Moana Hope

And I knew that all these things meant something.

I just didn't figure it out until I started to work through these things with my therapist.

Yeah, I don't even call him my dad anymore, to be fair.

Like when I talk to my mom about him, I just call him Gary.

I've made peace with it, and I don't carry that around anymore.

So I've made peace with it.

I've gone through all of the emotions of it, and I've...

I don't want to say, no, I will say I've forgiven him because I need to let that go because I don't want to carry that.

But that's all I knew.

And I think it's like people who have not been through it won't understand it respectfully.

It's like, you know, I watched my mum go through domestic violence and even for her it took her a long time to understand it was domestic violence.

And people always say to people who go through domestic violence, why didn't you leave?

It's not that easy.

It really isn't.

And so when you go through something as a kid and first of all, you haven't processed it and that's all you know.

That's what you're taught is love.

That's all you think it is.

So that's what you call love, right?

And so once I had the ability to go, hey, I'm going to talk about this or I'm going to work through this and I started and everything I learned was hard and every emotion I worked through and every trigger I had to get to the bottom of to understand why it made me who I was and

It just made me more free and less heavy.