From 5 to 40: My Life In Photos

Annotated with all of my memoir shorts to date

Graphics and selfies by author

Hi! I’m Stephenie Magister ✨(follow me).

First I Was A Girl is not yet a real book…but one day it will be!

In the meantime, please enjoy this collection of photos and memoir shorts showing me from a few years after birth to a few days before I wrote this.

Note: if you need an F&F link for any of the memoirs, head to the Substack version of this article

Part 1

It’s hard to accept just how much I’ve forgotten. How much I CHOSE to forget. How much I had to forget if I wanted to survive.

But memories, like emotions, don’t exist independently. They’re as interwoven as the different parts of our bodies are to our consciousness and sense of self.

And you know what I remember? Once, I was a little girl named Stephenie.

I came from an offshoot of a cult where a man’s reputation always meant more than any harm he inflicted to a woman.

To hide the harm those men had done, my family hid me as far from the public as they could…