Beloveds,
before i introduce anyone else, i have to introduce her.
the one the whole story is about.
Santana Chevel.
that's me. i'm the first character. i'm also the last one standing.
i was born on November 9, 1990, in the hills of Jamaica — a small community called Horse Guard District, about 18 miles outside Montego Bay. raised by two parents who loved me with everything they had. the ninth and last of their children. a girl who felt everything deeply and learned, very early, that the safest place to put what you felt was on a page.
i started writing at 13.
not because someone told me to. because i needed somewhere to put the truth when i had nowhere else to put it. the journal was the first place i ever told the truth without consequence. the first place i was allowed to be exactly what i was.
i have been writing ever since.
what you're reading now — the Speak, Mamacita collection — is not something i sat down and invented. these stories were already written. they lived in notebooks and journals and audio recordings and the deepest folds of my memory for decades before they became books.
some of them i wrote in real time, in the middle of the thing happening — furious, confused, heartbroken, not yet knowing what i was documenting. some journals i no longer have. those i wrote from memory. and sometimes i go back and read a finished book and realize i left something out — because memory is not a filing cabinet - it's a living thing. it gives you what you're ready for.
the books are published now. the journals remain mine.
but they are the same truth.
here is the shape of the story, in brief:
at 13, i was sent to live with my sister in the city to attend high school. something happened there that i wrote about in my diary — and that diary was found. the entry was read. and nothing was ever said about it out loud. that was my introduction to silence as a survival tool.
at 14, i met a man ten years older than me who drove me to school. what happened over the next two years i only understood years later as grooming. at the time, i thought it was love.
at 18, i met the man i would spend the next decade with — on again, off again, manipulated, coerced, punched once, and still going back. i wrote poems about him during those years. some of them were beautiful. that's what's so devastating about that kind of relationship: it gives you just enough beauty to stay.
at 28, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. i spent five months beside her and watched her change. on October 26, 2018, at 2:15pm, i got the call. i fell to the floor.
five months later, my father died. one week after that, i got married — to a man i didn't fully choose, in a dress i was performing inside of.
the marriage ended. then came another relationship. then a pregnancy. then a son. then a door getting kicked down in front of that son.
and then — finally, completely — i decided.
i am 35 years old. i am a mama to a boy affectionately called Prince who watches everything. i am a writer — have been since i was 13, will be until i'm done. i am the founder of Whispering Soul Sanctuary. in my bones, i live in a completely different country from where i grew up — where i write and rest and build from softness, not urgency. the address is still catching up.
i did not become this woman by accident.
i became her by surviving every story in this collection and choosing, at every possible exit, to keep writing it down.
this is what i know about myself now, after everything:
my voice was never the problem. it was always the solution.
my body was never something to be managed by other people. it was always mine.
my truth was never too much. the silence was.
healing didn't look like forgetting. it looked like remembering — and writing it down — and publishing it — and refusing to let the silence win.
the full collection — all seven books, all seven truths — is available now.
start wherever calls you. or start at Book 1: The Bathroom Door, which is where everything began.
Book 1 - The Bathroom Door - a 13-year-old girl, a predatory teacher, and the silence that followed for over two decades.
Book 2 - Fourteen - the taxi driver who was 24. i was 14. it wasn't love. it was grooming.
Book 3 - The Decade I Gave Away - 10 years with a man who used my guilt as currency.
Book 4 - Goodbye, Mama - losing my mama to lung cancer and learning to mama myself.
Book 5 - I Didn't Make It In Time - my father died one week before my wedding.
Book 6 - The Fox's Den - the ex-husband i almost forgot. almost.
Book 7 - Dear Gifftid - the man who made me a mother, kicked down a door in front of our son, and became the last person i survived.
or grab the complete bundle and read the whole story in order, the way it lived.
Speak, Mamacita: Seven Stories of Unsilencing Trauma (Bundle)
A portion of proceeds from the Speak, Mamacita series supports The Sanctuary Foundation, launching November 2027.
next week: 🌹 Mama — the woman who birthed me, raised me, and did the best she could to love me.
Talk Soon,
Santana Chevel 🌹