Why I Wrote OutRaised
OutRaised: Finding My Voice Beyond Foster Care isn’t simply a book about foster care. It is a book about a life I lived and the pieces of that life that helped me understand who I am.
I was the child who wondered where she belonged. I was the teenager who stepped into the world thinking she was grown, when there was so much she didn’t yet know. I made mistakes. I carried questions I couldn’t answer. I survived, I flourished, and I became a woman who can now look back at that younger girl with an understanding I didn’t have then.
I wrote OutRaised for her.
The book is told through stories and memories, reflections and insights, poetry and lyrics, and photographs from different chapters of my life. I didn’t set out to tell you everything that ever happened to me. I wanted to share the moments, questions and people that shaped me and helped me understand who I have become.
There is hurt in these pages, but there is also humour, music, faith, forgiveness, family and growth. Forgiveness doesn’t mean I have forgotten. Understanding doesn’t mean that everything that happened was okay. It means I can look back without allowing the past to have the final word on who I am.
Through OutRaised Voices, I’ve had the privilege of listening to people share their stories, asking the questions and creating space for voices that deserve to be heard. OutRaised became my opportunity to turn that same attention toward my own story.
In a way, I finally included myself in the conversation.
I don’t know exactly who will see themselves in these pages. Maybe it will be someone who grew up in foster care. Maybe someone who has questioned where they belong, carried unanswered questions, lived with scars, forgiven without forgetting, or simply reached a point in life where they are trying to make sense of how all the pieces fit together.
Perhaps those are my people. My tribe.
If OutRaised finds its way to them and something in my story helps them recognize something in their own, then sharing mine will have meant even more.
Because every life has a story. Mine began one way, took turns I could never have predicted, and it isn’t finished yet.
I was there.
I lived it.
I am here.
And I’m still becoming.