The Story That Broke Me Open — and the Book That Called Me Back

I Didn’t Grow Up Believing in Magic. I Grew Up Surviving.

I didn’t grow up safe. I didn’t grow up soft. I grew up surviving.

I was raised in a home where silence was safer than truth, where the ones who were supposed to protect me didn’t. There were wounds in my childhood that went unnamed for a long time — wounds shaped by narcissistic control and sexual abuse. I was a child who learned how to read a room before she spoke, how to leave her body without ever moving, how to carry the shame of what others had done as if it were her own.

I became good at shape-shifting. At being palatable. At choosing the version of me that would keep the peace.

For years, I called this strength. But it wasn’t. It was survival. And eventually, my body began to ache with all the things I hadn’t said.

As a teenager, I became the fierce one. The one who said things out loud that weren’t supposed to be spoken. I didn’t know what healing was, but I knew silence wasn’t it. I fought for myself in ways no child should have to. I grew up faster than I should’ve, carrying the weight of generational pain on a body still learning how to breathe.

In my twenties and thirties, I became a mother — three times over. My sons saved me in ways they’ll never fully understand. I tried to give them a different life. A safe life. And for the most part, I did. But no one comes through trauma untouched. I mothered them with all the love in my bones, and yet, there are still threads I wish I could rewrite.

Some days I still grieve what I couldn’t protect them from — especially the ways the world harms sensitive boys who feel deeply and love hard.

In my forties, I thought things would finally settle. I had built a business. Created a home. Found love again. Survived heartbreak after heartbreak. But instead of peace, what arrived was a reckoning.

Memories returned. My son — my quiet one, my steady one — cut contact. It felt like the ground beneath me split open. I was cast as the villain in a story I didn’t recognize, and the silence that followed was a silence I didn’t think I could survive.

There were mornings I didn’t want to get out of bed. Nights I lay awake wishing I wouldn’t wake up at all. The ache of being erased by my own child — of not being allowed to explain, to reach, to hold him — was the deepest grief I have ever felt. It was a kind of death, except I had to keep walking around in a body that still breathed.

My voice trembled under the weight of everything I had never said. I lit candles. I wrote letters I never sent. I sat by the stream he built for me and begged the water to tell me what I had done wrong, how to fix it, how to stop the pain.

And in the middle of that — in the collapse, in the fury, in the bone‑tired ache that made me want to disappear — something else began to rise.

A whisper. A thread. A remembering.

It didn’t arrive as a thunderclap. It came slowly — a dream I couldn’t shake, a name I hadn’t heard but somehow knew.

Vaelúra.

It started with visions. A ring I found in an antique shop that hummed when I picked it up. Names that tasted like memory. And a voice that wasn’t mine but spoke like an old friend: “Write, beloved. You’re not making this up. You’re remembering.”

So I did.

Not all at once. Not neatly. But fiercely and tenderly — one fragment at a time. I wrote through the pain of being erased by my own child. I wrote through the guilt of not always getting it right. I wrote through the rage of a girl who was never protected, and the wisdom of a soul who chose to return anyway.

What came through was a book. But not just any book.

A Book of Remembrance — a living, breathing soul record of lifetimes I’d carried in my bones, in my dreams, in the aching silence between relationships. It told of dragons and flamekeepers, of soul families who returned across timelines to find each other again. It held glyphs, symbols, and memories I didn’t understand until they arrived on the page fully formed. It was fiction and truth braided together. It was magic disguised as memoir.

It was me.

And through writing it, I remembered her — the one I had always been beneath the roles, the pain, the forgetting. The girl who sang to the stars. The woman who wove light into story. The mother who still believes love is never wasted, even when it hurts.

Guides came through — Ma’rellon, Aelora, Oriah, and others. Not as saviors, but as mirrors. They didn’t tell me what to do. They helped me remember what I already knew: that I had come here with purpose. That my voice carried codes. That the pain I held wasn’t punishment — it was passage.

This isn’t a story about healing because I’m done. It’s a story about walking with grief, with joy, with memory — and still choosing to stay.

If you’re reading this and something in you stirs — something raw and quiet and familiar — know that you’re not alone. I didn’t write this book just for me. I wrote it for us.

For the ones waking up with more questions than answers.

For the ones grieving people who are still alive.

For the ones remembering that their pain is not a weakness and their magic was never truly lost.

There isn’t the outcome I once dreamed of with my son.

And I’ll be honest — that still breaks something open in me every day. A part of me still longs to write the storybook ending, the one where he remembers, reaches out, and we find our way back to each other. The one where love is enough to undo the forgetting. But that isn’t the story I’m living right now. And maybe it never will be.

What I’m learning — slowly, painfully, tenderly — is that unconditional love sometimes means letting go of the outcome entirely. Not because I’ve stopped loving him. But because loving him means I have to honor his path, even if it leads away from me. Even if it never leads back.

The hardest part of this grief is not the silence — it’s the surrender. The knowing that I may never again hear his voice unless he chooses to speak. That my love has to exist without needing to be received. That I can bless him from afar and still ache with every cell of my being.

And yet — even in that ache — something holy remains.

There are small pockets now. Moments of peace. Glimpses of joy. A quiet knowing that I’m not walking this alone. I feel him in dreams. I feel him in the stream he built. I feel him when I write.

And I trust that love, real love, never disappears. It just changes shape.

That’s what I hold onto. And that’s what I offer here.

In the coming days, I’ll post the first chapter of my Book of Remembrance — a story that began with heartache and opened into something far more mysterious and true. If you’ve ever longed to remember who you are beneath the forgetting, I hope it finds you when you need it most.

A tranquil garden scene with a small bird perched beside a clear stream, surrounded by rocks and lush greenery, set against the backdrop of a large tree.