Sonya Leeding knows how powerful it can be to speak your truth and have even just one person listen.
She's seen it in her work as a detective helping children reveal the worst of trauma, desperately hoping she can bring them justice.
"I bang on about telling my story all the time but when these kids come in . especially the younger ones, once they've told us about what's happened to them, you see them go: 'I don't have to carry that anymore,'" she says, of her dream job as a police officer with the Child Protection Unit.
"Then they get up and walk out and they're much lighter."
But it's taken Sonya more than a decade to talk openly about the long road she's been on following the shooting murder of her husband on the Gold Coast, Senior Constable Damian Leeding.
Now, she's finally ready to tell her story.
"I probably feel like I'm the most back to myself that I have been in a long time," the 44-year-old tells the ABC from the back deck of her Gold Coast home.
"It's probably taken a good part of 12 years to do that.
"I'm working in my dream job. The kids are great. I, kind of, do what I want at the moment. So, everything is sort of falling into place."
A flock of birds flies in and out of the garden and Sonya's beloved dogs Elliott and Amalie do "zoomies" around the yard as she details what life has been like since Damian died.
A divorce, a period where she was drinking too much, and unimaginable grief have marred the past 12 years but today Sonya is fit and relaxed and seems visibly content with where she's at.
Now a detective Senior Constable, Sonya was only 32 years old when Damian was callously shot in the face on May 29, 2011 while responding to a botched robbery at the Pacific Pines Tavern.
He died three days later at age 35 - leaving behind the couple's toddler son, Hudson, and four-month-old daughter, Grace.
Gunman Phillip Graeme Abell and Donna Lee McAvoy are serving life sentences after they were convicted in 2013 of Damian's murder.
The getaway driver, Benjamin Ernest Power, was sentenced to nine years' jail after pleading guilty to manslaughter.
In the cruellest of ironies, Damian was shot at the same location he and Sonya had celebrated their plans to get married years earlier.
"When they were telling me he had been shot and told me it was at Pacific Pines Tavern, that was the first thing I blurted out. Of all the stupid things I could say, I said: 'Oh, that's where we had our engagement party'.
"So it's a bit of a bittersweet location."
Damian's death shook the state of Queensland.
Like all tragic killings of a police officers, the image of a spouse kissing a loved one goodbye and never coming home is unfathomable by the public they pledge to protect.
Sonya struggled to reconcile her own identity with the role she was given after being thrust into the spotlight to shoulder the public grief.
As she cut ribbons at memorial parks and boarded boats named in Damian's honour, she was continually pulled back to the night of his death.
"I was often referred to as 'the widow of' or 'the wife of Damian'.
"I didn't really think about, until further down the track, where I went: 'Oh, I've been putting up this persona, I suppose, of being the widow and being Damian's wife,'" she says.
"There was always a certain label, I guess, on what I was supposed to be and who I was supposed to be."
The widow status has meant finding love after Damian has also been fraught with complexities.
"With someone new, I'd be like: 'Oh great, I'm not just Damian's wife anymore'.
"Each time I'd start a relationship I'd think: 'This is something new to look forward to' and I'd get to reinvent myself again as somebody else.
"But each time all the underlying issues would come up - the grief and the sadness and then the alcoholism that came with my coping mechanisms."
Sonya is frank and open about how alcohol has been her crutch over the years and says her relationship with drinking is a work in progress.
"It's a tough one," she explains.
"It's certainly not something that I can honestly say I've got a handle on.
"I'm sure there are alcoholics out there that would be screaming at me for saying this, but I still turn to it occasionally.
"But I would say I'm perhaps more a binge drinker these days as opposed to coming home every single night and having one-plus bottles of wine."
When Sonya got the knock on the door to say Damian had been shot, she was mother to a four-month-old girl and a busy toddler.
She would later take the kids to see their father's body and watch her little girl reach into the coffin to touch his lifeless body.
When she talks about her kids - Hudson is now almost 14 years old and Grace is 12 - Sonya gets that glow that all mothers get when they share stories or photographs.
"I wouldn't be here if we didn't have them," she says.
"I can honestly tell you, there was no way that I would have kept living.
"They have absolutely been my grounding force and the one thing that brings me home every day, so I guess I've got them to thank for that."
Sonya says she could never have been prepared for the intensity of the media interest after Damian's death - from photographers climbing fences to take photos of baby clothes on the line to stories about her dating life splashed across the local paper.
She says at the trial of her husband's killers she felt she was playing a "cat and mouse" game with the press.
"I walked out to a wall of cameras and in the rush of them trying to get footage, I was pushed up against a wall and literally had to navigate the way down the wall to across the road before I was free," she says.
"So I suppose that's where my opinion of the media at the time had come from because I felt completely like my life was being invaded."
Policing has always been a huge part of Sonya's life and she's worked hard to get where she is at work today.
From feeling wrapped in cotton wool when she first returned to active duties after Damian's death and battling the stigma she was "getting special treatment", Sonya is proud of her achievements including being appointed as a detective in recent years.
Despite forging her own path, she is still sometimes pulled back to the night Damian died.
"I always . listen out for jobs similar to Damian's on the police radio and always make sure there's backup," she says, conceding things are different now.
"People tend to meet up all together and go in as a group as opposed to one crew but it was luck of the draw, Damian was close by and he went in.
"I suppose when there's people's lives at risk, what else are you going to do?"
She says there is only one thing that could have prevented her husband dying - and it wasn't police protocol.
"One person could have not pulled the trigger. It's as simple as that. Other than that, I don't think it could have been any different," she says.
Sonya says the thing that helped her find her own identity after Damian's death was writing her first book.
Her novel, Blue Widow, will be published next month and she says after writing her story down she no longer feels the weight of it.
"I think the more that I share it, the less it burdens me," she says.
"The day that I pressed print on the first draft was probably the first day that I went: 'I don't have to carry that around with me anymore'.
"I know it's my baggage. I know it's there. But now I can pick it up in a book and go here it is.
"And obviously, I don't want anyone to forget Damian but I also want people to know that it wasn't an easy walk through the park, either."