From shame to strength: rewriting my story

From shame to strength

For a long time, I didn’t realise I was carrying shame.

It wasn’t something I could name back then. It sat quietly beneath everything, my thoughts, my decisions, the way I saw myself. It shaped my silence in ways I didn’t yet understand.

But looking back now, I see it clearly.

When I lost everything

There was a time in my life when I lost everything. One of the deepest losses was my two children being taken into the care system. For years, I carried the weight of that as if it defined me entirely. I blamed myself for everything. Not just what had happened, but who I believed I must be for it to have happened.

I hid the truth. I told the world I had one child, the one who lived with me. I couldn’t bring myself to speak about my daughters. The stigma felt too heavy. In my mind, I had already been judged: a bad mum. That label stuck, even though I was doing everything I could to raise my son with love, care, and strength.

The shame didn’t stop there

I felt shame that my son had to see me struggling through trauma with little to no support. Shame that he grew up knowing he had two sisters out there in the world he had never met, and still hasn’t. Shame that I couldn’t always manage my mental health while carrying the grief of missing my children.

And even deeper than that shame, that I couldn’t shield my children from everything. That they saw things no child should see. That they witnessed the impact of domestic violence, the bruises, the fear, the survival.

I carried all of this without understanding what it was. I just knew it felt heavy. Quiet. Persistent.

Rewriting my story

But something has been changing.

Through therapy, and through finally being seen and understood by someone who listens without judgement, I’ve started to recognise that what I was carrying was shame, and more importantly, that it was never meant to define me.

Now, instead of letting shame consume me, I’m learning to hold it differently.

I acknowledge it. I understand where it came from. But I don’t let it tell me who I am anymore.

Because when I look at my life now, I see something else too.

I see that young 19-year-old girl hurt, overwhelmed, and doing her best to survive, and I don’t see failure. I see strength. I see resilience. I see someone who faced things that could have broken her completely… and still found a way through.

I am not just my past

I am not just the hardest chapters of my life.

I am someone who is still here. Still growing. Still healing.

And maybe that’s what this journey is really about, not erasing shame, but transforming it. Turning it into understanding. Into compassion. Into something that no longer holds power over who I am becoming.

This is my story.

And I’m finally learning to tell it without shame.

– Kristy Holt, birth mum