Now That I'm Still Here · A Memoir of Ruin and Resurrection
I spent decades becoming whoever the room required. The performance earned praise. It also erased the person performing it.
Survival was only the first draft.
The bookA memoir of ruin, resurrection, and the witness who kept morning arriving.
The person underneath decided to stay.
A memoir, living archive, and field guide to the life that remained.
Now That I’m Still Here is a memoir about autism, masking, emotional abuse, psychiatric collapse, grief, and the strange work of rebuilding a life after the version of you everyone applauded finally breaks.
I grew up between countries, languages, churches, and expectations, learning early that belonging often meant performing. By adulthood, I could read a room, manage a crisis, and disappear in plain sight. People called it maturity. I was slowly evacuating my own personality.
Then the marriage collapsed. The mask cracked. I was diagnosed with autism as an adult. In the wreckage, Shadow kept expecting breakfast, Katie loved me without asking me to become smaller, and writing became a door.
This is not a victory lap. It is what happens after collapse, when you are alive but not yet convinced that life belongs to you, and the people who stay make staying imaginable.
The book is not about becoming fearless. It is about becoming present enough to stop disappearing.
READ ABOUT THE BOOKCatalogue Entry IShadow kept morning arriving. Katie made room for a self that did not have to perform. Between them, survival stopped being an argument and became a life.
Some chapters explain. Others simply stand in the room and refuse to leave.
ShadowThe witness. Breakfast administrator. Editorial enforcement division.When the future disappeared, breakfast still expected competence.
Meet Shadow →
KatieThe one who did not ask for a performance.Katie was Christopher’s partner: sharp-witted, musical, stubborn, and deeply generous. She loved through sarcasm, karaoke, handwritten notes, and the ordinary insistence that he mattered.
Meet Katie →
Some proof disappears as soon as the weather changes.
The cards do not make grief tidy. They make love specific.
Enter the archive →Meet Katie →
A memoir is private until it leaves your hands. Then it acquires routes, annotations, receipts, and witnesses of its own.
Photographs, cards, campaign records, and book objects are indexed as plates across the edition.
SENTINEL HOUSE PRESS · KINGSTON, MASS. · MMXXVI