This Is My Final Word, For Now

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This is the final piece — for now.

Not because the story’s over, but because this chapter feels complete. Because the words have landed. The energy has settled. The truth has been spoken.

And I feel like my dad would smile at that.

He didn’t always get to speak his truth. He swallowed a lot to keep the peace. Let others write the narrative while he lived in the margins. Maybe he thought it was the price of survival. Maybe it was. But I know part of him hoped someone down the line would pick up the thread and tell it straight.

So I am.

Not with vengeance. Not to shame. But to liberate. For me, and for anyone who’s ever felt like their life was shaped by someone else’s silence.

I think my father would have been proud of this website. Not just the layout or the code — though he’d enjoy those too — but the heart of it. The honesty. The unwillingness to play nice when playing nice meant erasing myself.

This site is a soft rebellion. It’s a mirror held up to the past, and an offering to the future. It’s my way of saying: I won’t carry your shame anymore. I won’t keep your secrets if they cost me my voice.

And if that rattles people, maybe they need to ask themselves why.

Because if it wasn’t true, it wouldn’t land so hard.

My dad, for all his complexity, loved me the best way he could. He gave me his curiosity, his love of solitude, his sense of humour, his deep care beneath a gruff shell. He tried to prepare me for a world he knew could be cruel, and he hoped I’d find the tools to survive it — even if he didn’t always have the blueprint himself.

I think, in his own way, he knew I’d understand when I was older.

And now I do.

This site, these blogs, this journey — it’s not just about me. It’s for the little boy in me who needed to be seen. It’s for my son, so he’ll know you don’t have to stay silent to be good. And it’s for my father, who maybe never got to finish his sentence.

This is my final word, for now.

But I am not done.

I am just finally living from a place that feels like mine.