Start Small. Start Scared. Start Now.

I spent a long time being told who I was. Shaped by my childhood and by the hair industry.

I was raised in a Pentecostal church — my mum’s water literally broke during a Sunday service. My grandfather a pastor. My grandmother sat on the board. I attended the private school attached to the church that was a preschool to senior.

On the outside, we looked like the perfect Christian family.

But behind closed doors, the reality was far from holy.

I grew up in an abusive home, shaped by two parents who weren’t aligned. Not in their values, their parenting, or their way of loving.They came from entirely different worlds, and I lived in the dissonance between them.

A yes from one, a no from the other. Praise and punishment could change by the minute. I learned early how to read a room before I read a book. How to shrink. How to please. How to perform.

I also was molested as a child and sexually assaulted as a teen.

And I was in Townsville, Far North Queensland of all places. That’s a hard navigation as a child and there is a big difference between dogma and doctrine.

I went from one jail to another — and back again.

Not literal bars, but the kind you can’t see: religion, family, expectation, control.

I was told I’d amount to nothing.That I’d be a janitor, and only that — by my own father.

Read letters my mother had written, wishing of suicide.

At fourteen, I was in Townsville City Youth and Mental Health. Heavily medicated on anti-depressants. Not because I was unstable, but because I was inconvenient. The medication wasn’t to help me feel better — it was to make me tolerable inside a house that refused to change. I sat in family counselling at 14, listening to my own father tell the room I was the problem.

No one asked what I’d been through. They just wanted me to be easier to live with. A system that was broken for children like me that ask too many questions, who dream.

Misunderstood. Mistreated.  Until at 15 I left it all thought, “Surely I can do better than this.” After my father had been physically abusive with me. Again.

That was sixteen years ago.

And in many ways, I’ve been raising myself ever since.

Learning how to survive wasn’t the hard part — I’d been doing that since I could read a room. The hard part was learning how to live. How to trust my own instincts when all I’d been taught was how to override them. How to comfort myself when no one had ever shown me how. How to build a life from scratch while still healing the version of me who was never given a blueprint.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out who the fuck I actually am — underneath the shame, the silence, the shape-shifting. And I’ve had to be my own parent along the way. To re-teach myself softness, structure, discipline, safety. To unlearn the belief that I’m too much or not enough — depending on the day.

To stop waiting for permission and start giving myself everything I never got. How to sit with myself without fear. How to hold the mirror up and say, “I choose you.” Not once — but over and over again.

I’ve spent years excavating who I am under the performance. Unpacking the beliefs that were never mine. Redefining love, softness, success, identity.

And it’s messy AF!

There are days where I still feel like I’m chasing ghosts or the thought of carrying it seems all too much!

But now I know this: I am not here to be small. I am not here to be palatable. I am not here to carry the weight of other people’s discomfort.

Choosing yourself is not one big moment. It’s a thousand tiny ones.

It’s the decision to leave. To stay. To rest. To rise.

It’s learning to say, “I don’t need your approval to be real.”

Alignment became my new religion.

Not rules. Not shame. Just truth — and the discipline to honour it.

Hair became part of my healing. Because transformation — real transformation — starts when you reclaim how you show up in the world.

Art gave me back my voice. Work gave me purpose. And power? Power came the moment I realised I was never broken — I was just never allowed to be whole.

This is my revolution. To be fully myself. Unapologetic. Unfiltered. Unowned.

And to never again shrink for the comfort of anyone. Not even the old versions of me.

So if you take anything from this, let it be this:

There is a voice inside you... It's quiet, steady, easy to miss.

It’s not loud like fear.

It doesn’t shout like shame.

It whispers. It nudges. It waits.

That voice is you. The real you. The version of you that existed before the world told you who to be.

And I promise — if you’re brave enough to listen, even just a little… If you choose yourself in small ways, in silent moments, in the spaces where no one else claps… That voice will get louder. Stronger. Unmistakable.

This is your permission to stop asking for permission. To become the person you’ve always been beneath the noise. To trust that choosing yourself — even when it costs you comfort, relationships, or control. Is not selfish. It’s sacred.

Start small. Start scared. Start now.

The rest of your life is waiting on the other side of that yes!

Domi xx