Acknowledgment:
This is not death.
This is not healing.
This is not freedom.
It is absence after adaptation.
Recognition:
To the things that shaped me.
To the times I overstayed my welcome.
To the ones I once loved.
To the ones who stayed.
Author's Note:
This book was written from inside experience, not from theory.
It came from patterns learned early, repeated often, and mistaken for love more than once. From spaces where attention was conditional, silence was instruction, and endurance passed for virtue. From trying to understand how care becomes transactional, how desire attaches itself to uncertainty, and how survival can harden into identity.
Some of what appears here reflects mental states I have lived in. Not for spectacle. Not for explanation. Only as context. Only as consequence.
Nothing in these pages accuses. Nothing absolves. Inheritance is not a verdict. Understanding does not undo responsibility. Harm can exist without becoming harmless.
This book does not offer repair. It does not offer resolution. It only asks that what was shaped, what was adapted, and what continues be honestly placed.
If there is recognition here, let it stand