“We accept the love we think we deserve.” — Stephen Chbosky

There’s a little voice within me that’s been asking me to write. She’s been asking for the entirety of my twenties. As hard as I tried to ignore her, there was never really a choice. After years of pushing her down, she remained. Ever persistent.

I imagine her the way cartoons imagine conscience: a little angel perched on one shoulder. And we all know that angel comes with a counterpart — a little devil, red-faced, tempting smile, a complete mastermind who usually gets her way.

She’s more cunning than the angel because she’s the queen of momentary joy. A bar of chocolate. A fifth hour of Netflix. The little indulgences that are lovely in small doses and numbing the moment they take over.

Anything, really, that isn’t the blank page.

The angel knows the joy of the long game, which is much easier to set aside.

For now. Over and over and over again.

I realized that if I could live in the “day before” forever, I probably would. The day before the diet. The day before commitment. The day before things get hard. It feels good to save things for what my dad used to call “a greater later.”

But you can’t get rid of that voice that way.

Listen hard enough and you’ll find she’s resilient.

Eventually, I gave in. I felt bad for her — always reaching for my attention, always so consistently ignored.

Giving in to the angel meant confronting the devil. And confronting the devil meant facing the real consequences of listening to her for so long.

She didn’t want me to write. She convinced me I should be doing anything else.

For years, I let her win, waking up empty day after day and pretending I didn’t know why. The joy she offered was fleeting, and its aftermath talked me out of everything:

No one will care. You’re not worthy of saying this. Quit now.

The sneakiest part about this shoulder devil and shoulder angel is that neither of them exists. They’re fiction. Me, battling me.

It’s the most impossible match to referee and somehow the easiest to win, because whichever side wins, the prize still comes to you. What that prize looks like depends entirely on who won it.

The angel’s prize almost never arrives the same day. It’s usually late, often fragile — and priceless.

The devil’s prize comes instantly, the kind you trade tickets in for at the arcade: fun for a minute, then you’re bored, empty, and back at square one, still not having written a word.

So why do I keep listening to the part of me built to sabotage me?

Because I was taught to.

We all were, at some point, by someone. For me, it was the person I looked up to most: my mother. Her opinion was God to me. How would she have described me? How would she describe me now?

Growing up, the words I heard most were dramatic, vengeful, unloving, a liar.

I was an inhabitant of her world, not quite a citizen of it.

Kind words appeared when I behaved exactly as she wanted — which I did, most of the time. It was the moments I questioned her, the moments she felt insecure, the moments I needed support, that I became unworthy of kindness or love.

I always felt like a visitor, never a permanent resident of her life — constantly asking permission to stay, constantly throwing love at her to earn my keep.

That was the love I was taught, and so it was the love I accepted. For me, love became a tool that didn’t work — the tool I kept reaching for to try to fix my mom. Every day, the well of love in my heart ran dry, and somehow I kept finding ways to refill it for her.

I could always find love for her. I could rarely find any left over for me.

And it’s no accident that the voice telling me I had no story worth telling grew out of the same soil. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I saw the folly of it. I had to reconcile how I could still call myself a loving person after realizing I’d spent my life mistaking vanity, deceit, ego, and anger for love.

Could I untrain myself?

How would I ever get a piece of the real thing — the kind of love that would let me believe my own voice mattered?

It started with refusing to accept that old counterfeit anymore.

Looking back, I’d accepted it many times over, with many people, because I needed to become the mother I never had. I needed to relearn love from the ground up and learn how to receive something greater than what I’d known.

Learning to believe I was worth listening to turned out to be the same lesson.

None of that would have been possible without the teachers whose words, books, and lectures I surrounded myself with.

It started with Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. From there, I listened to Wayne Dyer’s audiobook 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace on repeat for years — every drive, every treadmill session, every time I cleaned the house.

They opened a gate, and through it I found Rebecca Campbell, Gabrielle Bernstein, Marianne Williamson, and Elizabeth Gilbert.

