Content note: 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.
My circle,
Part One ended on my mother’s porch. That was my bottom. And I want to say it again, because it matters.
That porch was not my comeback.
It was the moment I realized I had one choice left.
Choose life, or disappear.
And that night, I made a vow.
Not a poetic vow. Not a cute quote.
A survival vow.
I will not die here.
I will not disappear.
I will not let this be the end of my story.
Then I did the next right thing.
And the next.
And the next.
I wish I could tell you the heavens opened and everything became easy.
It did not.
Healing did not arrive as a lightning strike.
It started as a crawl.
I got on welfare.
Within a week and a half, I got a job.
When I got a couple paycheques, I got off welfare and put down first and last on an apartment.
I remember that deposit like it was sacred.
Not because it was glamorous, but because it was mine.
It was stability I created with my own two hands.
Here is what nobody talks about.
When you crawl out of a pit like that, the world does not hand you a medal.
It hands you bills, triggers, flashbacks, and a nervous system that still expects catastrophe
even when the room is quiet.
So when I say I rebuilt my life, I do not mean I fixed everything.
I mean I kept choosing the next right thing even when my body was still in fight or flight.
And slowly, something began to change.
I started to trust myself.
Not because I felt confident, but because I proved to myself, again and again, that I would not abandon me anymore.
Eventually I left that job and started my own business.
From the outside, it might look like a straight line.
She got clean.
She got a job.
She built a life.
But inside, it was a spiral.
Because healing is not linear when your childhood trained your body to brace for impact.
Healing is learning to feel safe in peace.
Healing is learning that steadiness is not boredom.
It is protection.
Healing is learning to receive without flinching.
And even in those early days, freshly detoxed, meeting with social workers, I had a vision.
I knew I would use my pain to help others become empowered.
Because I did not have someone to look at and say, she has been there and she made it out.
I did not have a roadmap.
I did not have a mirror that proved life after the underworld was possible.
So I decided I would become that mirror.
Not as a savior.
As proof.
I wanted women to never be in the positions I found myself in.
I wanted women to have tools before life forced their hand.
Tools for nervous system safety.
Tools for boundaries.
Tools for discernment.
Tools for remembering their worth before they try to numb it away.
And as I grew, I realized something that became the deepest truth of my life.
My trauma did not just break things.
It forged things.
It forged my discernment.
It forged my boundaries.
It made me allergic to superficiality.
It gave me the ability to see what is real underneath what is performed.
And it carved devotion into me.
Devotion to truth.
Devotion to freedom.
Devotion to helping women come home to themselves.
Not because life is perfect.
Because I know what happens when you do not come home.
So here is the culmination.
The point of this story is not, look how bad it was.
The point is, I transmuted it.
I took the darkness that tried to end me, and I used it as fire.
Not to become hardened.
To become clear.
To become steady.
To become powerful.
If you are reading this right now and something in you is whispering, I am too far gone, I need you to hear me.
You are not too far gone.
You are not broken beyond repair.
You are not disqualified from a beautiful life.
You are not your lowest moment.
You are not what happened to you.
You are what you choose next.
And if something in you is whispering, I need help, please hear this too.
Needing help is not weakness.
Needing help is wisdom.
It is the beginning of the comeback.
Because I used to think power meant doing it alone.
Now I know power is letting yourself be held long enough to heal.
So this is my vow, and this is why I am here.
I will keep telling the truth.
I will keep building spaces where women can come home to their bodies.
I will keep turning pain into purpose without romanticizing what it cost.
I will keep choosing the spiral, the remembering, over the numbness.
Because I have been to the underworld.
And I came back with my life in my hands.
My past isn’t my shame. It’s my training.
And I’m done apologizing for the fire that forged me.
With love,
Marly Grace
If you need support right now and you are in Canada, you can call or text 988 for suicide crisis support, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you are in immediate danger or need urgent medical support, call 911. Youth can also reach Kids Help Phone anytime by calling 1 800 668 6868 or texting CONNECT to 686868.
