“I wanted to feel accomplished and admired, like all the women I had looked up to as a young woman in Cosmopolitan and now on Instagram. I’d convinced myself convinced this was real life. If those women could have it all, so could I. I bought every image they sold me.”
“My mom asked, ‘Have you heard about the van life girl who is missing?’ I couldn’t let this story go. There were so many weird similarities between her travels and my own.”
“Her suspected murderer. The person of interest in her case. Abuser. The last person to see her alive. A fiancé or boyfriend is compassionate, loving, empathetic, and protective. He lost that title.”
“I woke up in the ICU after an overdose. ALL that was on my mind was, ‘How am I going to convince my wife to give me money to pick up more heroin?’ 3 hours after being discharged, I was meeting my dealer.”
“You would never guess that before my smiling family photo, I was berated for an outfit choice. That in the pictures of me on vacation or my birthday, I’m wearing sunglasses to hide my bruises.”
“Medications, injections, acupuncture, growth hormones, hot Chinese herbs, burning moxibustion sticks. No cold, raw, or processed foods and drinks. No products with parabens, fragrances, and BPA. I was mad at the world. Every second, another woman was discovering an ‘oopsie pregnancy,’ while I had done nothing short of Olympic-level aerial gymnastics to get pregnant—and it still didn’t matter.”
“It’s there when we’re cooking dinner while simultaneously singing nursery rhymes to the baby. It’s there when we’re packing lunches, putting the kids to bed, playing hide and seek and doing arts and crafts.”
“As children we are taught to respect our elders and be polite, but statistics report 90% of those who were sexually abused as a child knew their perpetrator.”
“You can be flawed and still be good at what you do. You can never finish your college degree and still achieve so much. You can still love yourself and not look like the image of perfection that only exists in your mind.”
“I remember picking him up out of his crib and just holding him with tears in my eyes.”
