Stillness and Survival by Jacob Anthony Rose – A Memoir That Doesn’t Look Away

When I went through Stillness and Survival: A Life Between Trauma, Glitter, and the Echo of My Own Voice, I kept coming back to one feeling: this is someone finally telling the truth about their life, without softening the edges. Jacob Anthony Rose (also known as drag performer Sheena Rose) writes about growing up unwanted, unsafe, and constantly on alert, then slowly learning how to stay, heal, and be loved. It’s a heavy, trigger-filled memoir—child abuse, queerphobia, mental illness—but it’s written with survivors in mind, not for shock value.

Spoiler-Free Summary

The book moves in rough chronological order from Jacob’s childhood to adulthood. We start with a chaotic household: a teenage mom, a furious father, and a little boy who absorbs, very early, that he’s “a mistake” and an inconvenience. Even his last name becomes a symbol of erasure and control when the hyphen on his birth certificate quietly disappears in everyday use.

School offers no real escape. Jacob faces relentless bullying and queerphobia, including incidents that should have been treated as serious violence but are brushed aside. The message is clear: his safety and pain are not a priority to the adults around him. That double hit—home and school—sets the foundation for depression, anxiety, and later PTSD.

As he grows older, he moves between different homes, carries more secrets, and learns to survive by shrinking and performing whatever version of himself seems least likely to provoke harm. Eventually, he discovers drag and music. Onstage as Sheena Rose, in the queer nightlife of San Francisco, he finds glamour, community, and brief pockets of freedom. Offstage, panic attacks, flashbacks, and emotional shutdowns show how deeply the past is lodged in his body.

The turning point is a mix of collapse and support. Health scares and mental breakdowns force him into doctors’ offices and therapy rooms, where he finally hears words like PTSD and trauma applied to his own life. Meeting Juan, his partner, gives him his first consistent experience of feeling safe and loved. Those two threads—professional help and a stable relationship—anchor the later chapters as he works through the wreckage and starts to build something that looks like a future.

The book ends with resources, a personal soundtrack, and a quiet affirmation that he’s been bruised, not broken, and is finally ready to share his story.

My Take on Stillness and Survival: A Life of Trauma, Glitter, and the Echo of My Own Voice

As a reader, what stands out to me most is how honest this memoir feels. Jacob doesn’t tidy his experiences up into a neat “I suffered, then I triumphed” arc. Instead, he shows how long trauma can run your life in the background, how shame and minimization keep you silent, and how even “good” phases can be threaded through with panic and self-loathing.

I really appreciated the way he uses specific images to carry the emotional weight. The childhood Santa photo with “no sparkle” in his eyes isn’t just a hook—it becomes a visual proof of how early the light went out, and how long he’s been trying to get it back. The missing hyphen in his name, the boys at school who go way beyond “teasing,” the adults who see and look away—these details make the story feel painfully real.

The drag and queer community sections are another highlight for me. It would have been easy to paint drag as a magical escape, but the book never falls into that cliché. Sheena Rose is joy, performance, and power, yes—but she’s also working on top of a nervous system that’s constantly in fight-or-flight. That tension between glitter and survival gives the memoir a unique texture and keeps it from becoming just a “trauma book” or just a “drag book.”

I also liked how openly Jacob talks about therapy, medication, and mental-health resources. He doesn’t present healing as a sudden revelation; it’s more like a long, exhausting series of choices to keep trying: going to appointments, telling the full truth, taking the meds, letting people love him even when his brain tells him he doesn’t deserve it. The inclusion of actual resources at the back makes it clear he’s thinking about readers who might be in similar pain.

Is it an easy read? Absolutely not. The subject matter is intense and sometimes repetitive—but that repetition feels honest to how trauma works. Our brains circle the same memories and beliefs over and over. If you’re a reader who is sensitive to on-page accounts of abuse and mental-health crisis, you’ll want to pace yourself and use the content notes.

For survivors, or anyone interested in what long-term trauma really looks like from the inside, I think this book has real value. It doesn’t promise that everything will be fixed. It simply says: “I’m still here, and maybe you can be too.” And that, in my opinion, is worth a lot.

Content Warning:

Mentions of child abuse, domestic violence, queerphobic bullying, and mental-health crisis.

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