Still Here

"How are you still alive?"

A therapist asked Misty Dawn that question twenty years after her father's suicide, while she was sitting in a room on seven psychiatric medications and still not okay. She laughed. She said it wasn't from lack of trying. The therapist told her to write a book.

She didn't. Not for twenty years.

Still Here is what she finally wrote.

A memoir told entirely in letters - thirteen of them, counting down to the anniversary of her father's death. The letters are not polished. They are not redemptive. They do not promise healing on a timeline that makes anyone comfortable. They name what most grief books quietly leave out: childhood abuse no one was ever allowed to talk about. The kind of harm in relationships that doesn't leave a bruise. The medications that treated the wrong thing for years. The mornings she did not think she would stay.

And underneath all of it, the question that sits at the center of every survivor's life and never quite goes away:

How am I still here?

This is one woman's honest answer.

If you have ever buried someone who chose to leave -
If you have ever been told you should be further along by now -
If your healing has not looked like a straight line, or a redemption arc, or a clean ending -

This book is for you.

For readers of The Year of Magical Thinking, In the Dream House, and What My Bones Know.

For survivors. For witnesses. For everyone still carrying something no one ever helped them put down.

You are allowed to put it down. You are allowed to come back. You are allowed to find yourself in it.

You are not alone.