TRIGGER WARNING: This post mentions sexual abuse and may be triggering to some people. “Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs…In spite of which—or, rather, all the more because— here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here… Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I’d come to reclaim myself .” ~ Haruki Murakami “You don’t have any goals.” “I wondered why someone your age and with your qualifications hasn’t done more.” Easy statements to make for those who have not led my life. Twelve years of childhood sexual abuse, being silenced, struggling to stop it, people I trusted denying it had happened. Thirty-three long years of battling depression, failing, and constantly taking the easy way out by giving up on myself, my dreams, and my life. And yet I kept on moving on, pushing through the bouts of d
