From Surviving To Living

I’ve always been told that I’m a fast learner. I catch onto direction and correction quickly, and I can handle criticism like a champ.

Apparently, that applies to therapy too.

At the beginning of this year, I made the decision to go back to therapy and specifically find a therapist who specialized in EMDR.

It wasn’t because I was tired of “living in the past.” Mentally, I WAS living in the present. I was excited about my future. But I started realizing that even though my mind knew I was okay, my nervous system didn’t always know that.

Past traumatic experiences and memories still had a huge effect on the way my body responded to life. I was tired of constantly living in fight-or-flight. I was tired of memories from 10 or 15 years ago being able to hit the exact same emotional nerve as if they had happened yesterday.

And more than anything, I wanted to remember the good.

I’ve talked about some of my past experiences before, but I don’t really want to anymore. Partly for the sake of the other people involved, but mostly because those experiences do not define who I am today. I’ve done the work to get to a place where I don’t need to keep reopening those chapters to prove that they happened.

My therapist told me that the kind of trauma work I was doing could take two or three years.

I did it in eight months.

Not because I’m magically “better” at healing than anyone else. Healing doesn’t have a deadline, and everyone’s timeline is different.

I did it because I was fucking ready.

I wanted it.

One of the hardest things for me to understand was just how deeply trauma had shaped my brain and nervous system. In therapy, we talked about how complex trauma can create survival responses similar to those seen in people who have lived through prolonged, high-stress experiences.

Many of my traumatic experiences happened during some of the earliest years of my life. One of my earliest memories that could still hit that trauma chord was from when I was six years old.

Six.

Your brain is still developing. You’re learning what love feels like. What safety feels like. What home feels like. What relationships are supposed to feel like.

And somewhere along the way, my nervous system learned to survive before I really got the chance to learn how to just live.

I was a little girl living in fight-or-flight.

Walking on eggshells. Walking in fear. Reading rooms. Preparing for what might happen next. Surviving instead of living.

And when that’s all you know, you don’t necessarily realize anything is wrong.

It just feels normal. 

Something my therapist said to me during this process has really stuck with me. She told me that she doesn’t see a lot of women in their early 20s choosing to do this kind of deep emotional work. A lot of the women she sees finally confronting these things are in their 40s and 50s.

She told me that choosing to do this in my 20s would allow me to grow in ways I probably couldn’t even see yet. She also warned me that sometimes it might make me feel a little out of place around people my own age because of the emotional maturity and self-awareness that can come from doing this work so young.

And I think I’m okay with that.

Because if there’s anything I want to be for women in my generation, it’s an inspiration — not an influencer.

I don’t want women to look at my life and want my clothes, my hair, my apartment, my body, my travels, or whatever else social media tells us we should want from someone else’s life.

I want another woman in her 20s to see me and think, “Maybe I can do the hard shit too.”

Go to therapy. Set the boundary. Take the trip. Leave the relationship. Chase the career. Move across the country. Learn how to be alone. Rebuild the relationship. Forgive when it feels right. Walk away when it doesn’t. Find God again. Trust the Universe. Figure out who the fuck you are outside of everything that has happened to you.

THAT is the kind of influence I want to have.

I wanted to leave Illinois with a healed nervous system. I didn’t want to move across the country while constantly wondering if I was making the wrong decision. I didn’t want to come back to Illinois someday and immediately think about everything that could go wrong or everything that had happened here.

I wanted coming home to actually feel like coming home.

I wanted to come back excited to see my people and make new memories instead of feeling like I was returning to a place filled with old ones.

And I wanted to leave knowing that I am proud of every version of myself that existed here.

The good one. The messy one. The chaotic one. The fun one. The quiet one. The heartbroken one. The one who had absolutely no fucking idea what she was doing.

All of them.

Therapy was hard. EMDR was SUPER fucking hard.

Sitting in those sessions and willingly facing things that I had spent years mentally shoving into a backpack was exhausting. Facing memories that could send my body into panic just by thinking about them took more mental willpower than I can explain.

For years, I would randomly have moments where I had to leave the gym, a grocery store, a coffee shop, wherever I was because I could feel something happening inside my body.

I’d get cold. My body would feel empty. Then I’d feel the tears starting to well up.

Before I knew it, I was walking out of a public place with tears running down my face, getting into my car, driving home, and spending the next hour completely overwhelmed.

Sometimes I saw a certain person.

Sometimes I read a text message.

Sometimes I saw something while scrolling on my phone.

Something seemingly small could dysregulate me so badly that my entire body reacted.

And this wasn’t some once-in-a-blue-moon thing.

For probably seven years, there were periods where this happened once or twice a week.

The craziest part?

I didn’t even know they were panic attacks.

I just called them my “cry sessions.”

It wasn’t until earlier this year when I explained to my therapist what these episodes actually looked and felt like that I started understanding what my body had been doing all of these years.

It had been trying to protect me.

But I didn’t need to live like I was constantly in danger anymore.

So I did the work. 

But I did it because I refuse to let a shitty ex-boyfriend have power over me.

I refuse to let old memories dictate my present relationships with my family or my friends.

And I refuse to let trauma blind me from seeing how much good there still is in this world.

Because I know I deserve everything this life, this universe, and God have to offer me.

For someone whose brain could logically understand, “That happened a long time ago. You’re okay now,” while her nervous system was still screaming otherwise, EMDR changed something in me that talk therapy alone never could.

My brain knew what happened.

My body just needed help understanding that it wasn’t happening anymore.

And now I get to leave Illinois without panic.

Without feeling like I’m running away.

Without wondering if I’m doing the wrong thing.

I’m leaving proud of my past, fully living in my present, and so fucking excited for my future.

I’m not leaving Illinois to escape my life.

I’m leaving because I’m ready to go live it.