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Healing out loud with Jocelyn, 40 Kingsway Crescent, Moncton, NB (2026)

03/12/2026

My Story Isn’t Pretty

My story isn’t the kind people like to hear.

It’s messy. It’s heavy. It’s uncomfortable.

But it’s the truth.

I was a little girl when things first started to break inside me. My father leaving left a hole I didn’t understand how to fill. Then came an abusive stepfather. Teachers who were supposed to protect children but instead became another place where fear lived. Home didn’t feel safe. School didn’t feel safe. For a long time, nowhere really did.

By thirteen I had already learned something most children should never have to know.

The world has teeth.

I ran away. I ended up in city cells. I was pregnant and alone, facing decisions no thirteen year old should ever have to make. I had to make choices about my own body and my own future when I was still a child myself.

There was violence. There were beatings. There were moments where survival meant doing whatever it took to make it through another day.

Experiences like that don’t just disappear.

They live in your nervous system. They follow you into adulthood.

For me, that pain eventually turned into addiction. Drugs became a way to quiet everything that was too loud inside my head. The memories, the fear, the shame, the trauma that had built up over years.

But addiction brought its own darkness.

There was sexual manipulation. Situations where my worth felt tied to what someone could take from me or what I could give just to survive.

I lost pieces of myself during those years.

When I had my children, something inside me wanted to be better so badly it hurt. I desperately wanted to stay sober. Sometimes I believed that if I kept having babies, I would stay sober because I would never use while pregnant.

Motherhood became one of the things I held onto to try to keep myself alive.

But even that journey wasn’t easy.

Having a sick child changed me in ways I wasn’t prepared for. The fear of losing your son never leaves your body. It becomes something that lives in your chest. The hospital visits, the constant worry, the trauma of watching your baby fight to survive, never accepting fully that he was diabetic…it leaves scars people can’t always see.

That experience left me with PTSD.

At the same time I was raising two very different children, each with their own needs, their own challenges, their own worlds. I loved them fiercely, but I felt like I was drowning most days because I had no one who truly understood what my life looked like.

I felt completely alone.

I clung to friendships even when they were toxic because those people felt like family. When you grow up without stability, sometimes you hold on to anyone who stays… even when they hurt you.

Because the idea of having no one at all feels worse.

My life has never been a straight line. It has been a long road of trauma, survival, mistakes, motherhood, healing, and learning how to keep going even when I felt like falling apart.

And I know when people read my story, some will judge it.

But I’m not ashamed of where I came from anymore.

Those experiences are part of my history. They shaped me, but they do not define the woman I am today.

Today I’m someone who is still healing. Still learning. Still choosing sobriety and truth every single day.

And telling my story isn’t about reliving the pain.

It’s about refusing to hide from it anymore.

Because there are so many people walking around carrying stories just as heavy as mine.

They’re just too afraid to say them out loud.

I’m not hiding anymore.

I’m healing out loud.

03/08/2026

Some days I get scared after I hit “post.”

I sit there wondering who is reading my words and what they must be thinking about me.

Do they think I’m messed up in the head?
Do they think I’m broken?
Do they read my stories and judge the girl I used to be?

Sometimes the thought creeps in that maybe I should just delete it all. Every post. Every story. Every piece of my past I’ve put out into the world.

Because telling the truth like this is terrifying.

But then I remind myself of something important.

I am not that girl anymore.

Those stories are my history, not my identity.

The girl in those posts was hurting. She was lost. She was trying to survive in the only ways she knew how. And I refuse to hate her for that anymore.

In fact… I’m proud of her.

I’m proud of the scars I carry.
I’m proud of the story that shaped me.
And for the first time in my life, I can honestly say I love myself.

Writing all of this isn’t about attention.

It’s about survival.

There are days when putting these words on paper is the very thing that keeps me from relapsing. It’s cathartic. It’s how I release the weight of things I carried silently for so many years.

Speaking it out loud takes the power away from it.

Every time I write, I feel like I’m reaching back through time and holding the little girl inside me who thought she wasn’t enough. The girl who felt abandoned, ashamed, broken.

I’m learning to love her now.

And if someone reads my story and judges me for my past or for the thoughts I had when I was at my lowest… that’s okay.

Because those thoughts don’t define who I am today.

What defines me now is the courage to face my demons. To open the closet where the skeletons lived for so long and let the light in.

This has become my world. My healing.

And strangely enough, it’s making me happy for the first time in my entire life to speak my truth.

