Why I Hit Publish

October 13, 2025

Why did I hit publish?

I’m not totally sure.

It scared the shit out of me.

I felt exposed. Vulnerable.

Guilty—like I had betrayed him in terrible ways,

even though he had wounded me in unimaginable ones.

In the very early days,

as I began to process what happened,

emotions surged through me—

deep, sharp, physical waves that left me raw.

And as I bled, words came.

That’s where The Wolf and He Brought Poison to the Party were born.

At first, I kept them private.

The words felt too fragile to touch daylight.

I wasn’t ready for anyone to see them—

not yet.

It wasn’t until my trip to Belize that something shifted.

Maybe it was the distance, or the salt air,

or the sacred quiet inside the caves we swam through—

but I started to test the waters,

loosely naming what had happened to me.

Each word that surfaced made breathing a little easier.

I couldn’t keep it contained anymore.

I had to share—not all at once, but enough to breathe again.

I’ve spent much of my life being the good girl—

smiling for the sake of legacy,

holding my pain so others could stay comfortable.

For years, a part of me begged to be seen

while another part kept performing for approval.

This soul rupture was the same pattern,

but magnified a hundredfold.

I couldn’t do it again.

I couldn’t swallow my truth

or carry someone else’s shame

for the sake of their comfort.

I’d done that for my entire community.

And no matter how hard I tried,

I couldn’t do it anymore.

I needed to be true to me.

Even then, I still couldn’t bring myself to say the words

betrayed, deceived, manipulated, or abused out loud.

So I wrote. I researched. I cried.

I became the detective in a story I thought I already understood.

And with each revelation came understanding—

and a stabbing pain I had never known before.

And slowly, those specific words began to come.

By then, I had a small collection of pieces.

And in my need to stay afloat, I turned my energy outward—

drafting outlines, designing leadership projects,

building frameworks for reinvention and resilience.

But underneath all of it,

the real restoration was happening quietly—

in the late-night sentences no one saw,

where I was teaching myself how to hold my own broken pieces

without dropping myself again.

From there, the impulse grew—

the need to speak plainly,

to give language to rage, poisoned diamonds, and war.

So I began to share, publicly, on social media.

And as I did, I started to realize

that not everything I write is meant for everyone.

Some stories are too intimate,

too heavy or too deep with real people and shared histories—

especially when so many people know me.

And they know him.

So, I chose to have them live here.

Sometime mid-summer I got a reminder

that as a financial advisor, I had to disclose every outside pursuit.

So I took everything down—out of fear, out of duty.

But even before that, I’d unpublished my website more than once.

Deleted the link from my Facebook page.

Gone back and forth, caught between guilt and honesty,

between wanting to be seen

and wanting to stay invisible.

Yet, needing to be witnessed.

Still, the words kept coming.

And eventually, I realized I couldn’t breathe without them.

Writing wasn’t a project—it was air.

I had already begun calling the work Homecoming in my mind—

a return to myself,

to the woman who no longer needed permission to exist in her full story.

So I threw caution—and compliance—to the wind

and launched it for real.

That was the shift.

The moment I stopped waiting for permission

to bring my life into the light.

After that, everything opened.

Stories, essays, poetry—raw, necessary, alive.

Over time, they evolved:

from rupture to reflection, from ache to reclamation, from silence to voice.

But I also retraumatized myself by revisiting some of those moments.

Moment of Discovery was the hardest—

writing it felt like reliving the exact second my reality exploded.

I remember sobbing, gasping for air,

and then the quiet that follows devastation—

when you realize you’ve survived it again,

this time on your own terms.

I still cry when I read it.

Sometimes when all I do is think about the closing line.

Pressing “publish” became my way through.

The way I absorbed what had once shattered me.

A way to take back authorship of my story—

not to punish him,

but to preserve the parts of me that still believed in light.

And maybe—just maybe—

someone out there is finding solace in my words.

Or at least, in knowing they aren't alone

in whatever they have lived, too.

Now I see it clearly:

writing wasn’t just the bleeding—

it was the stitching.

Each word a golden thread.

Each story, a divine suture.

And Homecoming—the scar that reminds me I healed.