Thank you, all of you, for your bravery, your message of love, and for teaching me how to love, how to spread love, and how to finally accept the love I deserve — including the version of that love that sounds like:

Your story is allowed to take up space.

Just the other day, I was rereading one of my favorite books, Light Is the New Black by Rebecca Campbell.

In an early chapter, she describes her fascination with crystals and healing, and how she’d always been an empath — able to feel the pain of people around her without even knowing them.

I related hard.

I’ve often felt the burden of a big heart: the pull to help people, to fix them, the sense of watching situations unfold from somewhere just above the normal view of them.

It’s hard to explain, but it’s a lonely place to stand.

I rarely felt, growing up, like I had anyone who understood it. Everyone I knew seemed to have such ordinary families — nice families, good homes, a mom and a dad. And even when the parents weren’t together anymore, there was still visible love pouring into those lives.

I’d be lying if I said I never envied it.

I wished and prayed away the money, the house, the things. My bedtime prayers were really just one request, over and over:

To be loved.

I craved it so badly that I gave love to everyone and anyone. The more hurt someone was, the more available I made myself to love them.

I thought it was my purpose.

I didn’t yet know I was using that purpose wrong. I wasn’t put on this earth to love people who couldn’t love themselves and then end up buried ten feet under with them in their sorrow.

Campbell writes about spending much of her youth wishing “something” would happen to her so she’d have a channel — a reason to propel herself into her purpose.

Reading that, it hit me:

I’d been waiting for the same thing. Waiting for permission. For a big enough reason. For proof that my story was worth telling.

But I already had the life.

I already had lesson after lesson, life-shattering moment after life-shattering moment, from infancy to now.

The material was never the thing I was missing.

What I was missing was believing I was allowed to pick up the pen anyway — resistance and all, unfinished and unqualified, on the ordinary days as much as the extraordinary ones.

That’s what I want to say to anyone who feels this same pull and keeps waiting for a better moment to answer it:

There isn’t one coming.

The moment is whichever one you decide to use.

It finally hit me after years of moving through my life — feeling sorry for myself to no one’s listening ears, or feeling proud of myself and catching the judgment of people who assumed my positivity meant nothing had ever really broken me.

When I was sad, I was easy to avoid.

But when I was happy, pushing forward, people who didn’t know my story treated me like a peach that might bruise at a touch — not knowing that underneath that skin I was black and blue all over, doing my best to repair myself with whatever tools I had.

I’d read a book, listen to a tape, feel inspired for a moment, then crumble again.

But every crumble left behind new strength from whatever I’d just learned.

And slowly, slowly, I grew into a woman I’ve learned to love — and, just as slowly, into a woman who could finally trust her own voice enough to use it.

Coming out of hardship, trauma, the events that leave you feeling completely alone — and still managing to believe in something greater — that is strength.

For a long time, I thought acknowledging my pain was the same thing as healing it.

Sometimes I needed to talk about what happened to me. Sometimes I needed someone else to say, Yes, that was wrong. Sometimes I needed to be angry. Sometimes I needed to feel sorry for myself.

There was nothing shameful about any of that.

But eventually I realized there was another kind of resistance hiding inside my pain: the temptation to make what happened to me the final explanation for who I was.

My suffering was real.

My anger was justified.

But neither one could build the life I wanted.

And there was a strange comfort in staying there, because if everything wrong with my life could be traced back to what someone else had done to me, then I never had to face the terrifying question of what came next.

What was I going to do with it?

That question required something from me.

It required me to stop waiting for the people who hurt me to fix what they had broken. It required me to stop waiting for an apology to free me. It required me to accept that I could deserve compassion for what happened to me and still be responsible for what I chose to build afterward.

