The A Side and the B Side: How We Tell the Stories We Survived

There's a way I've learned to tell my story. Maybe you have too.

I call it the A side and the B side—like a record, like the song you release to radio and the one you save for people who really know your art and respect it fully.

The A Side

The A side is the story I can tell anywhere. It's full of victory, resilience, transformation. It's the narrative that centers my agency, my choices, my strength. It's the version where I overcame, where I learned, where I became someone better because of what I survived, or what I took from my own mistakes.

The A side is true. It's not a lie or a cover-up. It's the part of the story that focuses on what I did with what happened to me—how I fought back, how I kept going, how I turned pain into power.

It's the story people can hear without flinching. The one that doesn't require them to sit with the full weight of what happened. The one that reassures them: she's okay now, she made it, there's a lesson here we can all learn from.

The A side protects me in the telling. It gives me control over the narrative. It lets me be the main character (and sometimes heroine, sometimes antagonist) of my own story without having to prove I deserve to be one or the other.

The B Side

The B side is harder.

It's the story that sounds improbably bad. The one that, out of context, makes me sound like a victim—and not the empowered, reclaimed kind, but the kind that makes people uncomfortable. The kind they want to question, minimize, or explain away because it's too much, too extreme, too surely that's not what really happened. Too sensitive. Too dramatic. Too much.

The B side is where my agency was violated in ways I couldn't fight back against. Where I was fifteen and beaten so badly it took six weeks before I would face the sun, let alone people. Where I was left on a freezing highway at 1 AM and "not my problem." Where I was seventeen, eighty-two pounds, gray with double pneumonia, and my mother waited until I couldn’t stand before allowing me to see a doctor.

The B side is true too. But it's the kind of true that lives beyond the understanding of most reasonable people—not because they're cruel, but because they haven't lived in a world where mothers do these things to their children. Where the system fails this completely. Where a teenage girl can be this alone and still have to show up to calculus the next day and work eight hours after school.

The B side is the story I have to be careful with. Because when I tell it, people sometimes don't believe me. Or they do believe me and they're so horrified they don't know what to do with it, so they change the subject or offer platitudes or start looking for reasons why it couldn't have been that bad.

Or worst of all—they start looking for what I must have done to deserve it.

Stitching Them Together

Here's what I've learned: you can't tell the B side alone. Not to most people. Not if you want to be heard instead of doubted, supported instead of pitied, believed instead of questioned.

But you also can't tell only the A side—not to yourself, not if you want to heal the parts that still hurt, not if you want to honor the truth of what you survived.

So you stitch them together.

You let the A side carry the narrative weight—the strength, the agency, the transformation—while the B side pulses underneath, giving it depth and truth and stakes. You show the victory while acknowledging the violation. You demonstrate the healing while admitting it's ongoing.

You marry the story you can tell with the story you can barely speak.

And in that stitching, something powerful happens: you reclaim power over stories where you had none.

When you can't go back and change what happened, when you can't make people understand or believe, when the wound is still open and may never fully close—you can still control how the story moves forward.

The A side becomes the frame that holds the B side. It makes the unbearable bearable. It makes the unspeakable something you can finally say, even if only in pieces, even if only between the lines.

Why This Matters

This isn't about lying or hiding the truth. It's about survival.

It's about recognizing that some stories are too big, too brutal, too beyond the pale for the casual telling. That you get to choose when and how and to whom you reveal the full weight of what you've carried.

It's about acknowledging that you can be both: the person who overcame and the person still healing. The victor and the wounded. The one who made it and the one who's still making it, day by day.

The A side and the B side aren't in conflict. They're the same song, the same story, the same life—just different tracks for different listeners.

And you get to decide which side plays when.

Because that choice—that control over your own narrative—is part of the healing too.

It's part of how you take back what was taken from you: not just your safety or your childhood or your innocence, but your right to tell your story on your own terms.

To be complex. To be both strong and scarred. To have survived something terrible and still be surviving it. Still in it. And yet, beyond it.

To say: I overcame and I'm still overcoming and have both be true at once.

That's the power of the A side and the B side. That's how we tell the stories we survived—and how we survive the telling.