My circle this post comes with a little warning:
This story includes addiction, sexual assault, and suicide attempts in the home. Please take care of your nervous system. You are welcome to pause, skip, or come back when you feel resourced.
let’s get to it.
I have shared pieces of my story in fragments over the years.
Little glimpses.
A sentence here,
a truth drop there.
But I have never told it like this.
Not for shock.
Not for pity.
For truth.
For remembering.
For the women who have lived through things they have never said out loud,
and still found a way to keep breathing.
I was raised by a single mother.
She loved me deeply, and she hurt me deeply. Both can be true.
My mom struggled with mental health for most of her life. Professionals used a lot of labels over the years. Schizophrenia. Dissociative identity disorder. Bipolar. CPTSD. Manic depression. I am not here to argue diagnoses. I am here to tell you what it felt like to be a child inside the reality those labels tried to describe.
If I am honest, what I believe now is that she was a tormented soul caught in cycles of trauma and fear. Unfairly. Because life did not meet her with tenderness. It met her with trauma and an attempt at survival.
My mother has passed away now. I am not sharing this to expose her.
I am sharing it because the truth of my upbringing shaped my entire nervous system,
my entire life, and the woman I have become.
I grew up on fight or flight. Not as a concept. As an operating system.
My mom attempted suicide many times, and I was the one who would find her. Over and over, I would try to save her. And if you have never lived that, it is hard to explain the kind of fear it creates.
It is not just fear of loss.
It is fear of the next hour.
Fear of what version of reality you are about to walk into.
Fear that home is not a home.
It is a landmine.
We moved more times than I can count.
New shelters,
new apartments,
new schools,
new friends.
I became the new girl so many times that eventually I stopped trying to attach.
And honestly, the moving was not even the worst part.
The worst part was the not knowing.
Not knowing what my life would look like in an hour.
Not knowing what version of my mother I would get.
Not knowing if things were about to explode, or disappear,
or go silent in a way that made the silence feel dangerous too.
So I adapted.
I learned how to read energy before I learned how to feel safe in my own body. I learned how to be capable. Useful. Fine.
But I did not learn how to be held.
Then I got older, and I numbed.
At first it looked like drinking with friends, trying to belong,
trying to feel normal.
Then it became drugs.
Then it became heroin.
I want to say this clearly, because I know how loaded the word is. Addiction is not a moral failure. It is often a desperate attempt to stop feeling what your body was never given the tools to process. For me, it was the closest thing to silence I could find.
And so I lost myself at seventeen.
For a couple years, I lived like I was already dead.
Then one day something in me decided, it is this or the grave.
I had the final remaining dollars I owned, and I used them to rent a room so I could detox cold turkey.
I thought I had enough time to ride it out with the money I had.
I did not.
I nearly died in that room.
Alone.
With my body convulsing and screaming for relief.
Then there was a knock on the door. They told me I had to pay more or I had to leave.
I did not have more.
And the man in the room next to mine must have heard through the paper thin motel walls because a moment later, at my most vulnerable, he came and offered what looked like kindness.
He said I could stay with him for the night.
That night, he raped me.
That was the final straw.
I walked across town, about twelve kilometers, while withdrawal tore through me so violently it felt like my bones were being pulled out of my body. Asking myself how i got here, how my life actually looked like this.
I remember the cold.
I remember shaking.
I remember feeling like I was not even in my body, like I was moving through the world as a ghost.
I collapsed on my mother’s back porch.
And I told her I needed help.
I want you to understand something.
That porch was not my comeback story….yet.
That porch was just the bottom. Rock Bottom.
That moment was me realizing that if I do not choose life now, there will not be a later.
And this is where I am going to pause Part One, because what happened next deserves its own space.
Because the next chapter was not glamorous. It was not instant. It was not linear.
But it was the beginning of my power.
Because that night I made a vow. A vow so quiet nobody clapped for it. A vow that looked like survival.
It was the moment I stopped negotiating with death.
In Part Two, I will tell you what that vow was, and how I crawled back from the land of the dead.
With love,
Marly Grace
Recovery wasn’t a”glow-up” it was a thousand small choices to stay alive until staying alive felt normal again.
