Episode Details

What happens when surviving something is only the beginning of the journey?

Angel Willard is a Canadian author from British Columbia and the author of Fighting to Come Home, a memoir about trauma, survival, motherhood, accountability, chronic pain, loss, incarceration, and rebuilding a life after profound hardship.

In 2016, Angel was involved in a catastrophic car accident that almost took her life. She describes being trapped underneath the vehicle, suffering extensive injuries and burns, undergoing multiple surgeries, and living afterward with permanent injuries and chronic pain.

But the accident was not the only difficult chapter of her story.

Angel also speaks openly about childhood trauma, decisions she regrets, incarceration, separation from people she loved, motherhood, grief, and the difficult process of changing patterns she didn’t want to pass on to her children.

In this conversation, we explore the difference between surviving and becoming, what it means to separate your identity from the worst things that happened to you, and why healing doesn’t necessarily mean erasing the past.

For Angel, resilience eventually stopped meaning defeating the problem. It became learning how to build a meaningful life alongside something she could not eliminate.

And the meaning behind her memoir’s title becomes clear:

She wasn’t fighting to return to who she used to be. She was fighting to become someone she could finally come home to.

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