PREFACE

To Those Who Dwell in the Land of Death-Shade

There are places so dark the language breaks.

Not the darkness of midnight or storm,
but the kind that lives inside bone.
The kind you don’t notice at first,
because you were born inside it.
The kind that teaches you to fold yourself
before you’ve even learned your own shape.

I have lived in that kind of darkness.
And I know some of you have too.

The scriptures call it a “land of death-shade.”
Ezekiel calls it a valley—
a field of bones so dry, even memory has cracked.
I didn’t read that passage and find metaphor.
I found a mirror.

This book is not a manual.
It won’t walk you step by step through healing.
It’s not a method or a prescription.

It’s a witness.
A story.
A breath offered into the places where breath was once taken.

It began, oddly enough, with a memory of a book.
I was sitting quietly one afternoon, in a season of personal and professional transition—
in between things, in the hush of uncertainty.
And for the first time in years, I thought about Flowers in the Attic.

I don’t know how it found me.
I don’t remember picking it up.
But I remember what it felt like to read it—
as a child,
in a body that already knew how to disappear,
in a world that never acknowledged what had happened.

And here was this strange, aching book
that didn’t flinch.
That named horrors.
That said, This happens. It’s not just you.

I didn’t need the plot.
I needed the permission.
I needed to know that a story could hold what I could not speak.

And in that quiet moment, I knew:
I wanted to write something that could do the same.

Something that doesn’t rush to resolution.
Something that can sit with sorrow,
without trying to sanitize it.
Something that doesn’t make healing a performance.

I believe in light.
I believe in resurrection.
But not the kind that skips the valley.
Not the kind that pretends we weren’t scattered first.

Section One is called “Dwellers in a Land of Death-Shade” because some of us lived there far longer than anyone knew.
Before church.
Before theology.
Before there were words like “attachment” or “personhood.”
There was silence.
There was splitting.
There was the slow, strange survival of a body that kept living while the soul curled up far away.

This section does not begin in the light.
It begins where we learned to disappear.
Where breath became threat.
Where boundaries were not broken but erased.
Where childhood was not lost but never allowed.

There will be no neat transitions here.
Just fragments.
Just truth.

I offer this with a gentle warning:
We will walk through hard things.
Stories of dismemberment—not just spiritual, but human.
Stories of bodies that were not safe,
and the quiet terror of being the “good one” while drowning.
You are free to skip, pause, breathe, leave, or come back.
You are always free.

And I offer this with an even gentler hope:
That somehow, between the lines, you will feel seen.
That this story will hold a mirror to yours—not to define it, but to dignify it.
That you might dread your body a little less.
That you might exhale more deeply.
That you might find space again.

When I began my company, Living Mangaliso—
Mangaliso, a Zulu word meaning “you are an amazement”—
I wrote these words:

You are a person.
In your personhood, you inhabit a body.
In inhabiting a body, you take up space.
And learning how to take up space is the journey of a lifetime.

I didn’t write that from theory.
I wrote it from the valley.

For some of us, personhood was never protected.
Attachment never formed.
Space was never safe.

But even in the valley of dry bones,
God asks,
Can these bones live?

This book is not the answer.
It’s the leaning in.
It’s the slow, sacred turn of a body listening for breath again.

So if you dwell in the land of death-shade,
this is for you.

There is no light here that demands your performance.
There is no hope here that silences your pain.

Just one voice—mine—
telling the truth,
and offering you a place to rest
while your own voice finds its way back.

You are a person.
In your personhood, you inhabit a body.
You are not too much.
You are not too broken.
And you are not alone.