The Stories We Actually Share
We live in a world that’s obsessed with 'the tea,' the perfect timeline, and the 30-second breakdown. But real life—especially the parts involving survival, healing, and the people who stand by us—is never that clean.
This is a space for the nuance we usually scroll past. I’m leaning into my perspective to challenge how we look at trauma—from our demand for 'proof' to the invisible role of the secondary survivor. We’re moving away from the need for perfect evidence and toward curiosity over assumptions and healing without a deadline.
Pull up a chair and let’s get into the messy, beautiful, and uncomfortable stuff together.
Why I Still Make Them Stand by the Front Door
The first sign I ever made for a first-day-of-school photo, and I misspelled kindergarten on it. That was ten years and two schools ago, and both kids still stand in the same spot outside our front door every August while I hold up a grade scribbled on printer paper. On what that same patch of concrete looks like when your son is a junior with a license.
The Example That Gave Her the Ick
I gave a room of professionals my best example of a manager checking in on someone well, and a woman told me it gave her the ick. Heads nodded. Another said if her husband talked to her that way, she'd find it condescending. Every line in that example was defensible, and together they did something I hadn't planned. Here's what I got wrong, and why the example failing was more useful than the example working.
What If Some Memories Aren't Gifts?
A sympathy card sat on our kitchen table for weeks, in the spot directly across from mine, and part of it said that memories are gifts our hearts receive to comfort us. I read that line a few hundred times before it turned into a question. Some of my memories aren't gifts, and some of what might be the gift is the part I don't have. A reflection on trauma and memory, on why the mercy and the cost came together, and on why the general comfort is almost always the wrong tool.
The People Who Were There Said the Least
My parents were in the house the night I was assaulted, and for years afterward they, along with the people closest to me, barely named it. They didn't leave. They stayed in my life. But the quiet started to feel like everyone had moved on while I was still stuck in it. On why the people who love us go silent after something hard, what that silence tends to mean, and how to read it.
What the Highlight Reel Leaves Out
People kept telling me they hoped I came back refreshed, and I was. The trip was amazing. I still came home to a week that hadn't waited for me, and to a question my husband asked near the end that I can't stop thinking about, at home and at work.
Everyone in That Room Was Having a Differet Week
At the first session of my Central Exchange series, I put my phone on Do Not Disturb before I walked in, so that nothing landing in the next hour would decide how I showed up. Then I asked thirty women to name one thing they were carrying, and realized every person in the room was having a different week. Here's what that changes about how we show up for the people across the table from us.