At twenty, Niki took a job on a commercial salmon boat off the coast of Haida Gwaii to buy her freedom.
A Memoir
A commercial fishing boat. A childhood built on silence. A woman learning how to take up space.
Butterfly Dust is a memoir about survival, memory, and the stories we inherit long before we have words for them.
Braided between a summer spent working aboard a salmon boat off the coast of Haida Gwaii and a childhood shaped by unpredictability, emotional neglect, and the unspoken rules of a family that looked fine from the outside, it follows one woman's journey from self-erasure to self-possession.
At its heart, Butterfly Dust asks a simple question:
How do you find your voice when silence was the first language you learned?
This is a story of resilience, motherhood, reinvention, and the long road home to yourself.
Butterfly Dust
This is not a recovery story.
It is a reckoning.
Butterfly Dust is a memoir about permission
Permission to speak.
Permission to choose.
Permission to want.
Permission to leave.
Permission to take up space.
Permission to trust yourself.
At its heart, it is the story of a girl who learned that disappearing was safer than existing and the woman who spent the next forty years finding her way back.
I don't know how long I was unconscious.
At first there was only cold, seeping into my skin, anchoring me to the slatted oak pen boards like a second spine. The wood beneath me was slick with ice and silver scales fused into a hard gray crust.
Awareness returned in fragments: the sharp sting at the back of my head, the muffled hum of the engine below deck, the echo of crashing waves still ricocheting inside my skull. I was still on the boat, but for a moment it felt as though I had washed up on another planet.
Prologue
I desperately needed to get out.
Butterfly Dust
Growing up in a family where what wasn't said mattered most
The lasting impact of childhood trauma and emotional neglect
Survival, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves to belong
Motherhood as a mirror and a catalyst for change
Perimenopause, reinvention, and becoming visible again
The long journey from endurance to self-trust
The Quiet Violence of Being Unseen
You've spent years searching for yourself in achievement, relationships, travel, spirituality, or service.
Family secrets, generational patterns, and inherited silence have shaped your story.
You're ready to believe that taking up space is not selfish—it's your birthright.
You've ever wondered where your own voice went after years of meeting everyone else's needs.
Motherhood, midlife, or perimenopause cracked open questions you could no longer ignore.
You were the "good girl", the helper, the peacemaker, the one who held everything together.
You learned early to read a room before you learned to read yourself.
This book is for you if:
Not because someone finally told you it was okay. Because you stopped waiting for permission that was never coming.
The knowledge that you can trust yourself
Not too late to speak. To choose. To leave. To take up space. To begin.
The understanding that it isn't too late
You were a girl doing the only thing that felt safe. That is not a character flaw. That is survival.
The truth that you were never the problem
Butterfly Dust Explores
here
The rewrites. The agent submissions.
The rejection letters. The unexpected wins.
Everything that happens between finishing a manuscript and holding a book in your hands.
I'm doing this in real time.
I'd love for you to be part of it.
FOLLOW THE JOURNEY TO PUBLICATION
I'm sharing all of it.
My brother called me Non
Not because I wasn't there.
Because I was.
Read Butterfly Dust
I was just never quite there.
...and found yourself underlining passages, calling a friend afterward, or seeing pieces of your own story in theirs, Butterfly Dust may feel like coming home.
This memoir is for readers who have spent years being the good daughter, the peacekeeper, the achiever, the one who held everything together.
It's for anyone who learned to survive by becoming smaller, quieter, more useful and who is beginning to wonder what life might look like if they stopped.
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