I could not read until I was twelve years old.

The year I started school was the first year a new reading method was introduced. Phonics was out. I was one of the children who needed it and never got it. I fell through the gap the system created and nobody caught me. My mother kept telling them something was wrong. They did not listen.

I faked it. For years, in classroom after classroom, I faked it well enough that most of my teachers never knew. A few of them told me I was stupid. I believed them for longer than was true.

It was not until I was an adult, going back to school, that I finally learned I had dyslexia. That I processed and learned information differently. That my brain was not the problem. It was just wired in a way the system had no map for. Wired, as it turns out, for the kind of knowing that does not come from a page.

I hated books. I hated reading. Once the decoding finally clicked after grade eight, something shifted completely. I became someone who loved books, who devoured them, who eventually wrote her own.

If you had told twelve year old Tracy, the one sitting in the classroom pretending to follow along, that she would one day be an author... she would not have believed you.

But here we are.

I wrote this book. It found its way to you.

And if any part of you has ever been handed a story about yourself that was not true, by a teacher, a system, a religion, a culture, a person who should have known better, told you were not smart enough, not capable enough, too much, not enough, wired wrong, born wrong, believing the wrong things... this book is the antidote to every single one of those lies.

Sovereignty is not something you earn back. It is something you remember. It was never taken from you. It was just buried under everyone else's version of who you were supposed to be. And if you are ready to stop living inside a story that was never yours... keep reading.

You are exactly where you are supposed to be.

With love, Tracy