Strength taught her how to survive. Softness taught her how to live.

She wore the badge. Raised her daughter. Built a life that looked strong from the outside. She became the woman people could depend on, the one who kept going, kept carrying, kept showing up.

Until strength started costing her more than anyone could see.

Raised in silence and praised for her resilience, Rashida Saunders learned early how to carry what hurt without letting it show. That lesson followed her into motherhood, law enforcement, leadership, grief, faith, and love.

From the outside, she was thriving.

Inside, she was disappearing.

What happens when the version of you everyone admires is the same version of you that is slowly breaking you?

Permission to Break is an intimate memoir about survival, silence, and the complicated truth about being called strong. Through the parts of her story she once believed were better left unspoken, Rashida confronts what it costs to become everything everyone needs while quietly losing pieces of yourself along the way.

And eventually, she has to answer a question she can no longer outrun—Who are you when you no longer have to prove that you can handle it?

This is not a story about falling apart.

It is about what happens when a woman who has spent her life surviving finally gives herself permission to live.