This book is an autobiographical treatise about mental illness and about finding a path to healing. It is about childhood sexual abuse, unhelpful teaching, depression, confusion, and vulnerability. But it is also about love, hope, joy, and God. My aim has been to understand and explain the processes of healing that I, with the help and support of many others, have undertaken and lived through. To be able to free myself from mental illness, I needed to understand how abuse and put-downs have shaped my personality and the effects they still exert on the adult me. This led me to reconfigure my thinking, no less.

In this book, I've tried to express how my healing unfolded. I believe the writing of it has helped me to turn some of the determinants of my life from destructive to constructive-and my state of being from sadness to joy.