For most of my life, my story lived in the shadows—buried under other people’s lies, other people’s comfort, other people’s silence. I learned early that the world prefers tidy narratives, palatable truths, and children who don’t speak about the things that happened behind closed doors. I learned that survival often requires invisibility. And I learned that when you grow up erased, reclaiming yourself becomes an act of rebellion.My memoir, NOT ANYMORE: A Memoir of Stolen Identity and Reclamation, is the book I spent decades trying—and failing—to write. Not because I lacked the words, but because the world around me wasn’t ready to hear them. People flinched. They looked away. They told me it was “too much,” “too dark,” “too painful.” But pain doesn’t disappear because someone refuses to witness it. Silence doesn’t heal anything. It only protects the people who caused the harm.So I stopped protecting them.This book is not just a recounting of what was done to me. It is the story of what I did with it. How a child stripped of identity, belonging, and safety grew into a woman who refused to stay erased. How I pieced together the truth of my Native heritage after a lifetime of being told I was something else. How I survived a childhood that should have broken me. How I reclaimed my name, my story, my voice, and my sovereignty in my fifties.It is a story of brutality, yes—but also of evolution. Of the long, slow work of unlearning shame. Of understanding that what happened to me was not my fault. Of discovering that survival is not the same as living, and that reclaiming yourself is a lifelong process.Writing this memoir meant walking back into rooms I once escaped. It meant remembering things my mind had buried for my own protection. It meant confronting the complicity of neighbours, relatives, and institutions that chose silence over intervention. It meant acknowledging the child I once was—the one who screamed, the one no one saved, the one who deserved so much more. But it also meant honouring the woman I became. A woman who refuses to disappear.

A woman who refuses to be silent.

A woman who says, with her whole chest: Not anymore. This memoir is not for shock value. It is not for pity. It is a testimony. A reclamation. A declaration that the truth matters—even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it disrupts the narratives families build to protect themselves, even when it forces people to confront the violence they ignored. If you choose to read it, come with an open heart. Come ready to witness. Come ready to understand what it means to survive the unspeakable and still rise. Because this is not just a story about what was taken from me.

It is a story about what I took back.