Still Here, Still Rising — The Book

I have never written about this on the website before.

Not because it has not been happening. But because some things take time to be ready to share. Some things need to be far enough along before you can talk about them honestly without the ground shifting underneath you.

This is one of those things.

So — for the first time — I want to tell you about the book I have been writing.

I want to tell you why it exists.

Not the polished version. The true one.

This book exists because silence nearly destroyed me. And I do not want silence to keep destroying other people.

Still Here, Still Rising: A Memoir of Survival, Silence and Becoming is not just a memoir about what happened to me. It is a book about what happens after. The years of trying to survive your own survival. The shame. The confusion. The anger. The grief. The broken relationships. The fear of being too much, too damaged, too far gone. The way trauma follows you into adulthood, into love, into fatherhood, into your body, into your sense of who you are.

But it is also a book about still being here.

Who I wrote it for.

I wrote it for the survivors. For the parts of them that have never been believed, never been heard, and never been allowed to speak. I want them to feel — maybe for the first time — that someone is telling the truth in a way that does not make them feel weak, broken, or alone.

I wrote it for the people who love survivors. Because healing is not simple. Love matters enormously — but love does not automatically undo trauma. Survivors can be loving and reactive. Strong and terrified. Funny and deeply wounded. Present one moment and gone inside themselves the next. This book exists to help people understand that — not as an excuse, but as a way of bringing more compassion, patience, and truth into the room.

And I wrote it for the man who thinks it is too late for him.

I want him to know it is not.

What this book is — and is not.

Still Here, Still Rising is not a book about victimhood.

It is a book about survival, silence, masculinity, shame, love, damage, repair, and the long, painful, beautiful act of coming back to yourself.

I am not writing from the resolved distance of recovery. I am writing from inside the ongoing experience of healing — still in therapy, still figuring it out, still becoming. Because I believe that is more honest and more useful than a neat journey from wound to wisdom with a tidy resolution at the end.

This book does not pretend the damage is gone.

It says — the damage is real, the aftermath is real, and you are still here. And that matters more than you know.

Where it comes from.

I am a male survivor of childhood sexual, physical and psychological abuse. I spent decades in silence. I built careers, raised children, crossed oceans, and functioned — sometimes brilliantly — while something enormous ran underneath that nobody could see.

Writing this book was the most difficult and the most necessary thing I have ever done.

It took twenty-five drafts. It took therapy. It took the courage to go back into rooms I had spent my whole life trying to outrun — and to find the language for what was there.

I do not regret a single word of it.

Where it is now.

The book is not yet published.

It is currently in the final stages of preparation before submission to publishers. It has been through professional assessment, structural editing, and more rewrites than I can count. A companion workbook — When Trauma Enters the Room: A Workbook for Survivors and Their Partners — has been written alongside it.

I have held the author’s proof in my hands. I have stood outside an Officeworks store and collected 258 pages of my own life, spiral bound, and felt something shift.

The road to publication is still ahead. But the book exists. And it is ready.

When it finds its publisher — you will be the first to know.

Why it needed to exist.

There is no shortage of survivor memoirs. But there is a profound shortage of books written by male survivors — from inside the experience rather than from the resolved distance of recovery — that speak directly and honestly to the men still in silence.

And to the people who love them.

Still Here, Still Rising fills that gap.

Because some stories are too important to stay buried.

And because somewhere, there is a man reading this right now who thinks it is too late for him.

It is not.

Still here. Still rising. Still becoming.