My hope is that somewhere out there someone reads these words and recognizes a piece of themselves in them.

And maybe… just maybe… it gives them the courage to start speaking about their own struggles too.

Because the moment we stop hiding our pain is often the moment real healing begins.

And that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Healing. Out loud.

03/08/2026

People often think eating disorders start in the teenage years.

Mine started when I was six.

That was the year my father left.

At six years old you don’t understand adult decisions. You don’t understand complicated relationships or why people walk away. All you understand is that someone who was supposed to stay… didn’t.

I remember the confusion more than anything.

I remember waiting.

Waiting for him to come back. Waiting for someone to explain it in a way that made sense. Waiting for the feeling in my chest to stop hurting.

But no explanation ever really came that a six year old heart could understand.

So my mind did what children’s minds do.

It filled in the blanks.

I told myself there must be something wrong with me.

Maybe I was too loud.
Maybe I was too difficult.
Maybe I was too much.

Somewhere deep inside me I started believing that if I had been better… smaller… easier to love… maybe he would have stayed.

That belief planted a seed that would grow into something very dark.

I started looking at my body like it was the problem.

I remember staring at my thighs as a little girl and thinking they were enormous. In my mind they looked like big loaves of bread. I would imagine cutting my legs off at the knees so I wouldn’t have to see them anymore.

When I sat down and my skin folded even slightly, I didn’t see a normal little girl. I saw a huge, fat, ugly child staring back at me.

And my nose hadn’t grown into my face yet, so when I looked in the mirror all I could see was Miss Piggy.

That’s how cruel my thoughts were… at six years old.

I tried to tell my mom once that something felt wrong in my head. That the way I thought about food and my body didn’t feel normal.

She dismissed it quickly.

I don’t think she wanted to believe a child that young could already have an eating disorder. It was easier to brush it off than to accept that something serious might be happening.

But inside my head the war kept getting louder.

I stopped eating certain foods completely. I would only eat vegetables on my plate and leave the meat untouched. Things people loved like eggs, butter, and meat disgusted me. The texture, the smell, everything about it made me feel sick.

I became extremely picky with food.

I would obsess for hours writing down what I ate. Planning it. Controlling it.

Some days I wouldn’t eat at all.

Eventually my body would start fighting back and I would get constant diarrhea because I had starved myself for so long.

And the sickest part?

I loved it.

Because in my mind it meant I was losing more weight.

Every thought in my head revolved around food, hunger, and being fat.

It consumed me.

I was sick for a very long time.

When I got pregnant at eighteen, my body was incredibly unhealthy. I still had a six pack until I was eight months pregnant because I was terrified of gaining weight.

Even while carrying my child, the voice in my head was louder than my own instinct to nourish my body.

There was no way I was going to get fat.

Not even for my unborn baby.

That was the war inside my head every single day.

A war that started the year a six year old girl felt abandoned and decided she must be the problem.

Eating disorders aren’t about vanity.

They are about pain, control, and the stories we start believing about ourselves when we are far too young to understand them.

This is a part of my story I’ve never said out loud before.

But healing out loud means telling the truth.

Even the parts that are hardest to say.

03/08/2026

I didn’t start using drugs to party.

I started using drugs so I wouldn’t have to eat.

That’s the truth people don’t expect.

Long before addiction took over my life, I was already fighting a quiet war with my body. I remember standing in mirrors as a young girl, picking myself apart piece by piece. I felt too tall, too big, too noticeable. Like the only way to be accepted was to make myself smaller.

Food became the enemy.

I would skip meals and feel proud of the ache in my stomach. That hunger felt like control. Like I was winning some invisible battle no one else could see.

But hunger doesn’t stay quiet forever.

Eventually your body fights back.

And that’s where the drugs came in.

Co***ne. Stimulants. Anything that killed my appetite and kept me wired enough that I didn’t have to feel my body asking for food. Drugs became the most powerful tool I had to control my weight, my hunger, and my emotions all at the same time.

I could go days barely eating.

My body ran on chemicals instead of nourishment. My heart racing. My mind spinning. But in my head I was still convincing myself I was in control.

People would say things like, “You look great.”

They didn’t see the sores in my mouth from drugs.
They didn’t see the shaking hands.
They didn’t see the emptiness inside me that went far beyond food.

Addiction and my eating disorder became tangled together in the darkest way.

If I didn’t eat, I could use more.
If I used more, I didn’t feel hunger.
And if I stayed numb, I didn’t have to feel the deep self-hatred that lived underneath it all.

