Born in the dark and lived in the dark, it's not surprising I was an angry child. That anger didn’t go away as I grew up – it followed me, shaped me, spilled into every corner of my adult life. For a long time, I didn’t understand why. I just knew I was always fighting something.
It wasn’t a diagnosis known to me, but it was a diagnosis that eventually changed me. I didn’t have the answers in my forties. What shifted things was something my mother said – something simple, offhand, maybe even well-meaning:
“If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
That hit me. Not because it was wise, but because it made me see how little had ever been done about the anger I carried. My parents never addressed it. They let me grow up with it, let it harden into a part of me. But in that moment, I understood – while it was their failure not to help me deal with it, it was now my responsibility to change.
All those years, I had been stumbling through the dark, with no light and no guide. And now, I know: the blame doesn’t lie with me. It never did. It lies with the ones who let me fail – who watched me fall again and again and said nothing. My parents allowed me to grow up in secrecy, to carry a burden I didn’t have the words or tools to understand.
I was angry at my situation. I had been trying to navigate a disability I didn’t even know I had, living in the dark, in secrecy. It's hard enough to be a child. It's even harder to be a child with something unspoken, unsupported and unexplained. And that silence – on their part – became a prison. With no-one taking responsible or being accountable for what I was made to live, I am still in prison, but it's been reduced to a low-category one. Telling my story has reduced the sentence.
I still don’t know how I made it this far. But I did. And this is the story of how.
