OCTOBER is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Writing Let Me Down has given me the opportunity to meet so many other women who have graciously and quietly shared with me their own experiences. Some eerily similar to mine, some so very different. But one thing I've found to be consistent is our desire to connect.

In order to write this book, I had no choice but to wade back into the dark waters of this relationship and do whatever it took to remember my unbridled thoughts and feelings as that nineteen-year-old girl. I needed to inhabit her once again in order to remember. And what I found surprised me.

What haunted me most were the moments that I could not easily label. The moments that made me wonder — what role did I play in that? Am I to blame? Am I wrong to be upset about this? Did I imagine it? These were the questions that plagued my dreams. The ones rooted in self-blame and compounding self-scrutiny.

Once I understood this, it became a little bit easier to see why I had never been open about my experience with abuse with anyone in my life, depriving me of that connection. If I couldn't make sense of it myself, even 10+ years later, how could I possibly communicate it while looking into a set of worried eyes sitting across from me?

I am not an expert.

I'm not standing on the other side of the river assuring you that you can make the jump.

I'm not sure I will ever be.

But this October, for the first time since I experienced domestic violence thirteen years ago, my story is out there, in all of its confusing messiness. And thanks to the kind, compassionate, gracious, brilliant women I've met, we've been able to find just a little bit more of that connection, and assure each other that we understand the feeling of not understanding.