An Open Letter: Found in the Fire

To the ones who labeled me, the ones who left me, and the ones who survived like me—this is for you.
This is my story, not as a theory or diagnosis, but as a life lived in full flame. I was born into chaos, carried through trauma, and carved by fire. And yet, I’m still standing.
At just seven years old, I saw my uncle through a glass wall after he was shot in the head. We were told it was a wreck. It was a lie. It was point blank to the back of the head. I witnessed grief dressed as silence. Men in uniform guarded his funeral, but no one guarded me when a strange man tried to pick me up at school. No one stood between evil and my family. I have spent my life in hiding. Evil exists and it’s protected!
My mother was institutionalized instead of supported. Diagnosed instead of heard. She forgot she had children—drugged, drooling, bound in a rubber room, ECT, LSD, and behavior modification could fix her. Protocols and funding followed for women seeking divorce. She failed a personality test! It was hysteria, or a nervous breakdown!
Escaped by her sister, only to be placed on disability, while we survived in shadows. Records of treatment now purged! Brick and mortar mental institutions now showing on America’s Most Haunted!
We moved constantly. Lived in a housing project which was the nicest place I had lived. Changed schools endlessly. I graduated, barely. My brothers didn’t have a chance. We had each other but no electric. A cold Christmas warmed by an open gas oven door were my best memories.
I entered welding to escape poverty, My veil became a welding hood. I burned, I broke, and breathed in molten metal 16 long years.  My body paid the price no one warned me about. And I still had no safety net. Feminism told me I could do anything, but never warned me I might die trying. All the glitter wasn’t so glamorous.
I’ve been called privileged by some, privileged by first impressions, broken, a miracle, or an outlier by textbook theory, dead by those who wanted me and my brothers ashes sent home in an envelope to my family.
Theories tried to define me. Experts tried to fix me. But the only one who ever truly met me in the fire… was Jesus. He found me the day the church rejected me into their book of elect.
So I made this space for the unheard. The ones who burned quietly. The ones erased by systems and misdiagnoses. The ones who never fit into categories, but carry truth behind their eyes.
This is not a cry for pity. It’s a cry for truth. There is no statute of limitations on trauma. No expiration date on truth. And no box that can contain the power of a survivor refined by the fire of God.

—LaJune