A baby sits in a decaying, rat-infested room with water leaking from the ceiling into rusted pots, light streaming from a window.

take this chapter and create a starting image the represents the chapter for my book The Hard Beginnings My life began in Seminole, Oklahoma, but it wasn’t a beginning anyone would call blessed. Born on May 12, 2003, in a place that smelled of desperation and decay, I didn’t know what a loving home felt like. Instead, I grew up in a house where every crack in the wall, every creak in the floorboards, seemed to reflect the brokenness of my family. The ceiling leaked in the living room and in our bedrooms—just years of neglect and a building pressure no one wanted to acknowledge. I often wondered if that water was a metaphor for our lives. The leaks were persistent, like the quiet desperation that simmered beneath the surface of our home. I can still see it so clearly in my mind—those first memories of sitting on the floor in my diapers, staring up at the ceiling as water dripped into old rusted pots scattered around the room. The pots were a futile attempt to catch the leaks, but they only filled up faster than they could be emptied. The smell of mildew was constant, creeping into my skin like a second layer. There were rats in the walls and cockroaches scuttling across the floors at night. The house was an organism of its own—decaying, filled with shadows that moved on their own, whispering the same thing: "Nothing lasts here." In the background, there was always the sound of arguing. My parents had a way of making silence seem like an accusation. The arguing would come in See more