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Shame can last a lifetime
My first book was a novella titled Thoughts Of A Fractured Soul. It was a story that essentially fictionalized my life as a teenage parent and the main character’s struggle to find themself while raising a child.
It’s odd because even though that book was clearly about my real life, I resisted any comparisons. When people asked me questions about the similarities, I quickly shut it down saying that “the characters are real but the interactions are all made up.” That was my line and I said it so much that I actually started to believe it.
The main reason I distanced myself from the reality of this novel was that I was still dealing with the shame of being a teenage parent. I was twenty nine when Thoughts Of A Fractured Soul came out, which means my daughter was about eleven or twelve. People would say things like “it must be so cool being a young parent,” or “you and your daughter must be, like, friends.”
I understood what they meant by those statements, but they had no idea how much guilt and shame I carried with me. They didn’t know about nights I sat outside my daughter’s crib wondering how we would afford food the next day, or the times I swallowed my pride to borrow money from family and friends or asked my uncle to drop off groceries. I kept these…
