The Things We Bury Grow Roots What happens to a child who learns that being loved and being safe are not always the same thing? Before he had words like trauma, dysfunction, or survival, he simply called it home. He learned to read the weather inside a room. To measure footsteps. Watch faces. Stay quiet. Need less. Become easy to love. And when there was nowhere for the fear, shame, anger, and confusion to go— he buried them. But the things we bury do not disappear. They grow roots. The Things We Bury Grow Roots is a raw, lyrical memoir about family, addiction, childhood, survival, and the complicated truth that the people who hurt us can also be the people we love most. There are no simple villains here. There are parents who carried wounds of their own. People who loved deeply and still caused damage. Laughter inside rooms that also held fear. Tenderness beside anger. Children learning how to survive problems they were too young to understand. And eventually, a boy who became a man carrying those lessons with him. Because childhood does not stay in childhood. It follows us into the way we love, fight, forgive, parent, trust, and see ourselves. The survival skills that once kept us safe can quietly become the cages we spend adulthood trying to escape. Looking backward means confronting an uncomfortable truth: Understanding why someone hurt you does not erase what they did. Loving them does not require lying about what it cost you. At once painful, compassionate, darkly human, and deeply personal, The Things We Bury Grow Roots is not a story about blaming a broken family. It is about understanding one. About breaking inherited patterns without pretending the love wasn't real. And about finally giving language to everything a family learned to bury. Because sometimes healing begins with forgiveness. Sometimes it begins with anger. But first— someone has to tell the truth about where the roots began.