Resilience Has Always Been a Verb.
Part One: You Have Always Been My Why
This is the first in a five-part series about my why.
Apparently, vulnerability, authenticity, and courage in 2026 require a disclaimer. Here is mine. I am sharing the facts, not the files. The facts provide context for my work. The files contain names, private moments, and details that do not need to become public property for the truth to remain true.
This is not a trauma contest or a showcase of how fabulously I survived. Pain does not issue credentials.
I earned my professional education and training separately. Doing my own work saved my life.
Publishing this will have consequences beyond the page. People in my personal life will object to what I name out loud. Colleagues may draw conclusions about the professional from the history of the person. A client could choose to use something here against me. I have considered those possibilities.
Discernment asks what a disclosure serves; fear asks whether everyone will approve.
I owe the first question a serious answer.I cannot make the second a condition of speaking. My purpose is to make my why visible while keeping responsibility for this story where it belongs: with me. No client owes it comfort, recognition, or a story in return. Nor does surviving my life mean I understand yours. That understanding still has to be earned.
I am willing to be known without expecting to be understood by everyone.
This is a letter to the girl who built a backbone long before she had language for why she needed one.
To the Girl in the Panda Pajamas & Minnie Mouse Sunglasses,
You’re sitting on the step separating the raised formal dining room from the kitchen. It’s probably eleven in the morning. You’re approximately three years old. The outfit is everything. You know you’re cute, and you fully intend to demand that life acquiesce to your every wish.
Oh, babe. Life won’t.
But you survive.
For now, life is good. Two parents. One roof. A dog named Logan whom you insist on calling Shermo.
“Say Lo,” Mom says.
“Lo.”
“Say gan.”
“Gan.”
“Logan.”
“Shermo.”
She appears not to fully grasp the level of sass she gave birth to.
This is just the beginning.
At night, you escape your crib, find his bed, and climb in. You do not yet know how often dogs will comfort you when the world goes dark. How many tears they will lick up without asking you to justify a single one.
This is you, before.
Beforecancer, divorce, death, betrayal, grief, and a suicide attempt.
The Girl Who Comes After
You are wildly sensitive in a world that will not always be safe for that sensitivity. You learn to tell the truth just funny enough to protect your heart, but concretely enough that everyone knows what time it is.
Your mouth becomes your protection.
You name what everyone else appears willing to ignore: unfairness, adult hypocrisy, the considerable distance between Sunday’s sermon and Monday’s behavior.
They call it disrespect.
You disagree, but disagreement comes with limited negotiating power when you are a child. The adults control the house, write the rules, and determine whether truth counts as insight or insubordination.
Being right will land you in your room more than once.
You will blast music that would make the Catholic nun teaching your high school Spanish class faint directly into the arms of Jesus.
Then you become a grieving, angry teenager.
Your suffering is messy.
It is loud.
You beg for help until you are exhausted.
You told them. They declined to help and later had opinions about what happened next.
“I didn’t know” will be offered as though that check can actually be cashed.
For years, I understand everyone so thoroughly that
I tolerate almost everything.
I can explain their behavior all the way back to childhood while overlooking the child whose photograph I am holding.
But kneeling on thin pleather during Sunday Mass ought to require something of you the six days between services. Integrity. Compassion. Acceptance. Some restraint before passing judgment on a child in pain.
You cannot preach that value system, decline to live it, and require the fucking child to absorb the difference.
Sweetheart, you deserved so much more.
We have ingredients to work with: a wild mouth, a soft heart, sass,grit, and a value system I remain unwilling to abandon. A childhood best friend whose family makes room for one more.Adults who owe us more and vastly underestimate us.
A mother who deserves more time and the dream of doing something with ours.
Exceptionally good dogs.
People who show up.
Help we eventually learn to accept.
And the realization that life could be very fucking long if we never figure out how to cultivate peace.
The Woman Who Comes Back
I have eaten a lot of shit in therapy, healing what still lies ahead of you.
It takes time to become willing to do that work.
In high school, I engage my first therapist in what amounts to a staring contest. I have no interest in what I perceive to be a paid friend.
Later, with credit-card-funded therapy, we meet Darilyn.
We begin separating two questions:
What happened to you?
and
What are you going to do with what happened?
That second question gets expensive in more ways than one. I have to examine:
what I tolerate,
what I repeat,
and who I keep waiting for.
I have to take responsibility for my own behavior and stop volunteering for everyone else’s.
That includes my mouth. She has protected me. She has also done damage. Learning the difference becomes my responsibility.
But I will not dismiss the girl who spoke when silence would have made everyone else more comfortable. Could we pay her some fucking respect? She kept us alive.
You have always been my why.
And sweetheart, I eventually come back and save you.
Those ingredients become resilience through action.
We stay in therapy.
Leave familiar rooms.
Grieve people with a pulse, a working mind, and a valid checkbook.
We stop accepting the language of accountability in place of changed behavior.
I take responsibility for my future while acknowledging the cracks in the foundation I was given. I own what is mine.
I stop carrying what belongs to someone else.
I learn that understanding a person does not obligate me to remain available for what they do.
And, eventually, I learn to let a good day be good.
Resilience has always been a verb.
Long before “therapist” follows my name on an email signature, we build a life we once had no idea how to imagine.
You were my why before I walked into this profession.
But first, you get to be three.
The outfit is everything
&
The dog’s name is Shermo.
