My third son has ADHD. In the spring of 2025, wanting to understand him better, I started researching — audiobooks, YouTube channels, doctors explaining the neuroscience in plain language. The more I learned, the quieter a specific voice in the back of my head got. I'd always half-joked about it — yeah, I probably have that, ha ha — the way people do when something feels uncomfortably true but they're not ready to look at it directly. I'd always attributed everything to the trauma. The inability to focus. The time blindness. The emotional dysregulation. The rumination that could spiral for days. I'd explained all of it as the aftermath of a difficult childhood, and that explanation was true, but it wasn't the whole truth.

In late September I decided to do Sober October — no alcohol, no drugs, no caffeine. October arrived and my brain lost its scaffolding. Without the stimulants that had been doing the job of regulating my attention since I was fifteen years old, my thoughts scattered in ways I couldn't manage. I got into a loud, escalating argument with my manager. When it was over I ruminated for a week — not the normal version of going over something a few extra times, the consuming kind, the kind where you wake up at three in the morning replaying what was said word by word and can't stop no matter how many times you tell yourself to.

The following Friday I had a session with my counsellor. I talked for thirty minutes without stopping. I didn't realise I was doing it until she said something: she'd never seen me like that before. And then she said: if we didn't think it before, we can almost guarantee it now. She told me her son has ADHD. That everything I'd just described was exactly how he was off his medication. And then she explained what had been happening inside me for most of my life: since I was fifteen I'd been self-medicating with whatever was available. Cigarettes. Drugs. Alcohol. Coffee. Pop. Sweets. Each one a stimulant of some kind, each one doing the job of providing the dopamine regulation my brain couldn't reliably produce on its own. Remove all of them at once and the system falls apart.

The diagnosis came at the end of October 2025.

I'd explained all of it as character flaws for forty-seven years. Evidence for the file. Proof of the verdict the inner critic had handed down when I was a teenager on a basement floor in Regina. It wasn't character flaws. It was a neurological condition that had been running untreated my entire life. The trauma and the ADHD had fed each other for decades — the trauma wiring my nervous system for hypervigilance, the ADHD making me more vulnerable to that wiring, both of them together producing a person who was permanently braced, permanently behind, permanently exhausted by the effort of simply functioning. I'd spent forty-seven years believing there was something fundamentally wrong with me. The diagnosis said: there is something different about you. Those are not the same thing.

I want to go back to something I wrote in my journal in March of 2023, nine days after the breakdown. I was never sexually abused like some people. I wrote that. I believed it. I'd spent forty-four years believing it.

I was wrong.

January 2026. The medication had been working for two months. For the first time in my adult life the noise in my head had settled to a manageable level. I was, by any measure I had available, doing well. I was driving to work. Lake Country north toward Armstrong, just past Vernon, listening to music. A January morning. And then this absolute weight just fell on me. Not a thought. Not a memory in the way memories usually arrive — voluntary, with some sense of choice about whether you look at them or look away. This was something that came from outside the normal channels. A heaviness first. And then images, flooding in before I could stop them.

A bedroom. I can picture it clearly — the walls, the light, the specific quality of dark that a child's bedroom has at night. A door opening. Breath in my ear. The weight of someone lying down beside me. A hand — my hand — being taken. Being guided. The smell. Vodka and grapefruit juice.

I knew immediately. Not with uncertainty, not with the reasonable doubt you might apply to an ordinary memory. With the kind of certainty that lives in the body rather than the mind. I knew whose breath it was. I knew whose smell it was. I knew who had opened that door in the dark.

It was my mother.

I was driving. I said to myself — out loud, in the car — I can't do this right now. Not here. Not while I'm driving. And I pushed it back down. The way I'd spent my whole life pushing things down.

Here is what I understand now that I didn't understand then. The mind buries what it cannot survive knowing. That's not weakness. That's the body's most sophisticated form of protection. A child who experiences sexual abuse at the hands of a parent has no framework for it, no language for it, no safe person to bring it to. The mind takes the experience and seals it somewhere below conscious access. Not erased. Sealed. And it waits — until the person is safe enough, stable enough, has built enough tools and enough support that the sealed room can finally be opened without destroying everything around it.

I hadn't remembered. The memories hadn't been hiding from me. They'd been protecting me. Until they didn't have to anymore.

I need to say something directly to any person reading this who carries something similar. You are not making it up. The body does not invent this kind of weight. You didn't deserve it. Whatever it was, whatever age you were, whatever the circumstances — you did not deserve it. A child cannot consent to anything done to them by an adult in a position of trust. There is no version of this where it was your fault.