That distinction changed everything. I could honor the girl who had been hurt without asking her to run the rest of my life. I could grieve what I didn’t get without spending the rest of my life standing at the door waiting for someone to finally deliver it. I could love the people I had tried so desperately to save without climbing into the hole with them.

And maybe most importantly, I could stop confusing my wounds with my identity. Because pain can become familiar enough to feel like home.

And once it does, leaving can feel almost like betrayal. But healing asked me to leave anyway. Not because what happened didn’t matter. Because my life mattered too.

I still hear her some mornings. The devil, I mean. She still has good days. But I’ve learned that resistance showing up isn’t a sign I should stop.

It’s usually a sign I’m close to something true.

So if there’s a voice in you asking to be let out, in whatever form it takes — a page, a post, a story you’ve been carrying for years — I hope you’ll let her win today.

You don’t need a bigger reason than the one you already have.

You are allowed to take up space.

There is great love waiting for you on the other side of that resistance.

And it starts with believing you deserve to be heard.

I was fast asleep when I was jolted awake by a sharp slap across my face and the realization that every light in the room was on.

It was 4:00 a.m.

Mom was hovering above me, her face crimson red, her hand suspended in the air like she was ready to slap me again.

“What is Seth doing in our house?!” she screeched.

She was in a state. I was half asleep, my cheek throbbing, my eyes struggling to adjust to the bright lights.

Seth was my ex-boyfriend. At that particular moment, we were somewhere in the dance of “on again, off again.”

I knew he was in our house.

I also knew Mom didn’t know he was.

He had called me the night before asking if he could sleep over. He said his dad had “beat him up” and that he “needed a place to stay.”

Since we were out of town, I told him he could sleep in our guest room.

We had a side entrance with a stained-glass pig on the door that we called the “pig door.” I gave him the code and told him he could let himself in.

I asked him to call me before he went to bed. And I specifically told him not to have anyone over.

He agreed.

He called me before he went to sleep. And the next thing I knew, I was being slapped awake at four in the morning.

What I couldn’t understand was why Mom was this angry that Seth was at our house.

He had slept over plenty of times before. When I was away at boarding school, Mom would sometimes have him over without me there. They’d have lunch together. He’d clean the eavestroughs and help her with things around the house.

The only reason I hadn’t asked her permission this time was because Seth and I were technically in an “off” rather than an “on.”

But that didn’t mean I didn’t have empathy for him when he told me he needed somewhere safe to sleep.

I tried to calmly explain the situation to Mom.

I couldn’t get a word in.

“There are over fifty teenagers at the house! My Mini Cooper is missing from the garage! My liquor cabinet has been raided, and there are naked kids skinny-dipping in the hot tub!”

The party was bad. What happened afterward stayed with me much longer.

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When I was about fourteen, Mom took me with her to the happiest place on Earth: Disney World in Florida.

It was a trip I’ll never forget, but one I wish I could.

Happiness, as it turned out, wasn’t really on the menu.

On our first night,…

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Rarely are people willing to look directly at an abuser who shares the child’s blood—especially a parent. When they do, the excuses begin almost instantly.

One of the easiest excuses is a smiling photograph.

“But you were such a happy kid!” an uncomfortable family member might insist, armed with a single photograph of you at their house one summer, eating a Popsicle and smiling.

Ah, yes. Because abused children are expected to look like Oliver Twist: covered in soot, begging for scraps with a solemn, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

They cannot possibly live in middle-class homes. Or wealthy homes. They certainly cannot have parents who are respected, admired, or considered pillars of their communities.

But since beginning my own recovery, I have learned that many survivors of abusive childhoods and CSA did not turn into wizards at eleven. We did not bite poisoned apples and wake up when a prince kissed us. There was no Miss Honey waiting in the wings to recognize what was happening and carry us to safety.

Instead, we have albums filled with normal-looking photographs. We have families who appeared perfectly ordinary from the outside. We have smiling faces, birthday cakes, vacations, and school portraits.

