When the Past Begins to Speak
- Apr 7
- 3 min read
By DK Hillard
Author of Remembering Myself, Now Available
There are times in life when the past begins to speak — not as memory, but as presence.
Some stories are not told in straight lines. They arrive as fragments, whispers, dreams, and memories that don’t fit neatly into chapters. Remembering Myself: A Journey Through the Threads of Time is one such story. It is not a conventional memoir or the story of my life. It is the path of my remembering — a weaving of memory, art, and lineage into a living tapestry.
This volume follows threads rather than timelines. The book unfolds through five living threads — Shadow, Love, Creation, Transformation, and The Final Thread — not as ideas, but as lived currents moving through my life and the lives of those before me.
These threads are lived. The Thread of Shadow carries childhood wounds, generational silence, and the inherited sense of being unwanted.
The Thread of Love explores how love survives even in broken soil. Creation emerges first as survival and then as medicine — painting, writing, and textiles becoming ways to stitch myself back together. Transformation arises through collapse after collapse, each one breaking me open to something deeper. And the Final Thread does not arrive as an ending, but as a circle that continues to turn.
Because of this, the work does not move forward like a march of dates. It moves like weaving: one color here, another pulled through there, threads returning and disappearing, sometimes breaking, sometimes tying into new patterns. Being with it is less like following a straight path and more like stepping into a tapestry of remembrance.
The title — Remembering Myself — speaks to this process. To “re-member” is to gather back the scattered pieces of self, to call them home, to stitch what was fragmented into wholeness. And to “remember” is also to honor — to carry forward the lives, stories, and gifts of those who came before me. This work is both. It is not a recounting of my life, but a path of re-membering, a way of walking back through the threads that shaped me until I could weave them anew. For many of us, parts of ourselves were left behind in order to survive. This work is about calling them home.
“Parts of ourselves were left behind in order to survive. Remembering is how we call them home.”
I didn’t set out to write a book. I began by listening — to the echoes of my mother’s fire, my ancestors’ silence, my body’s wisdom. To the ways collapse was never the end but initiation. To how story, art, and ritual could turn even the heaviest inheritance into beauty.
What emerged is not a tidy story of survival. It is a nonlinear remembering — one that moves across time, weaving past and present, personal and ancestral, shadow and light. It is deeply personal, and yet you might find yourself in it. Because though our details differ, the threads are universal. We all inherit shadows. We all long for love. And we all carry the possibility of transforming what we’ve been given into something new.
Remembering Myself: A Journey Through the Threads of Time is my story, but not the story of my life. It is the path of my remembering. And it is also an invitation: to trace the threads you carry, to honor what has been handed down, even when it is heavy, and to weave something different, something healing, something whole.
We cannot choose what we inherit, but we can choose how we carry it. This book is an offering for those ready to remember themselves whole.
Connect With DK
Comments