Learning Together…

About myself, but mostly the mission…

My name is Denise Verrillo, and Neece’s Publishing Company & Services LLC did not begin as a business plan. It grew slowly from a lifetime of learning, writing, observing, surviving, connecting patterns, and trying to translate complicated things into language that helps people feel less alone. I went from living a highly masked life to experiencing paralysis, and paralysis took the masks off. I was forced to stop, reflect, and rethink almost everything about the way I had been living, what I had survived, and who I was beneath the roles I had learned to perform.

Before I was twenty-five, my brain felt like a sponge. I wanted to understand everything, so I learned everything I could. I knew programming, studied mathematics through calculus, and loved trigonometry. I learned the foundations of physics, chemistry, biology, and geology because I was fascinated by how all the pieces of the universe fit together. I could observe patterns for hours without needing to interfere with them. I simply wanted to watch, understand, and see how one piece connected to another.

Music works similarly inside me. I can play the piano, and sing, but I cannot read music. I understand the relationships between the sounds, the movement, and the feeling without always being able to explain the formal structure behind them. That same logic seems to exist throughout my mind. I often understand something through patterns, relationships, movement, and observation before I have the words to describe what I know.

Numbers made sense to me because they did not lie. They gave me a yes or a no, and when an answer was wrong, they forced me to go back, locate the mistake, and correct myself. I always thought there was something beautiful about that. Math did not insult me for being wrong or demand that I defend myself. It simply showed me where something did not connect yet and gave me another opportunity to understand it.

That way of thinking never left me. Even when illness changed how easily I could access and retain information, I continued looking for connections between systems, people, experiences, and ideas. I may not always hold information in the same way I once did, but I learned how to preserve the path back to it through journals, notes, arrows, questions, examples, locations, images, conversations, and patterns. I recorded not only what happened, but how I understood it.

For years, I thought I was simply raising my daughter, managing illness, caring for the people around me, and writing my way through experiences I did not always understand. Over time, those journals became books. The books became children’s stories, field notes, educational ideas, creative projects, nonprofits, and new ways of examining the body, relationships, faith, community, and the differences between people.

The company began to take shape when I realized these projects were not separate. They were all trying to do the same thing: help people understand one another, recognize value where others may see only difficulty, and create places where people are allowed to grow without first being forced to become someone else.

That is why our motto is Giving People a Place to Grow.

Neece’s Publishing Company & Services LLC is being built around the belief that people do not always need to be rescued, corrected, or forced into systems that were never designed for them. Sometimes people need information they can understand, meaningful work, patient guidance, creative opportunity, encouragement, or simply a place where their differences can be cultivated instead of erased.

The company is beginning the same way the books did: small, incomplete, and still being discovered. It connects publishing, children’s stories, education, creative collaboration, community resources, and future tools intended to help people observe themselves and one another more gently. Some parts are already here. Other parts will grow as the right people find one another.

I am not building this company because I believe everyone should think, communicate, learn, create, believe, work, or heal in the same way. I am building it because they do not. This is about bringing people together, growing together, and creating a place that accepts one another’s differences while offering people the room, tools, guidance, and opportunity to cultivate them.

The heart of this company is simple: you must live what you teach. It does not matter whether you are religious, spiritual, uncertain, or neither. It does not matter what you wear, how you look, where you came from, or which label someone gives you. What matters is how you treat people, whether your actions match your words, and whether you understand that different places and situations may require awareness, respect, and appropriate behavior. There is no complicated test. Do not judge people before knowing them. Be honest. Be accountable. Care about the effect you have on others. Help where you can, and do not teach principles you refuse to practice in your own life.

A person’s value should not be measured only by productivity, credentials, money, appearance, or how well they perform inside a system. It should also be measured by what they nurture, what they protect, what they create, and how they treat people who cannot offer them anything in return.

I do not know exactly what every part of this company will become yet. I only know what it is meant to protect: human dignity, curiosity, purpose, creativity, accountability, and the possibility that something dismissed as a weakness may simply need a different place to grow.

Sometimes, all we need is encouragement and a reminder that we do not have to know someone personally to want to help them. I also hope this company reminds people that they are not alone and that there is something inside each of us worth protecting.

As children, before the world began telling us what to think, many of us experienced moments when something inside us seemed to speak. When we were frightened, we may have felt warmth or heard a quiet inner voice telling us to be silent, stay still, move, or pay attention. You may call it intuition, instinct, a gut feeling, faith, inner knowledge, or whatever language feels right to you. The label does not matter. Labels are not what this company—or I—am about.

I want love. I want honesty. I want people who care. I want people who can look past the label, the pain, the behavior, and the armor. I want people who can notice the light hidden inside the cracks and help someone find the words to begin pulling themselves out—or finally believe that they can. Some people do not even realize there may be a life beyond who they were told they were allowed to become.

