For most of my life, truth wasn’t something I felt safe holding.
Not because I was a liar. But because I learned early — around the age of nine — that truth had the power to unravel lives. That it could break things. That not everyone had the capacity to carry it.
And so I learned to carry it alone.
I want to tell you something I’ve never said this publicly before. Not because I’m ready in the way people think you need to be ready. But because I know I’m not the only one. And that woman — whoever she is, wherever she’s reading this — she needs to know that someone else has been there.
So here it is.
When I was eight years old, my stepfather began sexually abusing me.
Somewhere deep in me, even at that age, I sensed my mother suspected something. My stepfather made sure I understood what would happen to our family if I ever spoke up. So I didn’t. I stayed silent and hoped that she would see what I couldn’t say.
Eventually, she asked me.
I could see the war in her eyes — part suspicion, part fear, part uncertainty about who to blame. But she asked. So I answered.
That night became one of the worst of my life.
Instead of protecting me, my mother asked me to confront him directly. A child — standing in front of her abuser — forced to repeat out loud what she had only just dared to say. He was drunk. He half-denied everything. A fight broke out. He hit my mother. She was hospitalized.
A social worker came to speak to me.
But in my culture, you don’t speak to outsiders about family business. My mother reminded me of that — even from the hospital — knowing what could come next.
By Monday, we picked him up from jail. Barefoot. Bruised. Back home.
The abuse didn’t stop. But my truth did.
I wouldn’t speak of it again with my mother until I was in my forties.
That moment — that night — shaped how I saw truth for decades.
I learned to perform. To protect people from what they couldn’t handle. To bury the parts of me that were too heavy for the room. I got very good at making sure no one was ever uncomfortable because of what I knew.
And I called it strength.
But it wasn’t strength. It was survival. And there’s a difference.
Because survival keeps you alive. But it doesn’t let you live.
I spent years wondering why I couldn’t stay in relationships that were good for me. Why I kept attracting dynamics that felt familiar in the worst ways. Why I could show up for everyone else — my kids, my clients, my community — and still feel like I was disappearing inside.
The answer was always the same thing. I had never learned that my truth was allowed to exist. That I was allowed to take up space. That what happened to me was not something I had to carry in silence forever just to keep everyone else comfortable.
When I finally started unpacking the why behind my hiding — everything shifted.
I realized that the parts of me I had been taught to silence were the very keys to my healing.
That truth — raw, messy, unfiltered, inconvenient truth — is not something to fear.
It’s something to reclaim.
I walk in my truth now. Not to hurt anyone. Not to blow up anyone’s life or rewrite the past.
But to heal myself.
My truth is no longer a threat.
It’s a boundary. A compass. A rebirth.
She Broke Free exists because I needed it to exist.
Because I needed a space that wasn’t going to hand me toxic positivity and a journal prompt that felt like homework. I needed something real. Something that would meet me in the middle of the mess and say — yes. This is hard. And you are not too much. And you don’t have to perform your healing.
This brand is built on that.
If you’ve ever buried something because the people around you couldn’t hold it — I need you to know something:
It was never too much.
You were just in the wrong room.
You’re in the right one now.
— Tasha
Founder, She Broke Free
If this moved something in you, the 7-Day Break Free Reset is a free place to start. Seven days of honest prompts — no fluff, no toxic positivity. Just you and the truth.
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