Thank you to my hero’s….
Thank you who the women, families and people who inspire me. Yet again a death threat has been thrown and posturing has been sent to someone who aids survivors , but the spirit of people who refuse to stop fighting for what is right and good… never fails.
This is the reality of what it looks like DAILY, monumentally, and constantly in the lives of survivors. When threats are made, posturing begins, and most times violence follows. Survival becomes engrained in every choice we make. Over analyzing becomes second nature. Every moment could shift out of nowhere so our nervous system never shuts down.
cPTSD becomes a coping skill, our survival secret….and it does it’s job well. Thank God. We stay alive, afloat, and always weighing every word we say, choice we make, and action we take. The exhaustion sets in, but our adrenaline pushes through the noise and gives us the energy to overcome fear so we can navigate unspoken expectations, intimidating glances and nuanced intentions. We have become masters as the art of dancing through puzzles like beautiful little ballerinas.
We are the embodiment of a feral cat… always anticipating, waiting, watching, calculating, smart, powerful in a quiet way, and yet entirely un-intimidating… forgettable. Once beautiful but now ragged. Capable but now skittish… leery of the hand that feeds us.
When it’s over, it is all but impossible to train that out of our body and brain. The next new battle begins. All that we learned to keep us alive, now becomes our enemy. It ruins relationships, loses jobs, and makes it impossible to make simple choices. Our bodies and brains enter a spiral when we are not surviving on adrenaline any longer. The body remembers life or death, constantly signaling potential threats… but the people around us find it annoying, inconvenient and unnatural. We are socially unacceptable and culturally uncouth.
Our brains fight against us while they DUMP hormones and withhold neurotransmitters from our system making it impossible to sleep, eat, or even move some days. Dissociation kicks in when we need it most to stay away. What used to keep us sharp are prepared, now holds us captive.
The mind boggling truth is, we are failing BECAUSE we survived. Some turn to substances in an attempt to self-medicate but that inevitably lands us back where we started.
So we go back…. For the cycle to continue like roller coaster that refuses to stop, but just keeps picking up speed. We keep imagining stepping off, but right as it pulls up to the platform it picks up speed again.
Or, one day… when it feels like it’s all over, somehow, by the grace of God, someone steps into the darkness and grabs our hand.
Somewhere someone felt a nudge and stepped up to align us with people who incredible patience like we’ve never seen before…. And we find grace, value, hope, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness (from ourselves, even more than others). In those moments we are given the gift of safety and time to relearn our entire existence, from the very beginning. Reprogramming each neural pathway, detoxing from cortisol overload and adrenal catastrophe so we can finally see clearly. We satiate the sense of belonging we have long searched for, but within ourselves instead of trying to find a human savior. Foreign perspectives and impossible potential becomes reachable.
It is these people- the fearless warriors who will fight for us when we don’t even fully understand what that means. They will endure, willingly and knowingly, the chaos that we had no choice but to endure. They will accept consequences that they don’t deserve. They give us love when we are unlovable; accountability in hand with grace. They choose to shoulder the understanding we are not yet capable of grasping.
These people change the world so we can have the chance to do the same. They inspire so we can one day become unstoppable forces for good. They give us a chance to live, and live fully. They embody fearless compassion and good.
And I, for one, am forever thankful for those people…