There's something else I need to say here, because I searched for a long time for anyone else saying it and mostly came up empty, and I don't want the next person to have to search as long as I did. Sometimes, during what was done to me, my body responded as though it were something good. That's the part almost nobody talks about. I was a child, and I was terrified, and in the moments when she was — there's no gentler way to say this — gentle with me, my body reacted the way bodies are built to react to gentleness, regardless of who it's coming from or what it means. That doesn't make it good. It doesn't mean I wanted it. A body responding to stimulation is not consent. It is not complicity. It is not proof of anything except that bodies do what bodies do, automatically, beneath the reach of a child's understanding.

And the voice that says maybe it was, maybe you deserved it, maybe you're exaggerating — that voice is not truth. That voice is the echo of the person who did the thing, living on in you, still trying to protect themselves at your expense. You can learn to answer it. It takes time and help and more courage than anyone should have to find. But you can learn to answer it. I know because I did.

Before I tell you how I got to forgiveness, I want to tell you the truth about how long I didn't have it.

I was angry at Bonnie from the time I was old enough to know what anger was until I was forty-six, forty-seven years old. Not a simmering, background, therapized kind of angry. Real anger. The kind that, even now, can still catch in my throat mid-sentence if I let myself go all the way back into it.

I finally got an EMDR appointment in early March 2026, six weeks after the memories had surfaced. EMDR works, in the simplest terms, by asking you to hold the traumatic memory in your mind while your brain is simultaneously engaged by bilateral stimulation — in our sessions, tapping. Left, right, left, right. The trauma gets reprocessed. The emotional charge attached to it begins to dissolve. That's the clinical version. The lived version is different.

You bring the memory out. You hold it. You feel everything it carries and you don't look away. You go from whatever manageable number you start at to a ten, because that's what the memory does when you actually face it rather than seal it off. You break down. And then the tapping stops, and you breathe, and the number drops. And then you do it again. And again. And again. I broke down properly. Not politely. The kind of crying that comes from somewhere below language. When the session ended I said out loud: yes. Yes. We did it. Not because it was over. But because I'd faced it and I was still standing.

In the second session, my counsellor asked me to go back into the scene but this time to place myself — present-day me, forty-seven years old — between Bonnie and the boy in the bed. To stand in the doorway when she opened it. I did. The rush was different this time. Not flight — not the terror that had defined every approach to this memory for months. Something more like fight. Like standing my ground. I was between her and him and she was not getting past me.

At some point I checked in with the boy — with the version of me who had been in that bed. He was still scared. He said he was scared there was more. More that hadn't come out yet. He asked me if I could stop more from coming. I told him the truth. I said I couldn't promise that. I didn't know. I still don't know. But I told him: I will be there with you if it does come out. We will deal with it together. I will not leave you alone in it again. Later, when I could talk again, I said to my counsellor: I think that might be the first time I've ever parented myself. She nodded. She said yes. She said that's exactly what that was.

Two weeks after the second session, on a Saturday morning, I woke up and felt good. Not okay. Good. There is a difference and I know both well enough to name them accurately. I lay there for a moment and noticed it. Then I got up and made coffee and stood at the window for a while. Outside, the world was carrying on above me. This time I didn't mind.

I want to be honest about something, because it would be easy to end this on that Saturday morning and let you believe the work has an ending. I asked my counsellor once, and I've asked myself more times than I can count — how do you tell someone you are broken? I still can't ask it without my eyes filling up. Not because I think I'm completely broken anymore. I've come too far to believe that. But I am rough all over. I have a lifetime of healing still ahead of me. And the idea of letting someone close enough to see all of that — the walls, the scars, the places that still flinch — is the one thing I haven't figured out how to do yet.

That's the part nobody tells you about healing. You can do the work, feel the shift, wake up on a Saturday and genuinely mean it when you say good instead of okay — and still, some mornings, feel like the same broken kid you once were. Both of those things are true at once. Progress doesn't erase the feeling of brokenness. It just means you're finally far enough along to notice you're still moving, even on the days it doesn't feel like it. Blind to it, sometimes. Moving anyway.

If you have spent time wondering why you can't just figure it out the way everyone else seems to — I want you to know that I wrote this for you as much as for myself. You are not broken. You are not behind. You are exactly where the weight of your life has brought you. And if you are still here, still reading, still trying — that is not nothing.

That is everything.