This small website, still incomplete and still being discovered, is my attempt to show people that life can become okay again. Maybe there can be a company that asks what you want to do instead of forcing you to climb a ladder that never leads to who you truly are. I hope to build this company from one person into many and show children that there may one day be a place they can choose if it feels right for them—a place that does not force beliefs upon them but simply asks everyone to keep learning how to treat one another better.

Words matter. Appearances matter because they influence how people are treated. I did not fully understand that until people looked at me and assumed some of the worst things society can assume about another person. In those moments, it did not seem to matter what the truth was. I had already been placed inside a box before anyone had taken the time to know me.

This goes deeper than judging a book by its cover. It is about whether we care enough to know another person beyond the surface. It is about cultivating one another and growing together.

Most of all, I want this company to show that profit does not always have to end in someone’s pocket. It can extend outward into communities. It can help build resources, restore opportunities, support families, teach skills, and help neglected places grow again.

I imagine a place that finds healthy crops from real farmers whose families have cultivated the land for generations and brings those ingredients into a community restaurant. A place that teaches children how to cook for free. A place where people can learn together, prepare meals together, and then sit down and eat together. Who would not want to eat there?

These are only some of the dreams I have. For now, the books are coming, and I hope people appreciate the time, energy, and life it took to create them. I spent a lifetime documenting pieces without fully understanding what they would become. Then, during some of the darkest moments of my life—when my body felt as though it was about to snap—memories began returning.

I reread old journals, and experiences began connecting. I examined medical records, photographs, places, and conversations. Everything started rushing back: the ways I once handled information, the places where I stored memories, and the strange anchors I attached them to so they would not disappear.

Sometimes those anchors were locations, people, songs, images, or even annoying commercials that made no sense to anyone else but were impossible for me to ignore. Some part of me seemed to know that I might need them one day to find my way back.

I just did not know that finding my way back would mean finding myself again.

I want to help the seven-year-old child avoid losing themselves in the first place. I want children to recognize their own anchors and preserve the vivid, beautiful memories alongside the painful ones. I want them to learn how to understand the adults around them without becoming trapped by those adults’ limitations. I want them to grow into people who are more self-aware, more compassionate, and better prepared to care for one another.

I want to empower the generations still coming while helping the generations already here develop more empathy. This company is still small, incomplete, and being discovered.

But it has begun.

Alláh-u-Abhá.

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Keep Smiling… for you.

Most of my life, one theme has remained consistent: I stayed true to myself. I was taught at a young age that consistency would pay off one day. The people around me did not always remain the same. Some changed a little; others changed so much that, over time, they seemed to forget who they had been beneath the armor they created or the roles they accepted. “If this was what they wanted, I might as well give it to them,” I wrote in a journal at 17. 5 years earlier at 12, I had already begun asking why everyone wanted me to be someone I wasn’t. Why couldn’t I just be a kid forever? Why couldn’t I play baseball with the boys at the park without the word “girl” being used to separate me from them? I was blessed to have an amazing group of kids who never saw me that way. They saw my love of the game. As I grew older, hormonal changes and worsening health changed what I was physically able to do, but one thing remained: since I began writing at age 6, I had wanted to protect children.

Everything I wrote and everything I documented included ways to protect children. To this day, that remains my driving force. We learn from mistakes. I want to bridge the gap between parents and children. I want parents to remember who they were before the armor and the masks. I want them to see their children for who they are before pressure forces them into a box or a mold. I want them to pause for a second before yelling at their child and ask, “What would five-year-old me want?” I want to help people come together and love one another again. Nothing more. I do not hold ill will toward anyone who has wronged me. I pray for them. This is how I choose to show grace, even though others were not always as kind to me during my weakest moments.

Throughout my life, one person after another told me to write a book. I also kept encountering experiences and ideas that did not seem to exist in a form people could understand unless someone wrote them down. So I did. I often wondered why experience and understanding did not carry the same weight as a test score. My formal education ended with a high school diploma, but my learning never did. The few people who knew me in college might say I was a little smarter than I let on, and they would be correct. I helped many amazing people learn how to program that year. That made me happier than earning the degree would have. My time in college ended when the school closed one month before graduation. That experience taught me how differently people learn, how easily ability can be overlooked, and how knowledge can exist without a piece of paper proving it. Those lessons now shape the work I am building: creating room for people whose abilities, experiences, and ways of learning are too often overlooked.

If you would like to know more about how these experiences shaped my work, click “Learn More” below.

These books are my attempt to help us see the child inside each other, and inside ourselves. It took me a long time to understand that. Now I do. That understanding does not excuse bad behavior; it simply helps us recognize cause and effect.