Kate Didd

The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.

It sounds simple. Gentle, even. But for someone who once assumed the worst in people, that sentence became a mirror so clear it was unbearable. I saw myself reflected back, every fear, every assumption, every survival tactic dressed up as instinct. And instead of looking away, I took it as a challenge: to outgrow the version of me that needed armor to breathe. To become someone I wouldn’t recognize if my life depended on it.

That mirror is a woman I’m not supposed to like.

In fact, by every logical measure, I shouldn’t like her at all. She is the woman I once took to court for stalking and harassment. What I didn’t know then was that she was being abused by my ex in the same way I had been and used as a weapon to continue his control long after our divorce. His abuse stretched sixteen years past the ending of our marriage, wearing new faces, telling the same story.

And now? I adore her. Completely.

That’s the power of clarity.

Can you imagine the madness of being with someone for seven years, married for only two, only to discover he was a compulsive cheater with anything that moved? To then have women crawl out of the shadows to tell you that although you were the wife, you were the other woman because he loved all of them more than you.

How fucking wild is that?

The stories gutted me. They made me feel stupid in the way women are trained to feel stupid: How didn’t you see it? How did you let this happen? This was 2008, when the truth finally surfaced when I ran from a man who assaulted me daily for years. It took a therapist, many years later, to finally name it for what it was, because I couldn’t grasp it myself.

And that’s when the nightmare returned.

No one tells you that some systems are installed at birth. That grooming doesn’t always look like harm it can look like tradition, expectation, praise. You are shaped for a certain kind of man so you won’t disrupt the world too much.

My father made one small mistake.

He treated me like a boy.

I learned to fix cars, work the farm, break horses, hunt. I played basketball, softball, soccer. I ran long distances. I was the golden child until more children came along and I wasn’t actually a boy after all.

Then I found men who loved how hard I worked. They praised my endurance like it was a virtue. And I bent myself into something unbreakable so they wouldn’t hurt me.

They loved me.

They hurt me.

They loved me.

They hurt me.

Like pulling petals from a flower: He loves me. He loves me not.

I played that game for decades until I ran out of flowers and romance was dead.

Now there’s a generation of millennial women who are angry. Telling younger girls to close their legs, pick better partners, raise their standards, ask for money. Do this. Do that. Maybe you should’ve picked better. Maybe you should’ve known more.

But what if we’re not failing?

What if we’re seeing it faster?

We’re listening to women who are older and freer not bitter. We’re asking why Grandpa was so angry. Why Grandma endured so much. Why the same patterns keep showing up dressed in different clothes.

I started noticing something terrifying: two completely different people, side by side, who hated each other’s parenting styles and yet produced the same kind of father. Different techniques. Same outcome. And when women come together and compare notes, the truth lands heavy:

We’re all experiencing the same thing.

Men aren’t monsters because they’re men. They are mirrors of the systems that raised them our fathers, brothers, grandfathers, coworkers, service workers. Everyone around us. Including the ones who promised to protect us first and were the first to throw us into the dirt.

Living in fear poisons your thoughts.

I can’t survive.

I can’t live.

I can’t breathe.

And then you realize those thoughts were written for you. To keep you small. To keep you compliant.

Excuse me but you haven’t met me.

I was raised by a monster. Which means I learned how monsters work.

The goal isn’t to become one.

The goal is to tame it.

You don’t let the darkness consume you, you teach it when to stand guard and when to stand down. You decide that the harm stops with you. That you will not become what hurt you.

Instead, you do something far more dangerous.

You become untouchable.

You kill with kindness so precise it makes cruelty choke on itself. You build a character so solid that lies collapse under their own weight. People stop listening to words and start watching actions and that’s how the world actually changes.

I never thought I’d climb out of the hole life handed me.

I thought the darkness was permanent until I realized I had to become the light.

I am overflowing positivity, not because life was easy, but because I chose it anyway. I curate the magic inside me so others can breathe easier around me. And yes, that takes a toll. Which is why boundaries are sacred.

Not everyone is mine to heal.

Some monsters aren’t meant to be tamed they are meant to be removed from your life without guilt, without explanation, without fear.

My life isn’t what it used to be.

It’s better.

I built it on a dirt floor. From the ground up. I pushed through hatred and chose love anyway, not the soft kind, but the fierce, disciplined, soul-deep kind.

Because I know what it feels like to look at the world and think, Wake up. Love is what we needed.

If you can’t see the example, you must be the example.

I took that as a vow, to my soul, to my mother, to my grandmother, and to every ancestor who survived so I could stand here.

The light can touch every part of who we are.

And only someone truly good can forgive the girl who once attacked her and say:

You deserve to be loved too.

You can’t take that from me.

I am better than you.