What Silence Cost Me...

Others think it began the day I walked out. Neither is true. It began long before anyone ever called me defendant, inmate, advocate, or survivor. Before I knew words like trauma, sexual abuse, or post-traumatic stress, I knew fear. I knew confusion. I knew what it felt like to carry secrets too heavy for a child to understand. Children aren't born believing they should stay silent. Silence is taught. It grows in homes where fear is louder than safety, where shame is placed on the child instead of where it belongs. That became my first lesson. I learned how to smile while hurting, how to pretend everything was normal when nothing inside felt normal. As I grew older, people judged my behavior, few looked beneath the surface to ask what had happened. I didn't start life with rebellion. I started with survival, carrying what I couldn't name. Looking back, I see how those early wounds echoed through my relationships, my struggles, and eventually the path that led me into the into the criminal legal system. For years, I thought those chapters proved I had failed. Today, I understand different.
 

When Survival Became a Way of Living. 
As I moved through adolescence and adulthood, the effects of those early violations didn't disappear. They shaped how I moved. How I trusted, how I didn't trust. How I sometimes searched for escape instead of healing. Addiction, destructive patterns, choices made in pain, not in freedom. For a long time, I thought survival meant pushing forward, no matter the cost. But the cost kept adding up, quietly, in ways people don't see unless they've lived it. Even when I tried to start fresh, the past echoed forward. Relationships carried cracks. Decisions were made from a place of trying to outrun memories that never really left. Looking back, I see that survival wasn't a single moment. It was a series of small, exhausting adaptations, none of which should have been mine to carry alone. And then, there's the part where silence started to break.

For years, I believed silence was safety. But silence was also loneliness. It kept me separate from the very help I needed. Speaking, even in small ways, felt dangerous. But staying quiet was costing me more.

Eventually, speaking didn't come all at once. It came in fragments. Telling one truth to one safe person. Saying out loud, things I'd only ever thought. Each time I spoke, even briefly, I noticed something shift. The world didn't end. I wasn't punished for naming what was real. And slowly, that made space for something like voice. Not perfect speech, not clean or polished, but mine. I began to understand that speaking didn't mean erasing pain. It meant refusing to let silence be the only option. And with that came the gradual reclaiming of self.

That voice eventually reached further than I imagined. I shared my work in spaces that center survivors. Advocates and mentors like Dr. Jamila T. Davis reminded me that rebuilding is possible. Work that helped me see my voice as something steady.