Why I Wrote Violet Branches

For most of my life, I kept everything locked away. The memories, the pain, the unanswered questions, all of it sat in a place I never planned to visit again. I told myself that silence was strength, that moving forward meant burying the past deep enough that it couldn’t find me. But the truth is simple: what we don’t let out, we let rot inside.

Violet Branches was born from that realization.

This book isn’t just a collection of stories from my childhood. It’s the truth, unpolished, uncomfortable, and raw. It’s about growing up in chaos, surviving the kind of instability that twists your sense of safety, and learning how to rebuild yourself when the people who were supposed to protect you either couldn’t… or wouldn’t.

Writing it wasn’t easy. Some days it felt like reopening wounds I’d spent decades trying to close. Other days, it felt like I was finally breathing for the first time. And somewhere in the middle of all that pain, I found clarity. I found forgiveness. I found a way to understand the boy I used to be, and the man I eventually became.

What surprised me most was how writing this book changed me as a father, a husband, and as an educator. Working in special education, I see firsthand how important stability, love, and belonging are. I see kids fighting battles they didn’t choose, and I recognize parts of myself in them. They remind me why telling this story matters.

Violet Branches isn’t about blame.It’s not about revenge or rewriting the past. It’s about breaking a cycle , and showing that healing is possible, even when it feels out of reach.

If you’ve ever carried childhood trauma… If you’ve ever fought your way back from addiction…If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s too late to rewrite your story…I hope this book speaks to you the way writing it spoke to me.

This blog will be a place where I share the pieces that didn’t fit into the book, the lessons that came later, and the honest reflections about what it means to grow up broken and somehow end up whole.

Thank you for being here.Thank you for giving Violet Branches a place to land.

More to come, and some of it won’t be easy to tell. But maybe that’s the point.

— Rob Gordon