Permission to Break is a raw, deeply human memoir about what it costs to hold everything together—and what it takes to finally let go.
Growing up in Northeast Portland, Rashida Saunders learned early that strength meant silence. As a Black girl raised in an environment shaped by survival, and later as a police officer carrying the unseen weight of trauma, she mastered the art of appearing “fine” even when she was breaking inside.
Through motherhood, therapy, community, and a long battle with emotional suppression, Saunders unravels the generational patterns that taught her to armor up and reveals the quiet, painful work of learning to soften. From officer-involved shootings to childhood wounds, from grief to self-forgiveness, this memoir exposes the truths she hid even from herself.
This is a story about healing, vulnerability, and the permission we all need—to rest, to feel, and to finally break open into who we were always meant to be.
Permission to Break is a raw, deeply human memoir about what it costs to hold everything together—and what it takes to finally let go.
Growing up in Northeast Portland, Rashida Saunders learned early that strength meant silence. As a Black girl raised in an environment shaped by survival, and later as a police officer carrying the unseen weight of trauma, she mastered the art of appearing “fine” even when she was breaking inside.
Through motherhood, therapy, community, and a long battle with emotional suppression, Saunders unravels the generational patterns that taught her to armor up and reveals the quiet, painful work of learning to soften. From officer-involved shootings to childhood wounds, from grief to self-forgiveness, this memoir exposes the truths she hid even from herself.
This is a story about healing, vulnerability, and the permission we all need—to rest, to feel, and to finally break open into who we were always meant to be.
The Courage to Begin
The ache of living split between two worlds I carried
Silence was the first language I learned. The hum of the refrigerator filled the kitchen, louder than our conversations ever were. My legs swung against the chair, the scrape of wood on linoleum echoing in a room where no one said what they really felt. I wanted to ask, Are we okay? Do you see me? But I already understood questions had consequences. One sharp glance from my mother across the table was enough to freeze the words in my throat. So I chewed quietly, swallowed them whole, and called it strength.
Every word I buried settled in me like a coal pressed under weight, glowing quietly, waiting for a crack.
I didn’t know it then, but I was being stitched by survival—tight, careful, afraid to come undone. It would take years to learn I was never meant to be stitched. I was woven—by God, by lineage, by love that outlasts silence.
My mother reinforced the lesson without ever naming it. She stood on the porch most evenings, cigarette balanced between two fingers, smoke curling like a crown above her head. Bills pressed in on the counter. Heartbreak lingered somewhere close by. And still, she never cried in front of us. Once, when tears welled in my eyes after a hard day at school, she said flatly, “Dry it up. Nobody wants to hear all that.” It wasn’t cruelty. It was survival.
Her silence became scripture, and I copied it line for line, not yet knowing that the sacred wasn’t in her stillness—it was in the parts of us that longed to be seen.
Softness lived in her too, flickering through the cracks: the night she sang along to the radio, wooden spoon tapping the side of the pot; the time a joke slipped past her defenses and her laughter startled even herself. Those small moments were proof that even in our house of silence, another world existed—one where tenderness was possible.
I learned early that softness was fleeting. So I wore strength like protection. In her silence, I learned the script of one world—hard edges without softness—but somewhere inside I longed for another.
At school, I wore the mask well. Teachers called me resilient. Neighbors said I was strong. After a fight on the playground, my teacher told the class, “Shida’s tough. She doesn’t let anything shake her.” She didn’t see my hands trembling under the desk afterward. Resilience was their word for a child carrying too much. Strength was the name they gave to silence.
Those compliments pinned me in place—a girl expected to survive without complaint, to straddle worlds: the quiet ache inside me and the tough exterior everyone seemed to admire. I lived in two versions of myself: the girl everyone praised for being tough and the one who carried a quiet, burning ache no one could see.
The armor followed me into adulthood—into motherhood, where tenderness tested what I thought I knew about strength, and into law enforcement, where control became a requirement. My daughter would sit between my knees, her braids clinking with colorful beads as I parted and smoothed each section, her small head tilting back to look at me with a patience that unraveled me. She asked for softness I wasn’t sure how to give.
In uniform I belonged to one world—steady, composed, unbreakable. At home I was supposed to belong to another—warm, open, present.
Even my hands told the story, caught between light and shadow, belonging to two worlds at once. Family and force. Tenderness and toughness. Black woman and badge. I was living both and—not either or—belonging everywhere and nowhere all at once. I had built a life on this balancing act, but the split was beginning to ache.
How long can a person live split down the middle before something gives?
One night on patrol made that question impossible to ignore.
“Shots fired,” the radio snapped, and the car surged forward. Sirens cut the night open. Streetlights strobed across the dash, painting my hands in alternating bands of shadow and light. My heart thudded so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
We arrived to chaos—blood slick on the pavement, voices colliding in fear, someone crying out in grief so raw it hollowed the air. I kept my voice even, my steps steady, my face unreadable. That was the job: unshakable no matter what.
But later, long after the scene cleared, my body stayed locked. Heart racing, muscles coiled, breath shallow.
