Amazon Link: Rebirth Isn’t Painless

From The Author

When I wrote Small Town Gayby, I called it a fictional memoir—a mosaic of truth and storytelling that pieced together the outlines of my life into something whole. At the time, I needed a way to tell the story in one breath, to get it all out, to survive it in the telling. But the truth is, some chapters of our lives aren’t just chapters. They’re volumes. And some pain is so dense, so defining, it demands its own space on the shelf.

This book is one of those volumes.

Rebirth Isn’t Painless is not a retelling—it’s an excavation. A deeper dive into one of the most traumatic, confusing, and silencing periods of my youth. I’m not writing this to glorify my survival. I’m writing it because I remember what it felt like to be fifteen and feel like the world wanted to scrub the queer right out of me. I remember the smell of Pine-Sol and fear. I remember silence being safer than honesty. And I remember pretending I was being healed, when I was only being hollowed out.

This story is for every person who’s been gaslit by faith. For anyone who was taught their identity was a wound, and who learned to perform repentance just to stay alive. It’s for the quiet rebels, the ones who survived with their truth folded up in the corners of their minds like a secret note.

Trauma is like smoke in your lungs after a fire—you may have made it out of the blaze, but you’ll be coughing it up for years. It stays with you, coats the inside of your life, makes you relearn how to breathe. But it doesn’t define the air you’re breathing now. It doesn’t get the final say.

I hope this book meets someone in the dark and reminds them there’s life after the performance. That truth has its own quiet power. That survival isn’t shameful—it’s sacred.

And most of all, that even after everything: you’re still here.