I’M STILL INVISIBLE AFTER GIVING YOU MY ALL “Performing Strength: The Suicide Crisis Nobody’s Talking About”

TONIGHT’S OPENING — THE ARMOR THAT’S DISMANTLING YOU AT HOME Let me tell you something I do not say lightly and have never said this cleanly on this broadcast before. I came into this world through a system that decided my mother could not keep me. Foster care. East Chattanooga. Housing projects. And then a return to a biological mother who loved me in every way her own unprocessed curriculum allowed — which was real love, complicated love, love that sometimes looked like chaos and sometimes looked like nothing at all but was always, underneath everything, love. I know that now. I did not know it then. What I knew then was that I was responsible for stabilizing environments I had no power over. That my job — long before I had language for it — was to manage the emotional weather of every space I entered. To be whatever was needed. To perform adequacy for rooms that had already decided what adequacy required. I brought that curriculum into every intimate relationship that followed. Not as a conscious choice. As an installed sequence. As the nervous system doing what it was trained to do before I had any say in the training.