Some days, nothing looks wrong on the outside. The coffee is warm. The morning is quiet. The world moves normally. But then something small – a sharp tone, footsteps too loud, a door closing a little too hard – lands in my body like a warning. Before my mind can name it, my chest tightens. My jaw clenches. My whole nervous system lights up like it’s bracing for impact.

That’s the thing about trauma. It doesn’t always announce itself with memory. Sometimes it arrives as a feeling you can’t trace. An instinct to disappear. A sudden need to make yourself smaller, quieter, easier to love. Not because anything bad is happening now – but because it did once, and your body hasn’t forgotten.

I’ll catch myself holding my breath in conversations that feel too familiar. Shrinking in rooms that remind me of old harm. Smiling when I want to scream, just like I did at twelve, trying not to make it worse. The survival patterns come back before I realize I’m in them.

And the hardest part is this: learning that I’m safe now. That I don’t have to prove my worth with silence. That not every silence is danger. That love doesn’t have to be something I flinch from.

Healing, for me, has been less about fixing what happened and more about making space for what still lives in me because of it. The breath I catch mid-sentence. The tension I carry in rooms that are perfectly still. The way I scan for exits even in gentle places. These are not signs of weakness. They are proof I learned how to survive. And now, little by little, I’m learning how to live.