Learning to Speak After Silence

What happens when survival becomes a language—and healing becomes a voice.

I’m thirty-five, sitting here with a Lunchable, writing about silence.
It feels symbolic — coming back to something from childhood while finally learning how to speak as an adult.

My storytelling didn’t start with writing.
It started with images.

My grandma gave me my first camera when I was four.
A little plastic one with real rolls of film.
She’d print every picture I took — blurry, crooked, out of focus — and every visit we’d sit together as I told her what each photo meant.

That was my first language.
Stories without words.

I grew up quiet — not because I couldn’t talk, but because I didn’t know how to say what I felt.
Silence was survival in the environment I grew up in.
Silence was the rule.
Silence kept me safe.

School became the first place where speaking felt possible.
Asking questions.
Reading out loud.
Finishing summer reading logs like my life depended on it.

Books made home bearable.
They filled the spaces where my voice should’ve been.

I was a phonics kid in the 90s — fluent on the page, but not in people.
Communication came naturally.
Articulation didn’t.

No one ever considered the real impact of my childhood.
I moved 47 times before I turned twenty-five.
I attended four high schools in two years.

That kind of instability rewires the developing brain.
It teaches you to scan, not speak.
Observe, not ask.
Decode tone, not articulate thought.

I wasn’t slow.
I wasn’t stupid.
I was surviving an environment that never stayed still long enough for me to learn out loud.

Every time I adjusted, we moved.
Every time I caught up, the ground shifted.
Silence became the safest language I had.

Books were the only constant.

📸 Modeling, Motherhood, and Learning to Speak Back

From fifteen to twenty-five, I was modeling.
Photoshoots. Travel. Different photographers.
I modeled while raising kids.
I had a major shoot four months after my rainbow son was born.
He’s now the age I was when I had him.

Modeling taught me confidence — and exposed my silence.
I learned how to pose, how to perform, how to deliver.
But when a photographer crossed a line, I still froze.
Quiet.
Compliant.
Doing as told because it felt safer.

That’s what happens when silence becomes your first language.

Dropping out of high school wasn’t a failure.
It was survival.
The system failed me long before I ever failed it.

My GED was the right path.

I passed every test.

I missed the full score by two points the first time.

I went back after my second son was born.

College was the next step.

I knew my sons deserved more from me than instability.

Becoming a mother at seventeen forced me to confront how much silence had cost me.

I learned to become loud for my kids — because no one had done it for me.
From early learning to public school.
From doctors to therapists.
From 504 plans to IEP meetings.

I refused to let silence become their story.

✍🏻 Writing Stayed With Me Through All of It

Through the moves.
The modeling.
The motherhood.
The chaos.

I kept writing.

It started in seventh grade — then I paired my photos with poems.
Turning feelings into lines.
Turning silence into something I could understand.

When I went into therapy, I began by tracking my habits.
That’s when writing became consistent.
Since 2016, I’ve kept a journal.
Most days I write something — even if it’s small.
A brain dump.
A morning reset.
A few lines to clear my head before managing the weight of everything else.

Writing became the place I could organize myself when the rest of my life felt unstructured.

Poetry let me speak broken without being punished for it.
It helped me understand emotions before conversations ever did.

But emotion-fluency isn’t the same as life-fluency.
I misread people.
Trusted too easily.
Mistook charisma for safety.

Looking back now, I see it clearly:
I wasn’t broken.
I was mismatched with the environments I was in.

I needed safety before clarity.
I needed space before sound.

I’m still visual before everything else.
I see and hear things before words are ever spoken.
I read body language long before I process sentences.
I watch a room before I decide if it’s safe to speak.

I’ve survived on intuition for years.
My nervous system still moves faster than my brain can form words for my mouth to say.

Sometimes I pause too long.
Sometimes I talk too fast.
Sometimes I lose the point mid-sentence.

But I don’t call that broken anymore.
It’s just a nervous system relearning that voice doesn’t equal danger.

Writing is where my voice returns to me.
It slows my thoughts.
Softens the edges.
Gives me space to understand what I feel before I try to share it.

🖤 Why I’m Open Now

Because silence shaped too much of my life.
Because silence almost took my life more than once.
Because silence kept me small for too long.
Because unspoken things almost destroyed me.

Because I wanted to be a voice for the ones who can’t be one for themselves.
Because I know firsthand how hard it is to break the silence — and yes, it’s terrifying.
More terrifying than trying to make friends on a playground ever was.

Writing gave me a voice I fought to rebuild.
Honesty gave me room to breathe.
Speaking up gave me back the parts of me I thought were gone.

The Daughters of Violence Universe exists because of that silence.
It’s where I put everything I never had the language for.
Everything I once hid.
Everything I’m finally ready to say out loud.

We don’t find our voices once.
We rebuild them.
Sentence by sentence.
Story by story.
Until it feels safe to speak again.

🪞 A Question for You

When did you first realize your silence had a story?

✍🏻 AM — Grounded in raw. Real. Grit. Healing.