Kate Didd

When I talk about my life, I want it to sound like a fairytale told by someone who has bled on every page and still chose wonder anyway. I want whimsy not because it’s cute, but because it is earned. Because joy tastes different when you have survived starvation of the soul. Because gratitude is deeper when you’ve had to claw your way up from the bottom with hands that were shaking and raw.

There was a time I could not believe in myself at all. Not in the gentle, “I’m having a hard season” way but in the way where survival itself feels negotiable. I was fighting demons and dragons that did not belong to me. Monsters passed down like cursed heirlooms, stitched into my nervous system by parents who inherited their own pain and never learned how to name it, let alone heal it. Generations of silence disguised as strength. Generations of “we did our best” that left blood on the floor.

And the hardest truth I’ve ever had to breathe in is this:

sometimes people did do their best and their best still destroyed you.

That realization almost broke me. Because once you accept it, you lose the fantasy that one day they’ll wake up, apologize, and make it right. You grieve not just what happened but what never will.

So now, when I sit in a hotel breakfast area, eating French toast made from bread pudding, soft, warm, familiar, exactly like my grandmother used to make, it feels holy. I watch my five-year-old giggle at his cinnamon roll, eyes wide, present, unguarded. No flinching. No scanning the room for danger. Just joy. Just being.

Across the table sits my husband, no longer estranged in the ways that matter. We are proof that love can bend without breaking. That even when everything is scorched, something real can survive underneath. I look at him and realize I have known love for a very long time, not because it was given freely to me, but because I became it in order to stay alive.

There were years where loving myself was an act of defiance. Where staying alive felt like spitting in the face of everyone who wanted me quiet, compliant, or gone. I lived out of spite before I lived out of hope. And if I’m honest, I’m grateful for that too. Spite kept me breathing long enough to learn how to live.

When my mother died nearly five years ago, I expected a room overflowing with mourners. She had always cast herself as a savior, rescuer, protector, healer. But the room was thin. Echoing. And in that silence, the truth spoke louder than any eulogy ever could. You cannot save the world and abandon your own children without consequence. You cannot rescue strangers while refusing to protect yourself or us.

She was a mandatory reporter. She saved hundreds on paper. But she could not save herself from an abusive marriage. She could not save her children from harm. And that contradiction split something open inside me that will never fully close.

When I started naming these truths, people recoiled. Truth is sharp when it finally gets oxygen. They told me I hurt them. And I said yes, I did. Because I was hurting. Because no one believed me when I said my life was unbearable. Because anger is what grief sounds like when it’s been ignored for too long.

I did not ask gently. I demanded acknowledgment. And when it wasn’t given, I walked away.

That walk cost me everything I thought defined me.

For three and a half years, I traveled the United States untethered to family, to legacy, to the false safety of familiarity. I stood on mountaintops and cried until my lungs burned. I swam in oceans that reminded me how small I was and how free that could feel. I traced waterfalls with my eyes and realized the world has always been magic, we just teach children to stop seeing it.

And still, I carried pain like a parasite. A loop. A cycle. Until one day, in the middle of all that beauty, I realized: I was not broken, I was unhealed. And healing is violent before it is gentle.

The last time I saw my father was at my brother’s wedding. He looked hollow. Like a man who had never believed in anything and so eventually, no one believed in him. Without my mother there to soften the edges and hide the damage, the truth finally stood on its own. Cruelty exposed. Lies collapsing under their own weight.

I was not graceful through that reckoning. I was loud. I was messy. I accused. I demanded. I was corrected and I listened. I can hold this truth now without flinching: I wasn’t wrong, but I said it wrong. Accountability is not self-betrayal. It’s self-respect.

I stumbled publicly. I learned painfully. And the reason I have the life I have now is because I was willing to own my mistakes instead of defending them. People who refuse to look at themselves cannot survive proximity to me. I am not soft for those who harm others and call it love. I am not gentle with those who create chaos and label the aftermath “crazy.”

So why does any of this matter when I’m sitting in a moment soaked in peace?

Because this peace was built from truth.

I pulled myself out of the dark with hands that were trembling. Others pointed the way, yes, but no one could walk for me. Healing is lonely before it is communal. And once I reached solid ground, I turned back and pulled others with me. We climbed together. We built something stable. Something honest. Something real.

There are no losses where I am now. Only discernment. Only gratitude that makes my chest ache. Gratitude so deep I have to pause before the tears spill into my coffee.

My son will never know what it feels like to be doubted at his core. He believes in himself because I taught him how. From tying his shoes to doing the dishes, from cleaning his room to helping others, he knows he is capable. He knows effort matters. He knows he is safe.

My older children saw the storm. They lived through the chaos. They carry scars. But they are watching something new take root. They are beginning to believe that safety is possible. That cycles can end. That the youngest not knowing terror means their pain was not meaningless.

So why do I travel?

Because once, as a little girl, I watched The 10th Kingdom, a story about a girl from New York who dared to dream. She fell into another world filled with trolls and dwarfs and dragons and evil queens. She learned her parents were flawed. That her mother was unkind. And still, she got her happily ever after. She loved her mother anyway, without letting that love destroy her.

That story stayed with me because it whispered a dangerous truth: you can see people clearly and still choose your own ending.

All children deserve protection. But they also deserve truth. I’m grateful I learned both. Because my children will grow up knowing the world is magical, not because it’s perfect, but because it is survivable.

And because believing, real, bone-deep believing, changes everything.