Forward

A letter to our parents:

As an adult, do you seek to associate with, be intimate with, or otherwise coexist with the bullies that tormented you as a child?
I know I don’t. Others I’ve shared with and listened to have also expressed that they don’t either.
For us—the artificially orphaned, the black sheep, the different and othered—we don’t seek out our childhood bullies, our abusers, our trauma inducers.
We seek to get as far away from that as possible.

The parents who hit us, the parents who continually set us up for failure, the parents who failed to help us express and embrace the things that made us unique—those parents were the worst bullies and abusers.
Those were my bullies.

This isn’t a book about trauma, though I do share those experiences.
No, that would be depressing.