The Liberation of Telling Your Truth: Let’s Be Honest

Let’s Be Honest

They say writing is rewriting, but nobody prepared me for the kind of rewriting that happens to you when you decide to tell your story with unflinching honesty, especially when that honesty includes owning your own mess.

Writing “Where Light Bleeds Through” felt like performing open-heart surgery on myself, without anesthesia. Every chapter demanded I return to rooms in my memory I’d locked and bolted shut. Some days, I’d sit at my computer and my hands would literally shake as I typed. Other days, I’d cry so hard I couldn’t see the screen.

But the hardest part wasn’t revisiting what others had done to me. The hardest part was facing what I had done to myself.

The Excavation Process

There’s something terrifying about excavating your own pain for public consumption, but there’s something even more terrifying about excavating your own culpability. It’s one thing to process trauma privately in therapy or journal about others’ failures in the safety of your bedroom. It’s entirely another to lay bare not just your wounds, but your own role in creating some of them.

I had to revisit the marriage that nearly destroyed me, and acknowledge the dysfunction I brought to it. I had to examine the financial devastation that left me starting over at midlife, and own the poor choices that contributed to it. I had to look at the crushing weight of feeling abandoned by people I thought would never leave, and recognize how my own patterns had sometimes pushed them away.

The brutal truth is that many of my deepest wounds were self-inflicted. My people-pleasing addiction. My inability to set boundaries. My tendency to choose familiar chaos over unfamiliar peace. My pattern of ignoring red flags because they felt like home. These weren’t things that happened to me, these were things I did to me, over and over again.

I had to examine the choices I wasn’t proud of, the times I acted out of desperation rather than dignity, the moments when my own brokenness created more brokenness. I had to own my part in the cycles that kept me stuck, the defense mechanisms that became offensive weapons, the survival strategies that eventually started destroying what I was trying to survive for.

The Mirror of Self-Reflection

Here’s what I discovered in that excavation process: the wounds others inflicted on me were real and valid, but some of my deepest pain came from the wounds I kept reopening myself. I was both victim and perpetrator in many of my stories, both the wounded and the wounder.

This realization was simultaneously devastating and liberating. Devastating because it meant I couldn’t blame everything on external circumstances. Liberating because it meant I had more power to change my story than I’d previously believed.

If I was part of the problem, I could also be part of the solution.

Reclaiming the Pen From Myself

For years, other people held the pen to my story. My ex-husband wrote chapters about what kind of woman I was. My parents authored sections about my worth. Critics penned passages about my failures.

But if I’m being completely honest, I was often my own worst editor. I was writing chapters of self-sabotage, paragraphs of self-destruction, and footnotes of self-defeat. I was the author of many limitations, the architect of my own barriers, the narrator who kept telling herself she wasn’t worthy of better.

Writing this book became an act of radical reclamation, not just from others, but from the dysfunctional parts of myself. With every paragraph, I was saying: “This is my story, and I get to tell it truthfully.” Not the version where I’m just a victim. Not the version where I’m entirely to blame. The whole, complex, messy truth where I’m both wounded and flawed, both survivor and someone who sometimes survived poorly.

The Liberation in Owning Your Part

Something miraculous happens when you stop protecting your image and start protecting your truth, including the uncomfortable truths about your own dysfunction. The energy you’ve been spending on managing others’ perceptions and defending your victim status gets freed up for more important work, like actually taking responsibility, growing, and changing the patterns that created chaos in the first place.

I discovered that my most shameful moments, including the ones that were entirely my fault, often contained my greatest wisdom. The mistakes I wanted to hide became the very stories that helped other people recognize their own patterns. The self-destructive choices I regretted most became the foundation for helping others avoid similar pitfalls.

My addiction to toxic relationships taught me what healthy love actually looks like. My financial disasters taught me stewardship. My people-pleasing compulsion taught me the value of boundaries. My pattern of ignoring gut instincts taught me to trust my inner voice.

Your Story Includes Your Mistakes

If there’s one thing I want readers to understand, it’s this: you are not defined by what happened to you or by what you did in response to what happened to you. You’re defined by how you choose to grow from all of it.

The crushing seasons of life, whether they come from others’ actions or our own dysfunction, they’re not your ending. They can be your beginning if you let them teach you instead of just torment you. The pressure that feels like it’s destroying you might actually be refining something beautiful, something the world desperately needs.

Yes, I made mistakes. Yes, some of my pain was self-inflicted. Yes, I sometimes was my own worst enemy.

But those truths don’t disqualify my story, they complete it. Because healing isn’t just about recovering from what others did to us. It’s about recovering from what we did to ourselves and choosing to do better.

The Invitation

Maybe you’re carrying a story that includes your own failures alongside others’ betrayals. Maybe you’re in your own crushing season, wondering if you’ll survive what life has handed you, and what you’ve handed yourself. Maybe you’re in recovery, taking tentative steps toward not just healing from trauma, but changing the patterns that kept you trapped in it.

Wherever you are, know this: your story isn’t over, even the parts you’re ashamed of. The pen is in your hand. And the world needs to hear from people who’ve been both broken and breaking, both wounded and wounding, both victim and survivor, because that’s the full spectrum of human experience.

Your mistakes don’t disqualify your message. Often, they authenticate it.

The Courage to Be Completely Human

The real beauty isn’t in perfection or even in being purely victimized. It’s in the courage to be completely human, flawed, learning, growing, taking responsibility, and refusing to let either others’ failures or your own become your final chapter.

That’s where hope lives, not in sanitized success stories, but in the messy reality of people who’ve faced their own dysfunction, owned their part, and chosen transformation anyway. That’s where healing happens, and where ordinary stories of ordinary people owning their extraordinary capacity for growth become testimonies to what’s possible when we stop hiding and start healing.

Your crushing doesn’t have to be your ending, whether it came from others’ actions or your own. It can be your beginning.

“Where Light Bleeds Through” chronicles my journey from abuse, devastating loss, and self-destructive patterns to purposeful living, offering hope to anyone walking through their own season of transformation and self-discovery.