Content note: this post touches on childhood trauma, abuse, and suicide. If any of this feels like too much right now, it’s okay to stop reading and come back another time.
Some stories are hard to tell because they hurt to remember. Natasha M. Faulkner’s new memoir, You Are Okay: A Survivor’s Story thru Darkness, is one of those stories — and she tells it anyway.
Born in a snowstorm in southern Oklahoma, Natasha’s earliest years set the tone for much of what followed: a mother who saw her as an obligation rather than a child, a father kept at a distance, and a grandmother who became the only steady source of love she knew. From there, her life moved through chapters most people never have to face in one lifetime, let alone all at once — early marriage and motherhood as a teenager, cycles of manipulation and control in the relationships that followed, addiction born out of grief, and a mental health system that handed her labels before it ever asked about her story.
What makes You Are Okay different from a typical trauma memoir is the honesty in how it’s told. Natasha doesn’t smooth over the parts of her life that are messy or hard to justify. She writes about the choices she made to survive — some she’s proud of, some she still carries the weight of — without asking the reader to judge them or excuse them. She simply asks to be understood.
And underneath all of it runs a single, quiet thread: she kept going. Even in the chapters that describe her lowest points, the book isn’t really about how far she fell. It’s about the fact that she’s still here to tell you about it.
That’s the heart of the title. You Are Okay isn’t a promise that everything will be easy. It’s a reminder — from someone who has been to the edge and come back — that surviving doesn’t require you to have it all figured out. It just requires you to keep going one more day, and then another one after that.
If you’ve ever felt like your story was “too much” to tell anyone, or like the version of you that survived hard things doesn’t get enough credit for simply still being here, this book was written with you in mind. Natasha’s hope is that readers who’ve walked through their own storms will read her words and feel a little less alone in them.
You Are Okay: A Survivor’s Story thru Darkness is available now. In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more from Natasha’s journey — including how she began to recognize the patterns of manipulation in her relationships, and how she found her way to healing and a sense of purpose on the other side of it all.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, you don’t have to go through it alone. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7.