Fighting to Come Home: Finding Your Way Back to Yourself | Angel Willard

So your book is called Fighting to Come Home, and I think the title says a lot about it.

Before you wrote this book, before you became an author, when you look back at your life, where do you think the refight began? Where did it begin from? Was there a particular moment where you realized, "I have to find my way back to myself"?

There was, uh, a few of them, yes, and before my life now, it's been ...

I was carrying a lot of pain I didn't fully understand, and when you experience trauma early in life, it can affect how you see yourself and what you expect from people.

I-- looking back, I see how much of my life was trying to survive, and I-- my life was full of chaos, and it kept me stuck in, uh, those situations.

And I've learned that my past is my past, and yes, those things happened, but they're not my whole story, and that's what I want people to really understand.

I've made a lot of mistakes as well as had a lot of hurt done to me as well, and I live with that, and it's helped me build my, my future though.

I've-- those experiences have helped build who I am today.

Okay, that's wonderful.

So when did coming home means-- What did coming home means to you then compared to what it means to you now?

So back then, I thought home meant finding a place or, you know, having my old life, having, getting my children life or getting back my body before it was in a car accident.

It's very different now.

Today, it more meaningful.

It means being able to look at my life differently.

I see that my past is not who I am, and that I needed to become someone different, and home was not a, a place anymore.

I was fighting to get back to myself after everything, finding who I was past the hurt, the childhood trauma, the being a mom or being incarcerated, being in a catastrophic car accident.

And I now see my life as something completely different than what it did before.

Yeah.

That's wonderful.