The promises I make

A Note Before I Begin

I am not a writer.

I love making up stories. I have always wished that, somehow, I could become a great writer. Maybe one day I will write a book that goes viral and people will know my name.

But this book is not about going viral.

It isn't a story I created in my wild imagination.

It is a story about me.

And I need to get it out.

I have been told before that perhaps I have gone through some of the things I have gone through so that one day I can help other people. I don't know whether that is why these things happened to me. I don't know if there is a reason for everything.

But I do know that I like helping people.

So if telling my story can make even one person feel less alone, or help someone recognise something in themselves, or give someone the courage to choose themselves a little sooner than I did, then perhaps telling it will have been worth it.

Everything in this book is real.

Everything I am about to tell you happened to me, as I remember it.

It is how I experienced it.

It is how I felt.

It is how I understood things at the time.

It is how I understand them now.

That does not mean that everyone involved would remember every event the same way. They may have their own memories, their own explanations, their own perspectives, and their own version of what happened.

They are entitled to that.

But this is not their story.

This is mine.

I am not writing this book to decide who was right and who was wrong. I am not writing it to put every person who hurt me on trial. I am writing about what happened, what I believed, what I felt, what I did, what I regret, what I survived, and what I am still learning to understand.

I am also not famous.

I am not an important person in the eyes of the world. I am a woman from a small town in South Africa who eventually immigrated to another country and is still figuring out what she wants her life to become.

For a long time, I thought that made me a nobody.

Maybe it does, if by somebody you mean a person whose name everyone knows.

But I am beginning to understand that being unknown is not the same thing as being insignificant.

I have lived a life.

A complicated one.

A painful one.

A beautiful one in places.

And I have memories that I have carried for years without knowing what to do with them.

So I am putting them here.

For privacy, I will change the names of the people in this book. But the people themselves are real.

Some of them loved me.

Some hurt me.

Some did both.

Some are no longer in my life.

Some may still be.

Some may never know that I wrote about them.

And some parts of this book may make me look good.

Some may make me look terrible.

There will be things I did that I am proud of.

There will be things I regret.

There will be choices I made when I was young that I understand very differently now.

I am not going to rewrite myself into the perfect victim.

I am not going to pretend I never hurt anyone.

And I am not going to pretend that everything that happened to me was my fault.

I am simply going to tell the story as honestly as I know how.

There is one more thing you should know before we begin.

I am a woman of faith.

My faith has not always been strong.

There were times when I lost it completely.

There were times when I was angry with God.

There were times when I questioned why any of this was happening.

And somehow, somewhere along the way, I found my way back.

So there will be moments in this book where I talk about God, about faith, about losing it, and about finding it again.

You do not have to believe what I believe.

You do not have to see God in the places where I see Him.

This is simply another part of my story.

And this story begins at twenty-five.

Because twenty-five was when I finally stopped running.

I stopped trying to outrun the past.

I stopped trying to become whoever I thought other people needed me to be.

And I finally turned around.

I looked at the girl I had been.

The woman I had become.

The life I had lived.

The life I had lost.

The life I still wanted.

And I decided it was time to face all of it.

So this is me, finally telling the truth as I know it.

Not because I am famous.

Not because I am special.

Not because I have all the answers.

But because this happened to me.

And maybe, somewhere in these pages, someone else will recognise a piece of themselves.

Maybe they will realise they are not alone.

Maybe they will choose themselves a little sooner.

And maybe that will be enough.

This is my story.

This is how I remember it.

This is how I lived it.

And this is where I begin.