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The image in the mirror, the tears, the degrading, the name “Little Bastard,” the circle where you went if you wanted the candy, the little hands that had to do the touching, the priest with the hand on the shoulder, the knee, the arm around you and them saying it was God’s way of showing he loved you…a childhood of not knowing who you were and being told you were the Devil’s child, but you survive…the only way you knew how: You pretended. You lived.

Raised in a Catholic orphanage from birth, I had to leave when I graduated. I mastered the art of pretending because, by doing that, I was covering up the hurt of everything that had happened to me. I was not me! Or so I thought, until one day, I started to write down the things that haunted me. As I put those words on paper, I realized that was me on the paper. A healing process, I thought. No, it happened, all of it, some with a sense of humor and some with such a great pain I felt it would never go away. It has taken me years, and once done, I put those words away.

Now I give them away so that others who have lived with the same pain know that they can stop pretending and live. Maybe those same things will never happen to another child in a Catholic orphanage or Catholic school ever again….Welcome to Shattered Innocence.