THE BOOK I WROTE SO I WOULD NOT DISAPPEAR
I’ve been thinking about why I wrote this book, and the truth is, it didn’t begin as a book.
It began as a way to make sure I didn’t disappear.
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For most of my life, maybe even before I had words for it, I lived with the feeling that something in me wasn’t supposed to be here.
I don’t mean that in an abstract way.
I mean I felt it in my body, in my family, in the rooms I lived in,
in the relationships I found myself inside.
Sometimes it was obvious.
Sometimes it was so woven into daily life that I couldn’t point to it,
but I still knew it was there.
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It was the feeling of being questioned before I spoke,
corrected before I understood why, dismissed before anyone had really seen what was coming from me.
Something in me kept being pushed back or treated as if it had no place.
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Again and again, what came from me was dismissed, denied, or destroyed.
My paintings were destroyed.
My poetry was never read.
At the time, I didn’t have enough of myself to understand why.
I didn’t know that what I was creating was something some people had no way of understanding.
I only knew what it felt like.
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Something in me was not allowed to exist, and if what came from me could be destroyed, then maybe I could be too.
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So I wrote.
Not because I thought I was a writer, and not because I thought anyone would ever read it.
I wrote because it was the only way I knew to make my life real.
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I kept journals from the time I was a teenager.
No one read them.
They weren’t written for anyone else.
But they held something for me.
They held a record, a presence, a way of saying: this is happening, I’m really here.
Painting and poetry were the same.
They weren’t expression in the way people often think of it.
They weren’t things I did for beauty or recognition.
They were ways of holding onto something that was constantly being pushed out of existence.
Living wasn’t easy.
There were many times when it would have been easier to leave, to stop, to disappear in ways no one could question.
If I hadn’t had to fight for every bit of my life, for my identity, for my right to exist,
for the truth of what lived inside me, I can see now that I might have slipped away without ever fully being here.
At the time, I didn’t call it a fight to exist.
It was simply the way I lived.
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Over time, I found pieces of autonomy.
I moved away from my family.
I left my first marriage.
I created distance from the people and situations that had been abusing me,
diminishing me, and denying what I was and what I carried.
In that space, something began to open.
Slowly.
Unevenly.
But enough that more of what was true in me could move through my art, my writing, and my poetry.
During those years, when I was working as a coach and trainer,
I heard the same thing from clients again and again: you should write a book.
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They were responding to what I shared from my own life,
because something in those stories helped them move through fear,
see themselves differently, and step into parts of themselves they hadn’t believed were possible.
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But I couldn’t receive it.
I didn’t believe anyone would want to read about my life.
Who was I to think my life would matter to anyone?
That question stayed with me for a long time.
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Then I turned seventy, and I went through my first sacred Huachuma ceremony.
That night, when I walked back into my studio, everything was different.
The paintings were there as they always had been,
but I could feel them in a way I had never felt them before.
Not as objects that I had made, but as something alive with what they held.
Every brushstroke carried something I had lived.
Pain.
Grief.
Love.
Endurance.
My life was there in front of me, not as memory, but as something alive.
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And something shifted in me.
I wasn’t looking at paintings anymore.
I was standing in front of the evidence of my own life.
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The pain, the grief, the love, the endurance, the parts of me I had tried to understand for years —
all of it was there in color and movement and texture.
They weren’t things I had made to survive my life.
They had been holding my life.
They had been carrying the truth until I was ready to see it.
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And once I saw that, I knew they could not be dismissed.
They could not be explained away.
They could not be erased.
Shortly after that, I was offered the opportunity to write a book,
and I said yes before I knew how I would do it.
Something in me already knew I had been writing it all along.
Not only in journals, but in everything.
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The poetry.
The paintings.
The searching.
The surviving.
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The way I had moved through my life trying to understand what had happened to me and what still lived inside me.
All of it belonged together.
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So I didn’t create a book in the traditional sense.
I compiled a body of work.
A record of a life lived under pressure, erasure, under the constant questioning of its own right to exist,
and of what it took to remain in spite of it all.
Remembering Myself is not simply the story of my life.
It is a testament to what it took to survive it.
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I had to make it real.
Not first for the world, but for myself.
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I had to say, in a way that couldn’t be undone: I was here.
I lived this.
This life mattered.
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Even if no one else ever saw it that way, I had to see it.
I had to give it weight, form, and presence.
I had to stop participating in my own erasure.
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There are things I didn’t include.
Details I chose not to share.
People I chose not to name.
This was never about telling everything.
It was about telling enough to make the truth of my life undeniable to me.
The rest still lives where it always has, inside me.
But what needed to be seen, what needed form and weight and a place in the world, became the book.
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It became the way I could finally say that I had been here, that I had lived this, that this life mattered.
If this reflection stirred something in you, perhaps it's simply another thread asking to be followed.
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Remembering Myself – A Journey Through the Threads of Time was created from that same impulse:
to make a life visible, to give memory form, and to honor what refused to disappear.
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