There are stories we tell the world, and then there are the stories we tell no one—the ones that live under the skin, shaping our choices, our fears, and our hunger. More Than a Runaway was born from the quiet truth that not all escapes are made with our feet. Some are made with our spirit long before the body ever follows.
When I first began writing what would become my second memoir, I didn’t understand that I was chronicling a reclamation. I thought I was documenting the grit of survival. I thought I was explaining how a girl learns to outrun chaos. What I uncovered instead was a deeper question: What happens when a girl stops running?
The world loves narratives where the rebel fades into redemption, or where the misfit becomes the lesson. But trauma does not hand out linear arcs. Healing rarely conforms to neat storytelling. Very often, healing is inconvenient, unpredictable, and entirely disinterested in permission.
More Than a Runaway is the part of my story that wrestles with identity after rupture—who we become when the labels handed to us no longer fit. The “runaway” label was always too small. Too tidy. Too convenient for the adults who didn’t have the capacity to hold nuance. It flattened a whole human being into a cautionary tale. And like so many young women navigating violence, instability, and betrayal, I wore the label long enough that I began to breathe through it.
But the truth was always bigger than that. I was not running away — I was running toward the first evidence of safety, connection, and agency my nervous system had ever encountered. I was running toward choice. Toward autonomy. Toward the possibility of a future that wasn’t scripted for me by other people’s wounds.
The memoir explores the uncomfortable terrain that exists between trauma and transformation. It asks questions that many women carry: How do we rebuild when our adolescence was spent negotiating survival? How do we learn to be held when we were never taught containment? How do we stop abandoning ourselves once the world stops abandoning us?
Writing it forced me to confront versions of myself that I had outgrown, rejected, or outpaced. It required me to make contact with the girl I spent years trying to distance myself from. And in that confrontation, I met someone I had misunderstood for a very long time: a girl who was strategic, perceptive, and deeply intuitive. A girl who recognized danger before language. A girl whose resilience was not a rebellion—it was intelligence.
There is a pivotal cultural reckoning happening around trauma, especially for women who were classified as “troubled,” “defiant,” “dramatic,” or “difficult.” Those labels were often coping mechanisms misread through the lens of adults who did not have the tools, the resources, or the humility to ask better questions. I wrote More Than a Runaway to widen that lens. To offer a counter-narrative to the harmful archetype of the broken girl who either gets saved or gets lost.
The truth is: many of us saved ourselves.
And we didn’t do it quietly.
The book also lives in the liminal space that trauma survivors eventually encounter—the space where survival is no longer the identity, but healing hasn’t yet become the destination. That space is uncomfortable. It demands that we make meaning out of experiences that were never fair. It asks us to grow roots in soil we did not choose. It asks us to claim our own lives even when the world insists we shouldn’t have survived them.
When I think about why this story mattered enough to publish, I return to the women who were never given an opportunity to speak for themselves. The ones who were institutionalized instead of nurtured. The ones who were criminalized instead of understood. The ones who disappeared into adulthood with no memoir, no witness, no audience. The ones who never got to say: I was more than what you called me.
If you are a woman who had to raise herself, or if you had to leave to live, or if you have ever looked at your younger self and felt protective rather than ashamed, then this book is for you. It honors the girl who improvised her way through danger. It honors the woman who became the sanctuary she needed. And it refuses to apologize for the journey between them.
I no longer believe it is radical to survive. I believe it is radical to tell the truth about survival. To document it. To give it language so that other women recognize themselves not as anomalies, but as ancestors in a lineage of reclamation.
I titled the memoir More Than a Runaway because the world tried to make my story small. I wrote it to make sure it never could be again.