And we have secrets we became exceptionally good at keeping, followed by adulthoods spent unpacking the consequences—estrangement, C-PTSD, and all the pain a smiling photograph could never capture.

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So instead, I looked for books. Mostly self-help books.

Wayne Dyer was one of the first teachers I found. At the time, he was offering a…

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I was twenty years old, living in a closet in Vancouver, Canada.

There was a boiler inside, barely enough room for a single bed—which I couldn’t yet afford—and no windows. I was working as a waitress at Earls, barely able to pay my phone bill and sleeping without a bed. Currently my roommates were letting…

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I stayed silent because I was loyal to the people harming me. I stayed silent because I had been trained to protect them. And I stayed silent because I was afraid that, if I finally told the truth, people would attack me for telling it.

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I had always been a good girl. When my friends started drinking, I proudly declined. While most teenagers were beginning to rebel against their parents, even the thought of telling my mom I hated her made me cringe.

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They need to be witnessed being good.

They become the most charitable woman in the room. The devoted mother. The self-sacrificing wife. The inspirational survi…

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That’s not his birthday. It’s the day he died.

I don’t know the date of the last day I saw him. I don’t remember the day I was told he was dead. I don’t know what I was doing the moment he took his last breath. Was I playing dress up? Watching TV?

I do know the story myself, and the country, were told about his death: it was a routine checkup.

I also know that Mom inherited millions after he died. Within a year, a statue of Dad and me was erected in a park named after him in Saskatoon. And it would be nearly two decades before I learned that the story I had been told about him—about his life, his illness and his death wasn’t the truth.

For most of my life I had Mom’s version of Dad’s story memorized like the back of my hand:

Dad had been sick for most of his life, but doctors misdiagnosed him with allergies and asthma. He wasn’t diagnosed with cystic fibrosis until he was thirty-nine years old, and he had a rare strain.

When he finally received the diagnosis, he was given less than a year to live.

According to Mom, Dad told the doctors he would still be alive ten years later—and that he would race them up the stairs when he saw them again.

Dad eventually received a heart-double-lung transplant at Stanford. Mom said she was the only woman who literally watched her husband give his heart away to another woman… she said she watched it being carried away in a Coleman cooler. A story I later learned was stolen from a different relative as Mom wasn’t around during the surgery.

Dad joked that he had left his heart in San Francisco.

I was born after his transplant, despite my parents being told that Dad had less than a two percent chance of fathering children. Mom publicly called me her “miracle baby.”

Her story continued from there.

She said our family lived in a van. She said she pawned her wedding ring. She said she travelled from state to state with my sick father, searching for work while my brothers and I travelled with them.

I had no memory of any of that.

What I remembered was our sprawling mansion in Old Las Palmas in Palm Springs, near Liberace’s home, followed by our ten-acre property in Saskatoon with an indoor pool and a go-kart track.

That version did not fit as neatly into the story Mom told publicly. Her entire pitch was “rags to riches,” and the harder the rags sounded, the more impressive the riches became.

Dad lived for eight years after his transplant.

Then he died.

Mom inherited Dad’s company, turned it into a multimillion-dollar business and built a public identity around what she had survived. She sat on the Harvard Women’s Leadership Board. She was recognized as one of the world’s top female entrepreneurs and was named Canada’s number-one businesswoman for three consecutive years.

The company’s supposed bankruptcy became another essential part of the story: the widowed mother who inherited nothing but debt and somehow built an empire.

But that claim was repeated far more often than it appeared to be verified.

Mom once told my sister, “Whatever you tell the press, they’ll print.”

She wasn’t wrong.

We lived in mansions. We drove in a Rolls-Royce.

And Dad became a memory.

He became the man we called Angel Dad. He became a passing monarch butterfly. He became a statue in a park. He became someone I thought about every October 17.

But he did not become someone I knew.

