Stillness and Survival: A Life Between Trauma, Glitter, and the Echo of My Own Voice, Jacob Anthony Rose

Description

Stillness and Survival is a raw, luminous memoir about growing up queer in an environment where silence was a form of protection, and finding a way back to one’s own voice after years of hiding.

Jacob Anthony Rose describes a childhood shaped by fear and quiet endurance, where self-expression felt dangerous and invisibility became a survival skill. As a young gay man, he learned to disappear, burying his voice not only from the world, but from himself. Music and performance eventually offered an escape. Through drag, glitter, and the electricity of the stage, Rose found freedom, joy, and a way to exist larger than his pain.

For two decades, performance became both refuge and release. But trauma, patient and persistent, does not vanish simply because it is outshined. During the isolation of the COVID years, the past resurfaced with force. Depression, adulthood grief, and unresolved childhood wounds once again stole his voice.

This memoir traces that collapse and the long, deliberate return that followed. Moving between stillness and spectacle, silence and song, Stillness and Survival explores queerness, resilience, creative identity, and the cyclical nature of healing. It is a story about reclaiming expression, again and again, even when the world makes every effort to quiet you.

Intimate and unflinching, this book will resonate with readers drawn to queer memoirs, survivor narratives, and stories where art becomes a means of survival.

Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: January 5, 2026