What looked like weight loss to the outside world was actually me slowly destroying myself.

Sobriety forced me to face something I had been avoiding for years.

My body.

Learning how to eat normally again after addiction and an eating disorder is a battle people rarely talk about. There is no applause for finishing a meal. No one sees the mental fight that happens in your head with every bite.

But healing means facing all of it.

Not just the drugs.

The shame.
The control.
The girl who believed she had to starve herself to be worthy.

So today I’m saying the quiet part out loud.

My addiction didn’t just numb my pain.

For a long time… it helped me hide my eating disorder.

And recovery means learning how to nourish the same body I once tried to disappear.

That’s a different kind of courage.

And it’s one I’m still practicing every single day.

03/07/2026

18 years.
Seven kids.
A lifetime of war stories and love.

And through it all…

it has always been him.

When we met I was 25.
He was 36.

Two people at completely different places in life somehow colliding in the middle.

He came with two boys.
I came with one.

Three little boys between us when this journey started.

We weren’t starting fresh.
We were stepping straight into family life… learning how to love, parent, and survive all at the same time.

Then life kept moving…

and our family kept growing.

Four more babies joined the chaos.

More laughter.
More sleepless nights.
More toys on the floor.
More reasons to keep fighting for the life we were building together.

Now the three boys we started with are grown and starting lives of their own, and we still have four little ones running through our house filling it with noise, chaos, and love every single day.

And life didn’t make it easy.

Two of our children are autistic.
One lives with diabetes and serious medical challenges.
All four of the little ones we share together are beautifully neurodivergent.

Parenting them has stretched us in ways we never expected.

Doctor appointments.
Hospital scares.
IEP meetings.
Learning how to see the world through their eyes.

But life didn’t just give us beautiful moments.

It gave us war stories too.

The addiction years.
The years we lost ourselves.
The years where everything we built felt like it was hanging by a thread.

Moments where we didn’t recognize who we had become.
Moments where walking away would have been easier.

Most couples don’t survive those chapters.

But somehow…

through the chaos, heartbreak, mistakes, and rebuilding…

we grew together.

We healed.
We fought for our family.
We fought for our life.

Today I’m 42.
He’s 53.

And when I look at him now after everything we’ve been through…

I know something most people spend a lifetime trying to understand.

The strongest love stories aren’t the perfect ones.

They’re the ones that go through hell…

and still choose each other anyway.

After 18 years, seven kids, addiction, healing, neurodivergent chaos, and a lifetime of war stories…

it has always been him.

If you’re lucky enough to have someone who has stood beside you through your worst chapters… hold on to them.

Because love that survives the storm…

is the rarest kind there is🖤

03/07/2026

Excerpt: Chapter: When Derek Was Taken

There are moments in childhood when the world suddenly stops making sense.

The day Derek was taken was one of those moments.

I remember the air in the house feeling wrong before anyone said anything. The kind of tension that sits in your chest and makes you quiet without knowing why. My mom was moving around the house differently. Faster. Shorter breaths. Her voice tight and sharp like she was trying to hold something together that was already falling apart.

Then we got the call from the school.

Derek was gone.

Not missing from class for a few minutes. Not in the office. Not at recess.

Gone.

Someone had taken him from school in the middle of the day.

And the most terrifying part was that at first we had no idea who had taken him.

I remember the confusion before the fear fully landed. Adults talking over each other. Phones ringing. My mom asking the same questions again and again.

Where did he go?
Who picked him up?
Who took him?

No one seemed to have an answer.

When you are a child, school feels like the safest place in the world. It is where adults are supposed to protect you. Where rules are supposed to keep things from going wrong.

But that day shattered that belief.

Someone had walked into my brother’s school and taken him.

Just like that.

For a while we did not know if he was safe. We did not know if he was scared. We did not know if we would ever see him again.

Later we would find out the truth.

His father had taken him.

But in those first hours, and then days, all we had was fear and waiting.

Days started blending together after that.

Twenty seven of them.

I did not understand the legal words people used. Custody. Rights. Courts. None of it made sense to me as a kid. All I knew was that Derek was missing from the house and the silence he left behind felt enormous.

His room stayed the same.
His things stayed where he left them.

But he was not there.

I remember my mom standing in the kitchen staring out the window for long stretches of time. Like if she watched the road long enough, maybe he would appear at the end of it.

It was around her birthday.

Instead of cake and candles, the house was heavy with worry and fear. The kind of fear that creeps into every corner of a home and settles there.

