Hi, I’m Cheryl!

I grew up with one unmistakable rule — what happens in this house stays in this house.

By thirteen, I had survived childhood sexual abuse by my grandfather — the man who raised me as his own daughter and was supposed to be my protector. I was later groomed and sexually assaulted by a family friend, who is the birth father of my daughter. I delivered her alone in a hospital room and testified in a courtroom against him. Not one person stood unconditionally in my corner for any of it.

I survived anyway.

For years I carried what I had been taught to keep hidden. But silence was never the whole story. Underneath it was determination. Underneath it was faith. And underneath it was a girl who would eventually find her way to education, to healing, and to her voice.

That journey — from silence to purpose — is not just the title of my memoir. It is the architecture of my life.

Today I move through the world with one driving conviction: to be for others what I did not have. That is why I write. That is why I speak. That is why I show up — in every room, for every person who has ever survived something they were never supposed to talk about.

My debut memoir, Still Standing: From Silence to Purpose, took eight years to write — not because the words were hard to find, but because I had to heal before I could speak them.

Silence is no longer my shelter.

And I am just getting started.