feel at home here and find this to be a safe space. We all deserve spaces that feel safe after what we have faced.

I was abused physically, emotionally, and psychologically my entire childhood. My abuser was predominately my mother and even calling her my mother just now was awful. I just no longer want to give her any titles befitting of women who actually love their babies and protect them. I’ve spent a lifetime over-achieving, breaking myself into countless pieces chasing perfectionism, and reducing myself all in the hopes she would see me and love me. To the outside world that has dwelled in the same spaces as I have as an adult, all they see is a driven, ambitious, goal-oriented, never take “no” young woman absolutely bent on success no matter how hard she has to work for it. My coping and masking prevented me for years from getting truly close to other human beings. It shaped every friendship that came and went. It even became tantamount to the “personality” I allowed the world to see. All in an effort to be seen and valued by her… My twenties were bereft of legitimate love from the opposite sex. I sought love from emotionally unavailable and tragically damaged men. A pattern I found that happens to nearly every young woman who has been abused in their childhood-we spent a lifetime begging our abusers to love us, it’s only natural we would date someone we have to jump through hoops for. Festooning my early twenties I bounced from friendship to friendship, woefully unable to establish roots with relationships. I’ve learned that this too is a learned habit I picked up from my birth giver. Her narcissism has undone nearly every friendship she’s had an an adult, I grew up thinking it was normal to not keep friends for life. Thankfully, and I truly do mean thankfully (Thank you, God), I met the right young women in my mid-twenties. The ones who, as they put it, saw the diamond in the rough. They knew with the right love and care, my best facets and features would emerge.

I feel like I truly started living in my 30’s. I experienced a tremendous trauma a couple of months before I turned 30. The damaged person I had been with for nearly six years and was slated to marry blew my world up. In the aftermath of the explosion I sat surrounded by the ashes of what remained of my life. I had to start over and somehow I saw God use that inexplicably painful season to grow me into who I am today. I was given the ticket I had always needed to stop accepting abuse from anyone in my life and to start over, a new me. Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, I came out of that season of hurt a stronger woman. I have steadfastly pursued healing and addressing my childhood trauma with an unwavering fervor ever since. It has not been easy and I still am finding things that have to be addressed head on and healed, but I am getting stronger by the day. I wish to see others find the same peace and find the strength to do the hard but noble work of addressing their wounded childhoods in the pursuit of a healed adulthood.

Welcome friends, Let’s heal together.