An Excerpt from Letters from the Netherwood
Trust is one of the deepest themes woven into Sera, Lily, & The Fox Prince. Not as a soft idea, but as a backbone. As an invisible thread that holds when fear gets loud, and doubt tries to speak in a voice that sounds like your own.
I didn’t realize how personal that theme was for me in my youth through my early twenties.
There was a season in my life when I trusted with all of myself—open, full-bodied trust that didn’t keep a tally. And then, little by little, trust began to fracture. My parents divorced but remained close for a time… until a new influence entered the picture and relationships shifted in ways that changed the shape of my world. Later, in my early twenties, I found myself in a marriage where self-sacrifice was not romance—it was survival. If you want more of that context, it lives in my Wild-hearted Bravery letter.
After enough breaks, I developed certain “truths” that were really just protection in disguise:
Everyone will let me down eventually.
Trust nobody.
Enjoy it while you can… until the other shoe drops.
That “other shoe” became an inevitability I carried—armor that felt like wisdom.
But therapy, time, and healing love have taught me something different: trust can be rebuilt. Not blindly. Not perfectly. But humanly—through repair, understanding, and the steady proof of someone who continues to show up.
This is the fervent kind of trust I wrote into the heart of the Netherwood. It is the kind that holds even when fear arrives wearing a familiar face.
Read the full letter on Substack: Letters from the Netherwood → https://substack.com/home/post/p-189641086?source=queue
Content note: the full letter includes references to divorce dynamics, relational trauma, and emotional abuse. Please read gently.