I sift through the ash of my childhood. It rises in my throat, thick as smoke, choking out the words I need to speak. The house I grew up in wasn’t a house. It was a battlefield, each wall a shield, each door a barricade. I was not a child; I was collateral damage. And yet, somehow, I survived. Somehow, I grew from the rubble, though my roots twisted around broken glass and buried lies.
Healing, they say, is a journey. But that word feels too kind, too linear. Healing is a war. It is the sound of shattered mirrors screaming back at you. It is the ache in your bones when you try to walk upright after years of crawling on all fours. It is pulling yourself, bleeding and bare, out of the wreckage of what should have been love.
No one tells you how much it costs—this rebuilding of self. How the heart doesn’t just break once but fractures over and over as you dig up the ghosts, face them, and let them go. How you must teach yourself to trust the sunlight after years of flinching from the shadows.
Some days, recovery feels impossible. The child in me—small, wide-eyed, bruised—still cowers at the corners of my mind. She whispers that the world is not safe, that I am not safe. I hold her close and promise her that we are safe now, though I am still learning what safety feels like.
And love—oh, love is the cruelest teacher. It asks you to peel away your armor, to let someone hold the tender parts you have hidden for so long. But how do you let yourself be loved when your skin remembers every slap, every sting?
It takes everything.
It takes screaming into the void until it echoes back your name.
It takes crying into your own hands and not being ashamed of the tears.
It takes forgiving the child you were for not running away, for not fighting back.
It takes forgiving the adult you are for still carrying that pain.
Recovery is not a triumph; it is a truce. A moment of stillness after decades of chaos. A whisper to yourself in the dark: You are alive. You are here. You are enough.
But here is the secret they never tell you: healing will break your heart. It will crack you open so wide you think you’ll never close again. And maybe you won’t. Maybe that’s the point.
Because through those cracks, the light pours in.
Through those cracks, you find the strength to grow.
And through those cracks, you begin to bloom.
There is nothing more beautiful than a scar kissed by forgiveness. Nothing braver than a heart that beats despite it all. So to the child I was, to the child you were: we are still here. And that is everything.
B 🤍
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