Healing, for me, has never arrived as a single moment of arrival. It has felt much more like learning an entirely new language, slowly, with frequent mistakes, long after the old language should have stopped being useful to me at all.
There were entire years when I genuinely believed I had moved past most of what had happened to me, only to find myself completely undone by something small and unexpected. A particular song playing in a grocery store. A familiar smell that arrived from nowhere. The specific color of someone’s outfit at a summer gathering, decades removed from the memory it quietly reawakened. Healing does not move in a straight line from wounded to whole, the way recovery is so often portrayed. It moves instead in loops, circling a person back to old pain at unexpected moments, even after long stretches of genuinely, sustainably feeling like herself again.
The most important shift in my own healing was learning to name accurately what had actually happened to me: not minimized, not exaggerated, simply accurate. For years, I had unconsciously absorbed my family’s own vocabulary for these events, all of its euphemisms, its vague phrases, its convenient half sentences that let everyone in the room avoid the real words entirely. Learning to call what happened exactly what it was, even silently, to myself, at first, became the beginning of every other piece of healing that eventually followed it.
I want to say this clearly, for any reader who needs to hear it stated plainly: I could not have done this work entirely alone, and I do not believe most people can. Working with a therapist trained specifically in trauma gave me language and tools that I simply did not have access to on my own, no matter how much reading or reflecting I did by myself. If you are reading this and have not yet found that kind of support, I would encourage you to seek it out not as some kind of last resort, reserved for when everything else has failed, but as one of the most direct paths toward the relief you are actually looking for.
I don’t want any of this to be read only as grief and effort, because that would leave out something equally true. Joy did come back into my life, and it did not arrive as some kind of compensation for what had been taken from me earlier. It arrived instead as its own separate, entirely genuine thing. Relationships where I finally feel safe enough to be fully myself. Ordinary moments with my own children where I get to offer them something different from what I was given as a child. A slowly built, hard won sense that my body and my story finally belong to me now, and to no one who once decided otherwise.
If you are somewhere in the middle of this work yourself, I want you to know that the loops are not a sign of failure. They are simply part of what healing from something this old and this deep actually looks like. You are allowed to have both the setbacks and the genuine progress. You are allowed to still be healing decades later. And you are allowed, eventually, to find your way back to joy that belongs entirely to you.