Sometimes it’s small, seemingly unrelated things that feel the most surprising. Like realizing you stopped decoration the walls.
I’ve done some objectively cool things in my life. Things that, someone else might feel incredibly proud of. But for many years, I’ve had a hard time looking in the mirror and saying Girl. You did that!
And I couldn’t really understand why.
It wasn’t humility. And it wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate validation. It’s that I just couldn’t seem to connect with my own accomplishments. They felt strangely distant. Like something that had happened to someone else.
I’ve since learned that trauma can affect both the way we remember what happened to us and how we experience our own memories. Trama can essentially break the connection we feel with our sense of self.
Maybe I never stopped being proud of the woman who won medals. She’s still part of me, just a quieter version that’s harder to see.
Chances are, there’s someone reading this right now that can relate to this feeling of disconnect. They too found themselves in a relationship where their reality was questioned, their feelings minimized, and their needs were always too much.
We stop trusting our own instincts. Stop asking for what we need. Stop celebrating ourselves and start editing our own story. I think eventually we become so accustomed to looking at ourselves from someone else’s perspective that we forget there are other versions of us too.
It’s not that I just stopped putting things on the walls.
There’s something about putting up a photograph, a medal, an accomplishment, or a reminder of something we survived that says:
This happened. I did this. This is part of my story.
And I think that part of my story was so painful, that if I wanted to survive, I couldn’t keep facing it every day.
So, I put it away. I made myself smaller and looked forward instead of back.
At the time, I think it was exactly what I needed to do. But time changed my grief and allowed survival to make room for something new. Pride inched its way back in and helped me remember the real story.
Contrary to what some might believe, pride isn’t always arrogance. Sometimes it’s simply being able to look at your life and say:
Yeah. That was hard. But I did it. And it mattered, because I matter.
Maybe healing isn’t becoming someone entirely new or reinventing yourself into a shinier, more acceptable version. Maybe It can also be finding your way back to the parts of yourself you abandoned in order to survive.
The woman who won medals.
Who built things.
Who kept going.
She’s still here. And she has some walls to fill. Which is a pretty good problem to have.
PS: She’s also launching a podcast on August 25th and the trailers up! Be sure to bookmark it on your favorite platform.