But it took her a long time to find it.

As a sharecropper’s kid growing up in Harnett County, the Holly Springs resident found her voice silenced by an abusive home and the corroding self-doubt inspired by a cruel father.

As a young adult she found her voice twisted by the lingering rage she thought she had pushed down deep.

And when she finally found the words she needed to speak, she knew they could heal others as well.

So McDonald, the sharecropper’s kid from Harnett County, started filling California theaters with her words.

She filled them with a self-produced one-woman play that gave voice to years of childhood emotional and physical abuse.

The play was called “I Wanna Tell You My Story.” She started performing it in the 1990s and it told of her journey from the Carolina backwoods to the busy streets of Los Angeles.

It told of her transition from a self-hating kid to a working-to-be-confident woman.

“I wanted to have impact on the world,” McDonald said.

Now 57, McDonald laughs when she thinks of how unprepared she was for her move “out west.”

She had moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s where she found work putting her nursing degree from Durham Tech to use.

The diverse West Coast city delighted her senses, even if its bigness scared her a bit.

She went to museums, met friends from every background and found work as a neonatal nurse in Los Angeles.

But the destructively self-preserving behavior she had learned on that Carolina farm kept rearing up its head — especially in clashes with people at work.

In a 2007 same-titled book based on her play, McDonald writes of the moment she “cracked,” when she became so angry that she physically attacked another nurse after an oral conflict.

She was in her mid 30s and had something like a nervous breakdown, she said.

So she did something unheard of in her rural Southern background — she talked about “family business.”

In therapy she pulled out all the family’s skeletons and spoke about her father’s constant name calling, his taunts that she’d never amount to anything and the beatings for which she was made to strip.

She also started journaling her memories and thoughts, and understanding how her past was affecting her present.

Her play was born from that journaling.

“I started dreaming the poetry,” McDonald said.

A doctor’s wife helped her organize the play’s contents, made up of both poetry and prose.

McDonald started cold-calling theaters to see where she could perform. She also did her own press, getting a mention in the Los Angeles Times.

For the next five years she performed the play all around Los Angeles and began doing workshops and classes for abused women.

She even traveled abroad to perform, once performing the play in Istanbul, Turkey.

Two years ago she came back to North Carolina to nurse a brother and mother who had fallen ill.

And this is where she has stayed. She doesn’t mind being home.

“I’m home on the inside,” she said.

And though she hasn’t been a medical nurse for several years, she continues in North Carolina the “spiritual nursing” she took up in Los Angeles.

She conducts workshops for abused women, holds classes for different organizations and has an inspirational talk show on WAUG, an AM radio station run from St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh.

“She had an interesting story to tell,” said John Low, WAUG’s program director, of why he wanted McDonald for the show.

One person who always pushed McDonald to succeed was her mother.

And her mother still lives in the area, but the father who caused her so much pain never got to see the woman his daughter became.

He died when McDonald was 14, though it was only as a grown woman that she has been able to forgive him.

And on a recent weekday from a bustling Cary eatery, McDonald said she has.

Abuse was what her father knew. He just wasn’t able to break its cycle.

“We all have a story,” McDonald said.