Kiera Gerety

I didn’t write this book to be pretty. I didn’t write it to be inspiring, or palatable, or easy to swallow. I wrote it because I had to—because the weight of it sat too long in my chest, pressing down on my ribs, choking out the breath I needed to keep going. I wrote it because there are things I could never say out loud, things I tried to bury beneath the years, beneath sobriety, beneath the quiet lie that healing means forgetting.

But forgetting has never been my way.

This book is a record, a reckoning, a bloodletting. It is every moment I thought I wouldn’t make it, and every time I did. It is the ache that still lingers in my bones, the scars that still catch the light, the names I still whisper when I see certain cars on the street. It is the weight of shame, of relapse, of loneliness so thick it wraps around you like a second skin. It is the blade, the bottle, the needle, the silence. It is the ghosts I carried for years, the ones I am still learning how to set down.

This is not a book about getting better. This is a book about getting through—the relentless, unpolished reality of survival, of facing each day despite the weight of it all. It is about healing in fragments, about endurance when there are no easy answers.

If I have learned anything, it is this: pain does not disappear just because we choose to heal. It shifts, it transforms, it weaves itself into the fabric of who we are. It does not let go, but we can learn to hold it differently. Not as a burden, not as a brand, but as a testament that we are still here.

And if you are reading this, then you are still here too.

That is enough. That has always been enough.

As my wife once told me “I’m not scared of you spreading your wings. I’m scared of you cutting them off.”

~Kiera J. Gerety