"...best way I can describe it is like a whole ocean full of red static electricity and my consciousness is like this little black pea in the ocean and I was just trying to hold onto that sanity -- my Self...who I was..."

"...I'd made something in class and they turned around and said 'I don't know why you're doing art because you'll never be any good at it' and this completely floored me because I thought this adult that was in a position of being a teacher—knew everything about life..."

"...the unfortunate side of having an abandonment wound that started pretty much at birth is that you learn to Self abandon—I began losing myself in my parents from a very very early age. Becoming whoever they needed to me to be, whoever they wanted me to be so that I would get breadcrumbs..."

"...in 2015, when I left, it was a very abusive situation, the lawyer knew it was abusive —so much so that he told me to not put my address on the documents so that whenever my ex husband signed them he wouldn't see my new address. A few weeks after I got moved & settled, I get a text message from my ex saying 'I know where you're at'..."

"...I wanted to be safe, I wanted to survive, I wanted to breathe, I wanted to understand & feel my laughter, I wanted to experience my voice, and so in my mind the safest thing at 5 years old was to a boy..."

"...it's like being in a room with a thousand people except nobody leaves and more just keep coming in, and that's how many I'm seeing all the time—everyday/everywhere I go I see them..."

"...I'm going to figure a way to never ever let that happen again, that was not the person I wanted to be—in fact, I as an acupuncturist know what I was doing was toxic to body..."

"...I really did see my life flash before my eyes & I thought 'this is it, this is it— the end' but I heard a voice say 'not now—not now' and it just happened so fast, the car was spinning, and I just felt like I was out of my body like viewing it as if I was someone else floating above this car..."

"...I've never been to the ER , I've never had anything like that happen to me before so I didn't really understand the magnitude of what was really happening, I just know that I was struggling to breathe..."

"...I found that he was someone in and out of prison and I continued to remain in that relationship even though he was always absent and when he was present he was abusive. Around the age of 26 years old—I ran from him while he was away but..he found me..."