It Wasn't My Voice

There are songs that sound like who I am.

And there are songs that sound like who I became while I was hurting.

Those are not the same thing.

For a long time, I thought healing meant reaching a place where I could no longer recognize the woman who cried, panicked, spiraled, or reacted.

Now I think healing looks much more honest than that.

Healing is being able to look at her with compassion and quietly say,

"I know why you sounded like that."

There are moments from that season of my life that don't sound like me at all.

The woman who overanalyzed every conversation.

The woman who replayed arguments in her head while trying to figure out what she had missed.

The woman who questioned her own memory because she had been told she was remembering things incorrectly.

The woman whose body stayed tense even during moments that were supposed to feel peaceful.

I know her.

But she isn't me anymore.

That doesn't mean she was fake.

She was surviving.

I think one of the greatest gifts God has given me is the ability to stop judging the versions of myself that He was gently leading out of the wilderness.

There was a time when I felt embarrassed by my reactions.

Embarrassed that I cried so much.

Embarrassed that I became anxious.

Embarrassed that I kept hoping.

Embarrassed that I couldn't simply wake up one morning and move on.

Now, when I think about those days, I don't see weakness.

I see a nervous system trying to make sense of a reality my heart was not yet ready to accept.

There is something incredibly merciful about realizing that our bodies often recognize danger long before our minds can explain it.

Sometimes anxiety isn't proof that we're irrational.

Sometimes it's proof that something inside us knows we are not safe.

I spent years trying to silence those alarms.

Trying to become calmer.

Kinder.

More understanding.

More patient.

I kept assuming that if I could just regulate myself enough, everything around me would finally become peaceful.

But peace cannot be created by one person inside a relationship that requires two.

Eventually I stopped asking,

"Why am I reacting like this?"

And I started asking,

"What am I reacting to?"

That question changed everything.

Because suddenly my reactions stopped being the entire story.

They became evidence.

Not evidence that I was broken.

Evidence that something was.

Looking back now, I don't wish I had never been triggered.

I wish I had listened sooner to what those moments were trying to tell me.

Not every reaction is wisdom.

But neither is every reaction madness.

Sometimes it is simply a soul knocking on the door of our awareness, whispering,

"Please pay attention."

Today I feel calmer than I have in years.

Not because I learned to suppress my emotions.

Because I no longer live in the environment that kept creating them.

There is a difference.

And I wish more people understood that.

Sometimes healing doesn't begin because we become a different person.

Sometimes healing begins because we finally stop asking our nervous system to survive what our spirit already knows is over.

That woman who felt so triggered...

She deserves kindness.

She deserves understanding.

She deserves forgiveness.

She isn't my voice anymore.

But she carried me all the way here.

And for that...

I will never be ashamed of her.

♡