Still Here: Letters on Suicide Loss, Trauma, and Choosing to Stay (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798198234802)

"How are you still alive?"

A therapist asked Misty Dawn that question two years after her father took his own life.

At the time, she was on seven psychiatric medications pushed to the highest doses possible - and still not okay.

She laughed.

She said it wasn't for lack of trying.

The therapist told her to write a book.

She didn't.

Not for twenty years.

Still Here is the book she finally wrote: thirteen letters written over twelve days, counting down to the anniversary of the day her father chose to leave.

Raw, intimate, and emotionally unflinching, this memoir speaks openly about the things grief stories often avoid:

• childhood abuse
• assault
• dissociation
• survival
• silence
• toxic relationships
• and the exhausting reality of trying to stay alive while appearing functional

But beneath every page sits the same question she has carried since she was twenty-four years old:

How am I still here?

This is her honest answer.

Not a polished redemption story.
Not a clean healing timeline.
Just a woman finally speaking after decades of silence.

For readers of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, and Stephanie Foo's What My Bones Know.

For survivors.
For the people who never had words for what happened to them.
For anyone who has ever wondered if they were "too damaged" to still become whole.

You are not alone.