My name is Shana. I am twenty-nine years old and a educational assistant going to school to be a teacher. I am also an angel mom to my daughter Aubree, an author of three books and a strong advocate to mental health.

I was only eight the first time my world cracked open. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Childhood is meant to be a sanctuary—cartoons on Saturday mornings, scraped knees, laughter at the dinner table. But mine was a different story. He was someone I should have been able to trust. I didn’t understand what was happening. I just remember feeling sick, ashamed, and like I had done something wrong. I didn’t have the words back then—just the silence, thick and heavy, choking me every night before sleep.
The abuse didn’t stop there. From the time I was four until I was seventeen, the bruises became a part of my skin like they were meant to be there. I learned how to walk silently, how to predict the mood of a room with just a glance, how to hold back tears until they made me sick. I learned that crying didn’t help—sometimes it made things worse. I became a ghost inside my own home. Nobody saw me. Or maybe they saw and chose to look away. I’ll never know which is worse.
By the time I turned eighteen, I thought I had escaped it. I told myself I was done with pain. Done with cruelty masked as love. But trauma has a way of rewriting your instincts—of convincing you that chaos feels like home.
I met him when I was seventeen. At first, he was kind in all the ways I thought mattered. He told me I was beautiful when I didn’t feel it. He said he’d protect me, keep me safe. I believed him. I needed to believe someone could be different. When I found out I was pregnant, I thought maybe this was the beginning of something good. I was three months along when the first slap came.
It was small, as far as abuse goes. That’s how I justified it. Just a slap. Just stress. Just a bad day. But I knew better. My body knew. My hands trembled in ways they hadn’t since I was a young. My chest tightened the same way it used to when I heard footsteps in the hallway late at night.
The violence got worse. He’d apologize, of course. He always did. Flowers. Promises. Tears. But my belly grew, and so did the fear. I wasn’t just afraid for me anymore. I was afraid for the tiny life inside of me—this baby who hadn’t even taken a breath yet and was already caught in a cycle I had never broken.
It was the night I felt a kick—tiny and fluttery—that I decided I had to leave the relationship. Just what I needed. I left.
I didn’t have a plan, just a will to survive. The same will that kept me going from the age of four to seventeen. The same will that got me through that day when I was eight and the world became unsafe. The same will that whispered in my ear when my partner raised his fist again, telling me that I could—I must—get out.
Now I’m writing this not from a place of sadness, but of truth.
I still have bad days. Trauma doesn’t leave you cleanly. Who knows nothing of the things I endured—and God willing.
This is not a story of pain, though there is plenty of that. It is a story of survival. Of choosing yourself, even when the world teaches you not to. Of standing up, even when your legs shake. Of finding your voice again, even when it was taken from you so long ago.
I am still here. And I am not afraid anymore.

There are chapters of my life I never thought I’d speak out loud—moments I buried deep, hoping they’d disappear with time. But silence didn’t heal me. Writing did. Talking did. And facing it—day by day, moment by moment—became part of how I began to live again.

I grew up in a world that was supposed to protect me, but instead, it broke me. Child abuse isn’t just about bruises. Sometimes it’s about the nights you cry yourself to sleep, scared to exist. Sometimes it’s about the silence of adults who should have helped but looked away. My body was never just mine. The trauma of sexual assault stole parts of me I didn’t know how to reclaim.

When I was old enough to understand the depth of what I had lived through, the weight became unbearable. Cutting wasn’t about wanting to die. It was about needing to feel something—anything—that reminded me I was still here. Pills became a crutch, a way to numb what therapy hadn’t yet reached. And the suicidal thoughts... they came like waves. Sometimes gentle, sometimes crushing. I tried. More than once. And each time, I survived—but not because I wanted to. At first, it felt more like failure than luck.

Then came a loss I can barely put into words. A pregnancy I hadn’t planned, but had begun to love. And then, just like that, it was gone. That loss was a silence I didn’t know how to carry. Another grief piled onto an already collapsing foundation.

But I want to tell you about a turning point—Roger’s Behavioral Health. I didn’t go because I was brave. I went because I had nothing left. I walked in broken. I was met with compassion, structure, and truth. They didn’t try to fix me. They helped me hold the pieces while I learned how to fit them together again.

Recovery wasn’t pretty. It still isn’t. Healing is not linear. Some days I still ache. Some nights I still cry. But now I know how to reach for help. I know my scars are not shameful—they are proof of survival. My story is not defined by what happened to me, but by how I kept going anyway.

If you are reading this and you see any part of yourself in my story—please, keep going. Not because it’s easy. Not because it’s fair. But because you matter. You are not alone.

I am still here. And that is everything.