Carrying What Wasn't Mine: Love, Loss, and What I Chose to Keep - Paperback

For most of her life, Camerie Porter believed strength meant silence.

She learned early how to survive disappointment, emotional absence, grief, and the quiet weight of expectations she never chose to carry. Raised by a hardworking single mother and shaped by the inconsistency of an absent father, Camerie spent years shrinking her needs, hiding her pain, and convincing herself that survival was enough.

But when devastating loss, depression, bitterness, and self-destruction threatened to consume her, she was forced to confront the truth: surviving is not the same as living.

In Carrying What Wasn't Mine, Camerie shares a deeply personal journey through grief, generational silence, emotional healing, motherhood, self-worth, and rediscovering her voice. With raw honesty and reflection, she explores what it means to release inherited pain, rebuild identity after heartbreak, and choose healing even when the process feels uncomfortable and uncertain.

This memoir is for anyone who has ever:

• Felt emotionally unseen
• Carried responsibilities that were never theirs
• Mistaken independence for healing
• Struggled with grief, abandonment, or self-worth
• Longed to feel chosen, safe, and enough

More than a story about pain, this is a story about becoming.

A story about learning that you do not have to keep carrying what was never yours to begin with.