I remember wondering if he was scared.

I remember wondering if he thought we had abandoned him.

That thought haunted me the most.

Twenty seven days does not sound like a long time to an adult.

But to a child, it feels like forever.

When he finally came back, everything should have gone back to normal.

But something had shifted in all of us.

You do not go through something like that without it leaving a mark.

Even now, when I think about Derek, that moment sits at the beginning of a long chain of things none of us knew were coming.

Sometimes trauma does not arrive all at once.

Sometimes it shows up in small fractures.

And that day was the first crack.

© 2026 Jocelyn Ezechiel | Healing Out Loud: A Memoir | All Rights Reserved.

03/07/2026

Every day on my drive, I pass the old trailer park.

Most people wouldn’t notice it.
Just another stretch of trailers along the road.

But when I drive by, my eyes always drift over there.

Because that place knows a version of me most people will never meet.

That’s where I lost pieces of my soul.

Sometimes when I pass it, little flashes hit me out of nowhere.

Not memories I sit down and think about.
More like quick, violent reminders that show up in my mind whether I want them or not.

I see the girl I used to be.

The girl with sores in her mouth from using so much.
The girl who woke up already sick and desperate.
The girl who would jump in her car before the kids even woke up.

Half drunk.
Jonzing.
Shaking.

Driving to the dealer like it was the only thing in the world that mattered.

I remember parking down the street, walking back to my place all sketchy, hoping my neighbours didn’t see me sneaking inside.

Heart racing.
Hands shaking.

Then going straight to the mirror.

One big line.

Then another.

Then another.

And after that I would disappear into my room for the rest of the day, shutting the world out while I kept doing line after line like that was my job.

That was my life.

That trailer park saw the worst version of me.

The version that didn’t think she would ever escape.

Now I drive past it on my way to work.
Sober.
A mother present in her children’s lives.
A woman studying to become an addiction counsellor.

And every time I pass it, I feel two things at the same time.

Grief for the girl who was dying there.

And gratitude for the woman who survived her.

Because the truth is…

That place didn’t just take things from me.

It also reminds me every single day of how far I’ve come. 🖤

Healing Out Loud

03/03/2026

“You’re so strong.”

People say it like it’s a compliment.

And I know it is.

But sometimes… it lands heavy.

Because the person hearing it
didn’t choose strength.

She adapted to survival.

For years my best friend would tell me,
“You’re so strong.”

And I loved her for saying it.
I know she meant resilience.
She meant admiration.
She meant pride.

But quietly, inside, I was thinking:

I don’t want to be strong anymore.
I want to be safe.
I want to be held.
I want a season where I’m not surviving something.

When you’ve had to be strong long enough,
it stops feeling empowering
and starts feeling exhausting.

Strength often means:

You handled what should have broken you.
You kept going when you shouldn’t have had to.
You carried things no one saw.
You regulated yourself because no one else could.

Being “the strong one” usually means
you didn’t have another option.

Sometimes the strongest person in the room
is the one who has never been allowed to fall apart.

So if you’re the one everyone calls strong…

It’s okay to admit you’re tired.
It’s okay to want softness.
It’s okay to want a life that doesn’t require constant resilience.

Strength is admirable.

But peace is better.

And some of us are not trying to be strong anymore.
We’re trying to finally feel safe.

Healing Out Loud 🤍

03/02/2026

People think addiction is about the drugs.

They imagine white powder.
Pills in orange bottles.
Needles.
Bottles hidden in cupboards.

They think the substance is the story.

It isn’t.

The drugs were never the point.

They were the solution.

Addiction is not born the first time you use.

It is born the first time you learn that your feelings are too big for your body.

The first time fear lives in your nervous system so long it becomes home.

The first time you realize that staying quiet keeps you safer than speaking.

For me, addiction began long before co***ne ever touched my bloodstream.

It began in hypervigilance.
In scanning rooms.
In avoiding eye contact with authority.
In learning to be small.

It began in a house where emotions were either explosive or ignored.
In contracts written as punishment.
In a nervous system that never learned how to rest.

Drugs didn’t create a wound.

They numbed one.

Co***ne didn’t make me reckless.

It made me feel powerful in a body that had always felt braced.

Ativan didn’t make me weak.

It let my shoulders drop for the first time in years.

Alcohol didn’t destroy my life.

It quieted the noise in my head long enough for me to breathe.

That is what no one understands.

When someone uses, they are not chasing a high.

