Revelation Day

April 17, 2025 was Revelation Day.

Six days after my dad died.

What do I want to say about it one year later?

First—this is not a date I will carry forward.

I will not mark it next year, or the year after, or the year after that.

But this year, I do.

Because I worked so fucking hard to be standing here—

as strong, as healed, as rebuilt, and as redefined as I am.

The last twelve months—honestly, longer than that—have been the hardest of my life.

And I have been through some shit.

I have been through some shit.

I have zero desire to relive how that day became Revelation Day.

If you want to understand it, go read Moment of Discovery.

It lays it out clearly.

What I will say is this:

I had no idea a person could do the things that were done to me.

I had no idea someone could sustain that level of lies and deception for so long, coupled with words of love, safety, and intimacy.

I had no idea he would intentionally cause so much harm to me, and other women.

I had no idea there was a thing called Weaponized Intimacy.

I operate from the belief that people are good.

That they are doing the best they can.

That because I am good, kind, loving, empathetic, understanding—

a warm, imperfectly perfect human—

others are too.

And that he would treat me that way.

It turns out, that is not always the case.

And that some people will say and do whatever they need to get what they want,

without real care for the impact.

Lesson learned. Painfully.

I’ve said before that last year was an emotional and psychological Everest for me.

That is not an exaggeration.

It took everything I had to get here.

To stay.

To not numb.

To feel all of it.

To look deep inside myself and ask why I stayed as long as I did.

To learn about the darker sides of human behavior—the parts that cause real harm.

To sift through memory after memory, trying to understand what was real.

To live the mind fuck of cognitive dissonance,

and the physical pain of withdrawals from a trauma bond.

To come to terms with the fact that the life I thought I was living

was never fully grounded in truth—

and the person I believed in never fully existed.

And somewhere in all of that—

I built safety inside myself.

I became my own safe harbor.

For the first time in my life,

I became someone who will protect me—no matter what.

And here I am.

Still putting the pieces of my new life together.

Standing in something that is beautiful

and hard

and scary

and, at times, isolating.

But mine.

I know—without hesitation—

that I made the best decision of my life

when I finally chose me.

And I still believe in blue skies, sunny days, magic,

and happily ever after.