The uniform came off, but the armor stayed. Even in the quiet, my body didn’t know the difference between safety and survival. I thought this was strength. What I didn’t see was that I was already cracking.
The danger wasn’t in breaking. The danger was in pretending I couldn’t.
The cracks showed up in small ways first—my daughter’s laugh bubbling up in the back seat, pulling a smile out of me no matter how heavy the day had been. Bike rides with my older brother, the wind rushing against our faces as we cut through the neighborhood, a reminder that freedom could be simple. Late nights on the porch with my sister, practicing dance routines until our feet hurt, laughing so hard we forgot for a moment that life was heavy.
Those moments reminded me joy could still find me, even if I didn’t know how to hold onto it. And later, a therapist who didn’t rush my silence, who waited until I finally spilled the words I had carried for decades.
When I braced for pity, she gave me presence.
“You have a story that needs to be told,” she said.
I laughed, shaking my head. “Who would care about my story? I’m just a cop. A mom. Nobody. Maybe if I had been through something worse, if my trauma was bigger, my losses heavier, my suffering more dramatic—then maybe it would matter. Other people have stories so much harder than mine. Why should mine take up space?”
She leaned back in her chair, letting the silence stretch until my words felt thin. Then she said, “Pain doesn’t have a hierarchy. What you carry matters because you carry it. If you keep minimizing it, you’ll keep bleeding in places no one can see.”
Her words landed like a challenge. I wanted to argue, to insist I hadn’t earned the right to tell this story, but part of me knew she was right. I had spent years comparing my wounds to other people’s scars, convincing myself mine weren’t deep enough to count. But the truth was, silence doesn’t measure pain—it only multiplies it.
I began writing in scraps: notes in my phone between shifts, words on the back of receipts, pages scribbled in the quiet after my daughter went to bed. Writing became my way back—a language softer than survival, truer than silence.
Every word I wrote felt like a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. In the space between sentences, I started to feel free.
At first, the sentences were jagged. But slowly they softened. On the page, I didn’t have to be strong. I could be messy, tender, human. I wasn’t writing for an audience. I was writing for the little girl at the kitchen table who had been taught to stay quiet, and for the woman who had worn two worlds for too long.
Silence was my inheritance, but it was also my suffocation. Strength carried me, but it kept me alone. Survival kept me alive, but it was never meant to be home.
I had learned to build a life from endurance, to hold myself together through the ache, to smile and call it gratitude. But there comes a point when even strength begins to crack under its own weight—when the body remembers what the mind tried to forget, when the heart starts whispering for something gentler, something true.
Every story, no matter its shape or size, carries the power to split something open—a wound, a truth, a beginning. And sometimes that split is the only way the light gets in.
It begins in a house where silence was law. It winds through streets where danger and duty lived side by side. It carries the weight of two worlds: family and force, tenderness and toughness, Black woman and badge. That silence shaped me, carried me, nearly destroyed me.
This is the story of what happened when silence finally began to open—and I found the ember still burning beneath it.
Writing as both a Portland police officer
and a mother, Rashida Saunders in her memoir, Permission to Break, tells the cathartic story of what happens when strength—culturally praised, professionally enforced, and biologically sustained—becomes unsustainable. The book offers a careful account of endurance and the cost of long-term emotional containment, while also documenting a life shaped by hyper-functionality rather than expression—where survival depends on just going through the motions, and life is often simply just tolerable.
The contrast between Rashida's professional identity and her interior longing for honesty and recognition was her most prominent theme. Her policing career is described with disciplined restraint: standing at crime scenes with composure, while absorbing the anguish of others, navigating night patrols while keeping constant vigilance, and inhabiting a nervous system forever calibrated for threat...these moments function as
evidence of what Allostatic Load does to the body over time. In this sense, the book parallels conceptually with
works such as Bessel van der Kolk’s
The Body Keeps the Score, and would be an exceptional companion to the above-mentioned book for any reader or educator wanting to understand more about their own behaviors or the behaviors of others.
What I appreciated while reading were the moments when the language itself begins to change. When Saunders describes momentary, quiet experiences—spinning in circles with her daughter in the living room, the smell of her child’s hair, the stillness of a morning without an alarm—the prose loosens and offers evidence of what becomes possible when survival mode relaxes its grip. I understood these passages as signs of a nervous system finally permitted to rest.
The prose is restrained and emotionally
controlled, shaped by years of living in a
constant state of alertness and
professional discipline. Some readers may find this tone heavy, especially those
looking for a sense of closure, since the
book favors reflection over instruction.
Resolution is left largely unstated. To me, this restraint feels intentional; it allows
the reader to feel the sustained pressure of Saunders’s experience, which I found
to be especially powerful.
The book ultimately challenges cultural assumptions about productivity, competence, and resilience. Saunders suggests that what is often praised as strength may, in fact, be a form of prolonged self-erasure. Permission to Break is a serious, reflective work that will appeal to readers interested in the intersections of duty, identity, trauma, and the difficult, necessary work of letting oneself become fully human again.