They are chasing relief.

Relief from memories.
Relief from shame.
Relief from the constant hum of “not enough.”

Addiction is not about pleasure.

It is about pain.

It is about a nervous system that never felt safe and found a chemical shortcut.

And here’s the part that makes people uncomfortable:

If you had lived in my body, with my wiring, with my history, you might have reached for the same thing.

Addiction is not a moral failure.

It is an attempt to survive unprocessed trauma.

The drugs were loud.

The trauma was silent.

And we tend to punish the loud things.

We rarely ask about the quiet ones.

When people said, “Why don’t you just stop?” what they were really asking was, “Why don’t you just feel everything you’ve been running from?”

Because stopping the drug meant feeling the grief.
The abandonment.
The fear.
The guilt.
The rage.
The shame.

Sobriety is not the removal of a substance.

It is the removal of anesthesia.

And when the anesthesia wears off, the surgery begins.

That’s the work no one claps for.

That’s the part that nearly broke me.

Addiction wasn’t my love story with drugs.

It was my untreated trauma asking to be seen.

And when I finally stopped numbing it, it did not whisper.

It roared.

And that is when I learned to Heal Out loud.

03/02/2026

I did not look like an addict.

That’s what I told myself.

I had babies on my hip.
I packed lunches.
I showed up to birthday parties with wrapped gifts and mascara on.

I was the mom who remembered extra socks.
The wife who smiled in photos.
The daughter who said she was “just tired.”

No one sees co***ne on a woman who folds laundry.

The first line I did that morning was in the bathroom while my children were eating cereal.

There is a specific shame in knowing your toddler can hear you sniff.

I locked the door.
Turned the fan on.
Ran the tap.

I told myself it was just to take the edge off.
Just to be more patient.
Just to be better.

Addiction lies in your own voice.

I came out smiling.
Wiped my nose.
Kissed sticky cheeks.

“Mommy’s just getting ready.”

Ready for what?

To survive myself.

There is something terrifying about how functional you can be while falling apart.

I could organize a playdate while calculating how much money we had left.
I could rock a baby to sleep while texting a dealer.
I could sit at the dinner table with powder still sitting in my bloodstream.

The scariest part was not losing control.

It was believing I was still in it.

I told myself I would never use around my kids.

So I used in bathrooms.
In parked cars.
At weddings.
At my own wedding.

I told myself I would never drive high.

So I drove high, but carefully.
Slow.
Alert.
Hyper-focused.
Convincing myself that awareness cancelled out danger.

I told myself I would never choose drugs over them.

And then I left during speeches.
Left during dinners.
Left during moments I can never get back.

Addiction does not show up like a monster.

It shows up like permission.

You deserve this.
You’ve had a hard day.
Just one.
No one will know.

And for a long time, no one did.

I still brushed their hair.
Still attended appointments.
Still advocated when doctors dismissed my concerns about autism.
Still fought for my kids like a lion.

But there were nights I lay in bed beside Stace, heart pounding, jaw tight, staring at the ceiling, thinking:

If they knew who I really was, they would take them from me.

That was the line I never said out loud.

The fear of losing my children didn’t stop me.

It just made me sneakier.

That’s the part no one wants to admit.

I loved my children.

I loved them ferociously.

And I still chose drugs.

Both can be true.
That is the horror of it.

Addiction didn’t erase my love.

It split me in half.

There was the mother.
And there was the woman chasing silence.

And every day, they went to war inside my chest.

03/02/2026

It’s becoming reality. I’m so proud of myself for working this hard to make my dream finally come true. Stay tuned…the cover is designed, the words are being written. One Day At A time…….eeeeeek💕

03/01/2026

Nobody talks about this part of mental health.

The part where you look fine.

You go to work.
You answer texts.
You show up for your kids.
You even laugh.

And then you sit in your car in silence because your brain won’t turn off.

The exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.
The anxiety that has no clear reason.
The grief that lives in your body.
The memories that still sting years later.

You’re not “over it.”
You just got better at hiding it.

High functioning does not mean healed.

It means you learned how to survive without collapsing in public.

Some of us aren’t dramatic.
We’re disciplined.

We cry quietly.
We spiral privately.
We self regulate because we have to.
We keep going because people depend on us.

And sometimes the strongest person in the room
is the one fighting the loudest battle inside their own head.

If that’s you…
I see you.

Staying is strength.

Healing Out Loud

Healing out loud with Jocelyn

03/12/2026

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