THRU: A Long Walk Away from Home

Thru is a journey that details some of the darkest moments in the life of Dakota. Not a sequel, but a prequel that sets the stage for all that she would become.Thru begins in the ’80s at the height of the drug epidemic. Dakota relives how she went from having an innocent teenage “puppy love” in Philadelphia, PA. to a tumultuous, manipulative, and outright abusive relationship in Brooklyn, NY. Written in “memory order” rather than chronologically, Thru takes you from relationship Red Flags to Code Red and crying out for help. In the end, Dakota realizes the role she played in her abuse and the impact it had on her loved ones. Written as an open letter to her friends and family, Dakota goes through the entire spectrum of human emotion from naivety, through trauma, to forgiveness and self-reflection.Thru shows how during a storm we sometimes get so caught up trying to dodge the raindrops that we forget that it’s raining. This holds for the incidents in our lives that we try so hard to forget or pretend never happened. Forgetting the dark moments doesn’t make them any less real and it’s not until one begins to heal from it that you can take bits and pieces of the past and try to make it make sense for what your reality is now. In the process of healing no feeling is left unfelt and no topic too dark.Thru is a symbol of strength and protection and how Dakota’s grandmother's prayers got her through. Thru is reflective of what was and how it created what is and proof that the only way OUT of a situation is to go THRU it. Read more