I didn’t know his favourite food. I didn’t know his favourite colour. I didn’t know what made him laugh when he wasn’t performing for a room. I didn’t know whether he was quiet in the morning or whether he sang along to the radio.

I knew his illness.

I knew Mom’s survival story.

I knew the version of him that appeared in speeches and books.

But I didn’t know my dad.

I remember his leathery skin, his slight temper and the visits I would make to his room.

“Bye, Dad!” I’d call as I was leaving.

“Bye?” he’d answer. “How can you say goodbye? You didn’t even say hello when you came in!”

He always made me giggle.

The questions I wasn’t allowed to ask

In middle school, I started taking an interest in cystic fibrosis.

I started thinking more seriously about Dad and his absence from my life. I wondered how he had died. If he had received a new heart and lungs, why had he still passed away? What happened in his final days? What was he experiencing? Was he afraid?

I did a school report on cystic fibrosis. Learning about the disease felt like a way of learning about him.

Eventually, I decided to ask Mom if she could tell me about Dad’s experience.

She told me that she had made a generous donation to Cystic Fibrosis Canada.

That wasn’t what I was asking.

“That’s great, Mom,” I said. “But what about Dad?”

She changed the subject again.

“You’re our miracle baby, Jinji-jo.”

“Thanks, Mom. But can you tell me about Dad’s experience with the disease?”

“Read my book, Jinji. The answers are in there.”

She turned cold, as Mom often did.

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t come to me asking these types of questions about things you could easily find if you just read my book. Why won’t you read my book? Why won’t my own daughter read my book?”

Suddenly, my question about Dad had become evidence that I didn’t love my mother.

I felt as if I had done something wrong by wanting to speak to her.

But I didn’t want to read her book. I already knew what it said. I had heard the speeches. I had read the story before. There was nothing new for me to discover inside a version that had already been repeated publicly for years.

I wanted a conversation with my mom.

I wanted to ask about my dad without being redirected toward her accomplishments, her grief or her book.

I wanted to know about his illness, but I also wanted to know about the person who had lived inside that illness. I wanted a conversation that could extend beyond hospitals, transplants and survival.

I wanted to know his sense of humour. His favourite meal. The things that irritated him. What he was like with my brothers. Whether he wanted more children. Whether he talked about the future.

Anything that wasn’t already part of her presentation.

Asking questions felt forbidden because every question was treated as an accusation.

If I asked about Dad, Mom heard criticism of herself.

If I questioned the story, I was ungrateful.

If I didn’t accept the book as the complete truth, I was hurting her.

I learned that maintaining peace meant repeating the approved version. Loving my mother appeared to require accepting her story without question.

And loving my father meant knowing almost nothing about him.

Trying again

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She’d had an idea, the way she often did, and it needed to happen immediately. She sent us to Michaels for paint and stencils, and my brothers and I spent the whole day out by the pool s…

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The praise was always remarkably similar. They were all “the best.”

A picture of my mom and me would be captioned, “Best mommy ever!”

A picture of my boyfriend and me would receive nearly the same treatment.

For one reason or another, it felt incredibly important that everyone in the world believed these people were wonderful. It wasn’t enough for me to stay quiet about what happened behind closed doors. I needed to actively construct a different version of them in public.

And I was very good at it.

Someone hurt me? I reminded them of how great they were.

My boyfriend cheated on me? I told him he was better than that. I told him he would never find another love like ours and that he shouldn’t throw it away.

My mom drank and drove me to school? I told her that her morning grapefruit juice looked delicious while pretending not to notice the heavy pour of vodka she had added to it.

For a long time, I thought this meant I was naïve. That I was weak. That I had somehow failed to see what was happening directly in front of me.

But I did see it.

I praised these people because, as long as I was praising them, I believed they might love me.

If I could make them feel admired, special and deeply understood, maybe they wouldn’t leave me. Maybe they wouldn’t hurt me. Maybe they would become the people I kept insisting to everyone else that they were.

