Sobriety wasn’t a straight line for me.

I’ve had more Day Ones than I can count — and every relapse came with so much shame that I stayed stuck longer than I had to.

In this episode, I talk about the cycle no one posts about: relapse, self-hatred, and learning how to get back up faster.

This isn’t about being perfect.

It’s about not living in the fall.

Five years sober — because I stopped hating myself when I struggled.

My loneliness didn’t start in prison.

It didn’t start with drugs.

It didn’t start with alcohol.

It started when I was three years old.

In this episode, I talk about witnessing my mother being shot — and how that moment quietly programmed my nervous system to believe the world wasn’t safe.

When chaos is your normal, calm feels suspicious.

When intensity feels familiar, you mistake it for connection.

This isn’t about blame.

It’s about truth.

You can love someone and still acknowledge what shaped you.

If you grew up in chaos, there’s nothing wrong with you.

Your body did what it had to do to survive.

But survival is not the same thing as safety.

Healing is teaching your body what safety feels like for the first time

Lonely wasn’t something I felt for the first time in prison.

It was something I learned as a child.

In this episode of Unchained, I talk about growing up in chaos, my mom’s marriages, the boyfriend who did very bad things to me, and the kind of loneliness that happens when you’re a little girl carrying something too heavy to say out loud.

I talk about my dad’s suicide one year before I went to prison. The guilt. The anger. The silence.

And I talk about how trauma and grief didn’t create my self-destruction — they just gave it gasoline.

If you’ve ever felt lonely in a room full of people…

If chaos ever felt like love…

If being needed felt safer than being alone…

This one is for you.

Follow, share, and send it to someone who needs to hear that they are not broken beyond repair.

Healing is possible.