I woke at 5 a.m., my heart aching and my mind swirling around a lesson life keeps teaching me: when someone reveals their true self, believe them.

Don’t dismiss the way someone treats you—it’s telling you everything you need to know.

When they act as though you don’t matter, believe them. When they consistently put someone else ahead of you, it’s because they believe you’re not their priority.

When they focus on what’s “wrong” with you, believe that is truly how they see you.

A person’s actions reveal the truth behind their words. They show where their loyalty truly lies and whether you hold a place of priority in their life. Sometimes the truth stands in plain sight, yet we turn our gaze away.

We wrap the one who hurt us in excuses, telling ourselves they’ll change, that they do care.

But deep down, we know—their actions have whispered the same truth over and over again: they don’t.

We turn away from the truth because we know its weight will break our hearts. One day, the truth stands before you, undeniable. And on that day, you choose yourself.

You become the giver of what they could not—or would not—offer: your own love, your own respect, your own compassion, understanding, and unwavering loyalty.

When I lived at 1161 Covington Road in Los Altos, my bedroom became both a hiding place and a cage. I would curl into the farthest corner of my bed, tears soaking into the pillow until the fabric felt cold against my skin.

My stepsister, Kathy, eventually convinced her mother and my father to send her back to Florida to live with her Nana—her plea sealed through wounds she carved into herself.

Alone, I drifted into thoughts too heavy for a child to carry, imagining ways to silence either myself or the stepmother whose cruelty shadowed every corner of my days. I wanted the noise, the fear, the ache to end.

Years later, I can trace my survival back to those nights. In the silence after my sobs, something small but steady began to grow—a seed of will, of life. I could not name it then, but it was the same force that would one day choose light over darkness, and turn the weight of those years into the soil from which I would rise.

In the end, I followed Kathy’s path, turning the blade of suffering toward myself. I couldn’t erase my stepmother, so I tried to erase myself. I wanted every thread binding me to that family to snap, to drift free into nothing. Pain had become a room with no doors, and I was ready to disappear.

For years, I carried a deep resentment toward Dotti, convinced she had failed to be the mother figure George and I deserved.

She did not embody the image of how a mother “should” behave, and I measured her against that ideal again and again.

With time—and a gentler heart—I began to see her differently.

She was not my enemy, but one of my greatest teachers, shaping me in ways I could not recognize then. I came to accept that she gave what she was able, and in her own way, she did the best she could.

She never offered the example I longed to follow, yet in her own way, she gave me something just as valuable—a mirror of what I refused to become.

Sometimes the clearest guidance comes not from those who show us the way, but from those who illuminate the paths we are meant to avoid.

I came to understand that joy and sorrow both rise from within.

No one else is the keeper of my spirit—only I hold the power to shape my own light.

It starts with your own heart and mind.

When somebody loves you, they don’t have to say it.
You can tell by the way they treat you.
How they treat you is how they feel about you.