Things We Don't Talk About: A Journey Through Shame, Transformation, And Finding Identity

This collection of poems is not fiction. It is memory, survival, and reclamation. These poems were written over decades of living through abandonment, violence, indoctrination, being silenced, and the long, lonely work of learning I am allowed to exist. They are the fragments of a life spent trying to make sense of other people's actions but taking responsibility for them. In writing this I have learned I was never at fault and the world looks different when you look at it from the outside. Nothing here is written for sympathy. Everything here is written for truth. If you see yourself in these pages, you are not alone. If you don't see yourself, I hope you see someone you love more clearly, and I hope you take the time to give them space and try to understand them. This book is not about what was done to me. It is about what I chose to become anyway.