Born into a fractured home and a violently racist world, Mariah Carey spent her earliest years feeling unsafe in her own skin and unwanted in her own family. Locked in rooms while other children screamed slurs at her, watching chaos explode between her parents and siblings, she learned early that adults didn’t always come to save you. Even home was a battlefield, where love, anger, and fear collided in ways a child could never understand.

Yet from that darkness, she built a voice that refused to be silenced. Music became the place where she could rewrite her story, one note at a time. The girl who once felt “unworthy of being alive” grew into the woman whose songs define entire seasons, especially — a holiday she rebuilt into the joy she never had. Behind the sequins and chart records stands a survivor who turned trauma into an anthem of hope.