Reclaiming your identity after abuse
Imagine trying to drive your car from the back seat. The steering wheel barely reaches your fingertips, the slightest movement jerks the tires violently left or right, and the windshield is so small you can’t see your blind spots. The brakes are shot—you slam them to the floor and only slow down a little. You need to get where you’re going, but the road feels impossible to navigate.
That’s what life felt like for me at twenty-two, with two kids under two, married to a man who never had my best interests at heart—who scared me.
People often ask why I left, but the “why” isn’t what matters. What matters is how I felt. When you’re the victim of any kind of abuse, people sometimes expect you to justify your pain. They want details, proof, the kind of evidence that satisfies curiosity. But I’ve learned that the details don’t define abuse—the feeling does. And the truth is, I didn’t feel safe.
I felt unsafe, and I didn’t feel like me. I was an empty vessel.
After decades of emotional abrasion left by alcoholic parents, I couldn’t live through another version of that fear. I was tired of walking on eggshells, tired of shrinking myself to survive.
The odds were stacked against me, and every fear told me to stay. I had reasons that made sense—financial security, “help” with the kids, fear of doing it all alone. I’d never lived independently; I left my father’s house as a pregnant teenager and moved straight in with my husband. But a few phone calls to domestic abuse hotlines, a women’s shelter, a church, and a series of quiet signs told me it was time to go.
So I left. I bet on myself. I chose to believe I could create a better life for my children and I that was better than anything I’d known before.
To keep the fear from swallowing me, I broke it down into logistics. I’d get an apartment. I’d pack and move our things. I’d save what I could for rent. And even if I had to use the food shelf some weeks, our home would be safe, quiet, and joyful, something I’d never experienced before.
In the middle of the night, while he worked third shift, I packed everything we owned. Living in a cold squalid 500-square-foot cottage made it easier than you’d think; a few trips in my rusty Subaru Outback and we were free.
As the adrenaline wore off and the dissociation lifted, I felt like I’d finally moved into the driver’s seat of my own life. For the first time, I was steering my own course but not as the fawning daughter of alcoholics, not as a housebound wife and emotional slave, not as a nursing mother, but simply as me.
Teenage motherhood poses a strange kind of loss: instead of mourning who you were before children, you grieve the version of yourself you never got to become. But in the moments between daycare pickups, night classes, and work shifts, I began to discover who I could be now: a woman with her own mind, her own will, her own name.
Not the name given to me by my parents, or the one I legally absorbed in a poor choice “marriage”, but one that felt like just mine and mine alone.
There weren’t many gems to keep from my childhood, but I cherished the stories my mother told about growing up in a big southern family, where neighbors drank sun tea on porches and life felt warm and connected. My narcissistic father had estranged us from that extended family, but I clung to one thread of belonging: my middle name, Mae, passed down through generations of southern women.
I used to dream of the South—the blue Shenandoah Valley, the sparkling Carolina coast. Vermont’s gray stick season never felt like home to me. I belonged somewhere brighter, somewhere that matched the warmth I longed for inside.
When I finally began creating a new identity for myself, one uninterrupted by the whims and selfish motivations of others, I realized my name no longer fit. My first name belonged to a version of me who’d endured too much pain, who’d been called it too often in cruelty. So I rebranded myself: Kayce Mae.
It was the same name in a way, but it became a bigger container, wide enough to hold all that I was becoming. A symbol of rebirth. A clean slate. A phrase that represented new birth in my own mind.
That same courage to rebrand, refresh, and rebecome became my superpower. It’s what’s allowed me to heal, crack open, reform, and heal again. Over the years, I’ve tried on many lives—military wife, college student, software developer, jeweler, banker, nurse, café manager, wedding planner, sales director, broker, ski instructor, and now a yoga teacher building retreats that help others rediscover who they are.
I changed my name, yes. But more importantly, I gave myself permission to change me. To evolve my career, my home, my beliefs, my opinions, my friendships, and my interests - whenever and however I need to.
I practice folding and unfolding, hibernating and reemerging, as often as I want.
And I think that’s the permission we’ve withheld from ourselves—to reinvent without apology.
Have the courage to do so.
I promise you won’t regret it.
When you’re ready to unfold, consider joining some of my upcoming events, workshops and dinners.
Experience the safety of connection in a sacred sisterhood amongst others who are coming as they are, reemerging, and unfolding too.