I thought I could love them into loving me properly.

I later learned to understand this response as fawning.

My instinct was not to fight, leave or even admit what was happening. My instinct was to become useful. Agreeable. Forgiving. Endlessly loving.

I could sense when someone was upset before they said a word. I could adjust my tone, swallow my anger and reassure the person who had just hurt me. I could turn their cruelty into evidence that they were wounded and turn my own pain into something inconvenient that could be dealt with later.

My response did not mean I was foolish.

It helped me survive.

When I eventually ended those relationships—first with the boyfriends and later with my own mother—I expected to feel free.

In many ways, I did. But freedom was also deeply disorienting.

I was no longer living in the kind of survival mode I had experienced nearly every day. I wasn’t posting fabulous lies. I wasn’t placing people on pedestals they had not earned. I wasn’t constantly scanning someone else’s face, voice or mood for signs that the other shoe was about to drop.

For the first time, there was no peace to keep.

And I didn’t know who I was without that job.

I had spent so many years waiting to find out what everyone else thought before deciding what I thought. I agreed with people to avoid conflict. I softened my opinions before I had even finished forming them. Sometimes I felt almost opinionless, as though my personality existed only in relation to the person standing in front of me.

What do you want?

What do you believe?

What version of me will make this moment safest?

When there was no longer someone whose emotions I needed to manage, I finally had to meet myself.

I had to learn what I liked without wondering whether someone else approved. I had to form opinions and tolerate the discomfort of another person disagreeing with me. I had to discover what made me angry, what made me feel safe, what I found funny, what I believed and what I was no longer willing to accept.

Most people begin doing that in their teenage years.

I didn’t truly begin until my late twenties.

My nervous system didn’t know what to do with all that empty space. Without another person’s image to protect, I had to ask why I had spent so long sacrificing my relationship with myself.

It took years of adjustment. Therapy. Reading. Journaling. Remembering. Questioning the stories I had been given and slowly figuring out which parts of me existed underneath them.

Eventually, all of that work brought me here: to honesty.

For whatever reason, part of claiming my honesty has meant claiming it online.

Perhaps that is because the internet was one of the places where my fawning had been most publicly displayed. It was where I received validation for loving my abusers the loudest. It was where I learned to do what everyone else appeared to be doing and present a family life that looked normal, particularly on days like Mother’s Day.

The lie had been public.

Some part of the repair needed to be public too.

So when did I finally begin telling the truth—and what did it cost me?

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My mother would stand beneath the lights, her chin quivering as she told the story of coming home to “tell her three little babies that their daddy had passed away.”

Oth…

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This morning, my husband Jordan and I are making banana bread. The oven is preheating. I’m mashing bananas while Jordan reaches into the cabinet for measuring cups. As his hand closes around them, I hear gla…

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Growing up with a mother who wasn’t the woman she performed to the world gave me a radar for a specific kind of person: the one Taylor Swift nailed in “Anti-Hero” when she sang “did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism?” That line is my mother, word f…

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For one, I had an unbelievably abusive mother. One who kept me in constant fear, one with an impeccable public image, and one who brainwashed me pretty thoroughly. Like Gypsy Rose, I spoke like a child well into my late teens. Mom couldn’t handle me becoming a woman, getting my period, or having a mind of my own.

Like the Menendez brothers, we had money and status, and everyone thought I was lucky. Also like the Menendez brothers, my mom abused me in an unspeakable way — and I think you know what I mean.

Unlike them, though, I didn’t turn to murder. The thought never even crossed my mind. My trauma bond to my mom ran so deep that for most of my life, I would have taken a bullet for her. Instead, I’ve turned to telling my story.

Because I believe my mom is a narcissist, that’s probably a fate worse than death.

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Now try: “I haven’t heard from my Mom in ten years” Or: “My Dad died when I was six.” Watch the table go quiet. Watch people’s faces do the thing where they’re deciding whe…

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