BEAUTIFUl: A STORY OF EMBRACING ONESELF THROUGH WORDS

The world is a beautiful place. Spring is the most beautiful time of the year. The flowers are in full bloom. The leaves are growing back. The sun is brighter. The days of cold weather are gone. Renewal is in the air.

I love this time of the year. I love being out in my garden planting the seeds and watching my flowers grow. My garden, my flowers give me a sense of peace I needed for a long time.

Finding the words to tell the story I'm about to tell is heartbreaking for me. Finding the words to tell the story is one I promised never to tell.

In this time of renewal and embracing this time of the year, I need to find the strength within me. This is the story of a girl who is now a woman who is finding acceptance through her most difficult time.

The story begins with a young girl in a small town trying to be invisible but she knew she couldn't stay invisible. She wished with all her heart she was invisible. She loved being in the shadows.

She loved the shadows. The shadows was the only place where she felt happy. The shadows was the only place where she felt she belonged. The shadows is the only place where she was left alone.

I thought it would be easy to tell the story after so many years but I find it to be very difficult. I stopped being my real self the day I left.

I need a minute to compose myself. I walk around my beautiful colorful garden. The colors give my home life. They give me life. The sun shining on my skin feels good.

Okay, now I can go back to telling the story. The girl loved the shadows but the outside world was calling. She tried to ignore the outside world but the outside world didn't give up. It was coming for her.

The girl was a pretty girl, a beautiful girl if you want to call her that. By beauty standards she was okay. She was smart. She loved her books.

The library was her second safe place besides the shadows. The library is where she got lost in her books. She drowned herself in books about lost worlds and robots. Books about family and love.

The outside world kept calling. Soon she will answer the call but not the way she imagined. She imagined so many things for herself. She wanted to be something important. Be someone important.

In the shadows she would dream about life outside of her small town. She would dream about what life would be if she was a different person. If no one knew her. If she was one of the many faces in a crowd of millions.

Then reality hit her and her dreams were just what it was dreams never to be realized. They were locked away in the deepest part of her memory.

Instead of dreaming big a nightmare came crashing down on her. She left the shadows and came out into the light. She was scared to leave her safe place but something told her this is what she needed to do.

She never knew what evil looked like. She read stories about serial killers and watched movies about them. She never imagined one was close to home.

This girl never believed one lived in her home. One she loved with all her heart. One who was her protector. One she called dad. They came for him while she was still in the shadows.

They took him away. They stared at her. She tried to run after him. She was stopped. She knew she shouldn't have left the shadows.

Her town looked at her in a new way. Not the weird girl who loved books and never spoke to anyone but the daughter of a serial killer. How many did he kill? She wondered.

She wondered about a lot of things. Things like what is gong to happen to her and her mother. The true nature of her father's crimes. One thing she knew for sure is that she couldn't go back to the shadows.

She looked at the world in a different light. Beautiful is what she called the world. A beauty she has never known.

Acceptance is a word that will never be known to her. No matter how much she needed to hear those words. In this town acceptance is not received well especially after the true nature of her father's crimes became known.

Hatred began to fill her town. There was nowhere she could hide. She begged her mother to leave. She wouldn't. Her mother wanted to be near her father despite what he did.

Her mother believed her father was innocent. She begged the town to believe her. They didn't. Acceptance by the town was the only vindication her mother could get but she didn't get it.

Acceptance for her was nowhere to be found. She wanted to leave and disappear. She finally found the courage to leave. She left in the middle of the night. She didn't look back.

She left for herself. She left because she needed to find acceptance in her own life. She needed to find meaning in her life away from her town.

She needed to find away to accept who she is and not hide anymore. That is easier said than done. Hiding was the only thing she knew. She went to a place far from her town where no one new her.

Hadley Delgado is her name but she changed it to Katie Collins. She was hiding again. For hiding was surviving but she was eager for a change.

Finding acceptance for her is to be her true self, telling her story and not hiding. Being real for the first time in years.

Courage, acceptance, beauty, love is what I found telling this story. I spent years hiding. I'm hiding no more. I'm Katie Collins now going by my real name Hadley Delgado. I found the courage to finally tell my story.

For the past twenty years I've been hiding my identity from the people who have accepted me. I became part of their town, their home and their lives. I struggled every day trying to understand why my father did what he did. I ask myself "Why did he do this?"

The truth is there is not answer for that. Telling my story for the first time in twenty years gave me what I needed. Beauty in my life. Love and courage in my life but most of all acceptance in my life and in myself. I am Hadley Delgado the daughter of the Night Creeper.