The past few weeks have been brutal. Not just difficult. Brutal. Like someone took a blade to wounds I thought had long since scarred over. Tearing them open without mercy. Old pain. Old betrayals. Old memories. All dragged – screaming – back into the light. It is overwhelming in a way that words can barely touch.
The truth is you never expect that someone you gave your heart to, someone you trusted with the rawest most fragile parts of yourself, would be the one to break you. You never imagine that someone you loved so fiercely – even a child – would use that love against you. The betrayal isn’t just a crack. It is a violent tearing apart. A destruction of something you once believed was sacred. And standing in the aftermath of that – knowing I must somehow let go – feels like asking me to cut off my own limbs and keep walking.
Letting go sounds so clean. So neat. But it is anything but. It is a war inside my own mind. The rage of wanting to scream. The heartbreak of wanting to rewind time. The devastation of realising I will never get the answers I crave. No apologies. No closure. Just silence. Just emptiness. Just anger that festers into a poison I must choke down every day.
I find myself stewing in a cesspit of regret. Denial. Disbelief. And remorse. Spinning around in circles. Begging myself for different choices. For different endings. Knowing none will ever come. It is a slow merciless kind of drowning. And no one can pull me out. Not really. Even though I am surrounded by people who care. Even though I am loved by friends. There are moments when I am utterly – savagely – alone. Because no one else can crawl through my particular hell. No one else can breathe in my pain.
All they can do is imagine. Piecing together my brokenness from the fragments I manage to share. Some whispered between sobs.
If it were possible – if pain could be divided and carried by others – maybe the weight would not crush me so heavily. But that is not how survival works. Survival is a lonely bloodied climb out of a pit I never wanted to fall into.
And yet here I am. Bruised. Broken. Bleeding. And still breathing. Still crawling forward. Inch by inch. Still refusing to let this destroy me.
That is the thing about trauma. It takes everything from you. It strips you bare. But somewhere – deep in the ruins of yourself – something stubborn remains. A spark. A refusal to surrender.
I may not heal overnight. Some days, I may not heal at all. But I will survive. And one day – not today and maybe not tomorrow – I will realise that I am stronger not because I avoided being broken. But because I endured it. Because I carried it. And because, despite it all, I still chose to live.
