Choose to Be Free: Extraordinary, Common, and Real

What does it really take to choose freedom - and keep choosing it, every day, for the rest of your life?Kathrine Phillips-Taylor had it all: a good job, two cars, a son she adored, and a life she'd built with her own hands. Then came the wrong relationship, the wrong choice, and the first hit of a drug that would define the next twenty-five years of her life.Choose to Be Free is her true story - raw, unflinching, and told in her own voice. From robberies and prison sentences to homelessness and heartbreak, Kathrine takes you through decades on the streets of Southern California, in and out of the system, in and out of her own children's lives. But this isn't just a story about rock bottom. It's a story about what happens when someone finally chooses, over and over, to walk a different way.This new edition, lovingly edited by her daughter Roniece Kayann Taylor-Bush after Kathrine's passing on September 22nd, 2025, includes an afterword that finishes the story only a daughter could tell - what freedom looked like in her mother's final years, and what it means to keep a promise after the person you made it to is gone.Choose to Be Free is for anyone who has ever wondered if their past disqualifies them from a better future. It doesn't.