resilient shares your story of growing up with parents that were abusive, being placed in foster care, struggling with repeating their mistakes, and how you learned to heal. Why was this an important book for you to write?

Something I learned when I began to heal from all of the trauma I experienced growing up was that I needed to know that there wasn’t something wrong with me and that I wasn’t alone. Feeling alone and isolated stunts the healing process because it leads directly to feeling like there must be something wrong with us. That realization – that I wasn’t alone – truly kickstarted my healing journey. And the more I realized I wasn’t alone, the more I realized how important that knowledge was to everyone else as well, that it wasn’t just something I personally needed. I couldn’t think of a better way of helping the world to heal and become a better place so fewer people have experiences like mine, or a more meaningful way of showing appreciation for those who came before me baring their pasts, than to open up and share mine with the world. I wanted my book to find its way into the hands of others like me so they will feel less alone and more understood, and I wanted my book to find its way into the hands of those who don’t have shared experiences so they could have some level of understanding of what it’s like for survivors of these types of trauma. I also wanted to have something candid and open about what it was like going through the foster care system in hopes that my story could help to improve the system for other children.

I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?

There was a lot of my past that was difficult to write about, many times I had to step away and take a break. Different parts at different times were difficult, though not always for the same reasons. I found it extraordinarily difficult to open up about some of the destructive decisions I made because of lingering shame and embarrassment. At the same time, I struggled with writing about the sexual abuse by my mother’s drinking buddy and the assault by my boyfriend’s brothers because those events were some of the least healed parts of my past when I was drafting. Of course, writing about my sister nearly dying in the car accident we were in when I typically would have been sitting up front stirred up my feelings of having failed my sister that I had back then because I’d had to be my sister’s caretaker when we were little. I can’t say there was a single hardest thing to write about above all others, but different things for different reasons.

What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?

I wanted to share as objectively as possible what happened in my life and the impact it had on me emotionally. I wanted to remove the whole aspect of blame and simply expose the myriad, sometimes befuddling, ways in which trauma can manifest in a young child, as well as demonstrate how certain things, however well-meaning, can be destructive, such as having a child reperform something done to them. We can all only act on what we know, so my goal is to help increase what people know so that we can, as a whole, improve the way we act toward one another.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from your story?

I want readers to know that healing is possible. That no matter what happens to us, we have an amazing capacity to heal, as long as we’re willing to look inside and face those things we need to heal from, and that healing is going to be messy and that’s okay.

Author Links: GoodReads | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Instagram