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How Childhood Trauma Affected My Ability to Receive Love
Why strangers felt safer than the person I loved This is the hardest piece I’ve written so far. My chest feels heavy. My throat feels constricted. Like my body is trying to stop the words before I type them. A few weeks ago, someone left a comment asking why I never mention significant others in…
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High-Functioning: When Your Life Still Works but You Don’t
The exhausting middle between survival mode and healing After the near-death experience, I kept waiting to become inspirational. That seems to be the preferred storyline. Woman almost dies.Woman returns transformed.Starts waking up at 5 a.m.Builds her dream life.Becomes a pillar of the community somehow. Instead, I started struggling to answer emails. At first, I thought…
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The Loneliness of Becoming Whoever the Room Needed
Why social masking started feeling like personality The music is loud enough that everyone has to lean slightly closer to talk. A girl near me is halfway through a dating story everyone else seems instantly invested in. Everyone laughs. I laugh too. Half a second behind everyone else. Just enough time to make sure my…
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I Didn’t Realize I Was Living Outside My Own Body
Pole dancing, performance, and the strange experience of learning how to feel The mirrors are everywhere. Not the soft, forgiving kind either. Bright white walls.Metal poles stretching from floor to ceiling like something between a playground and a dare. I sit cross-legged on my mat, trying not to look as uncomfortable as I feel. The…
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The First Time I Said It Out Loud: Telling the Truth About My Abuse
The female survivor group was supposed to be bigger. It was my new sex therapist, his wife for “female presence” and “moral support” and two other women. My screen felt too small for it.The lighting was bad. I looked tired.I kept shifting my chair, adjusting the angle, trying to look a little more put together.…
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People Pleasing: Growing Up in a Family Where Nothing Was Said
Learning to stay inside the lines. Around Asian women,obedience wasn’t taught.It was absorbed. My sister and I grew up in the same house.Two years apart.Same rules. We came out nothing alike. She challenged.I adjusted. During our “rebellious” years,our parents suddenly encouraged honesty.Open communication. She believed them. She told my dad she wanted to go to…
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I Wrote Letters to My Family I Knew I’d Never Send
Even on paper, I softened it. I never planned to send the letters.I just needed somewhere for them to go. Seeing them made it too real. They still hurt.Just less than saying them out loud. What I buried so deep. was slowly being excavated. And each time I did that,it felt like picking at a…
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Trauma: My Body Wouldn’t Let Me Say It Out Loud
What happens when you finally name what happened to you. I thought I was ready for therapy, until I was told this was bigger than CBT,something that needed a more trauma-informed approach. So I kept looking. Reading bios,trying to decide who I might open myself to. In the back of my mind, I was only…
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I Thought Healing Was Woo-Woo: Until I Had No Choice
When logic stops working, and your body won’t let you look away. I thought I understood emotions.In a… structured way.Something you could name, and move past. Breathwork.Energy work.Inner child conversations. They felt far away from me.Like something other people needed. I preferred things I could explain.If I couldn’t understand it,I didn’t trust it. So I…
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Changed Memory: Recognizing the Trauma I Pretended Didn’t Happen
What happens when someone reflects back the story you refused to see? I received an email with the subject line: Introduction. It was from an acquaintance I had met at a networking event in California two years earlier. We barely interacted that night. I remember feeling slightly intimidated by her. Over dinner, she casually described…
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