Trauma Recovery – Becoming Unboxed

The Voice on the Other End of the Line

One of the hardest things for a trauma survivor to do is reach outside their little bubble.

To move beyond the isolation that has started to feel safe.

To reach for another human being.

Another voice on the other end of the line.

Because after trauma, isolation can become comfortable in a strange way. Not because we necessarily want to be alone, but because being alone can feel safer than risking another misunderstanding, another dismissal, another judgment.

Sometimes healing begins with something that looks incredibly small from the outside.

Picking up the phone.

Sending a message.

Telling someone, “I’m not okay.”

And in the beginning of that journey, we are not expecting anyone to heal us.

We are not expecting another person to make us whole. We are not expecting one conversation, one relationship, one therapist, one medication, or one moment to suddenly make everything better.

Most of the time, we simply need someone willing to sit with us.

To listen.

To hear us.

Because something, someone, or some series of events hurt us deeply enough that, for a while, the expression of what happened may feel like one of the only things we still own.

Our words.

Our memories.

Our anger.

Our grief.

Our questions.

Our version of what happened to us.

Sometimes those expressions are all we have left while we are trying to understand who we are now.

That is why the response of the person on the other end matters so much.

It can take enormous courage to finally speak. And sometimes all it takes is one judgment for everything we have expressed outwardly to turn inward.

Suddenly, we are no longer simply saying, “I am hurting.”

We begin asking ourselves whether our pain means something is wrong with us.

Whether we should be further along.

Whether we are failing at recovery.

Whether what happened damaged us so completely that we will never find our way back to ourselves.

Whether we deserve pity instead of respect.

Whether we have somehow become something that should be judged instead of understood.

That is a tremendous amount of power contained in what can look like an ordinary human interaction.

The people we reach toward cannot heal us.

But their response can influence what happens next.

Whether they listen or dismiss.

Whether they stay or retreat.

Whether they make room for us or try to tell us who we should be.

Those moments can affect whether we are willing to reach outward again.

They can affect how safe connection feels.

They can even shape parts of who we become as we rebuild.

But there is another side to this.

No one person can protect another person from everything.

It simply is not possible.

We can stand beside someone.

We can warn them about danger.

We can try to shield them from pain.

We can carry what we are able to carry.

We can love someone so fiercely that we wish we could stand between them and every hurt, every disappointment, every loss, every sadness.

But we cannot live their life for them.

And sometimes, in trying so hard to protect someone we love, we unintentionally stand between them and something they need.

The chance to see clearly.

The chance to make their own choices.

The chance to discover what they are capable of.

The chance to decide what happiness looks like for them.

Protection can come from love.

But so can standing beside someone while allowing them to face what is theirs to face.

Because ultimately, most human beings are searching for many of the same things.

We want to be heard.

We want connection.

We want purpose.

We want some measure of happiness and productivity and the freedom to build a life that feels fulfilling to us.

The American ideal speaks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But happiness has never meant the same thing for everyone.

The clerk standing behind the counter at Dollar General may be every bit as content with their life as the millionaire sitting at the head of Walmart.

And either one can also be profoundly unhappy.

Money cannot tell us.

Titles cannot tell us.

Houses, accomplishments, jobs, and status cannot tell us what fulfillment looks like inside another human being.

And neither can we.

Maybe that is part of what we owe one another.

Not the promise that we can remove every painful thing from someone’s life.

Not the belief that we know what their happiness should look like.

Not the need to rescue, fix, or rewrite them.

Maybe what we owe one another is much simpler.

To listen.

To make room for another person’s expression without immediately turning it into a weakness, a failure, a diagnosis, or a judgment.

To trust that another human being knows something about their own life that we cannot possibly know for them.

To stand beside them without trying to become the author of their story.

There is a difference between saying,

“I will keep everything from touching you,”

and saying,

“Whatever happens, you will not have to face it alone.”

Friday Night Lights

I am here to support my son and his team on a beautiful fall evening. It feels almost surreal that nearly a year ago today, I could sit in these stands without trembling. Back then, I could feel the thud of the players’ feet, the sway of the bleachers, the contagious energy of youth—and still breathe without flinching.

I didn’t know then how sacred that internal calm had been. Back then, I just stayed somewhat numb to avoid the pain.

Now, every sound has a sharp edge. Every rhythm has a painful point my body still doesn’t know how to process it. The air hums with a tension that is somewhat unexplainable. A child keeps blowing a moose horn. I am sure they probably mean for it to distract the other team. Unfortunately for me, each blast feels like it’s aimed straight at my nervous system.

The Farmington High School Cardinals’ home field glows under the Friday night lights. In celebration of every touchdown, fireworks split the dark Ozark sky. They’re breathtaking against the untouched hills that form the backdrop of the stadium. The gentle rolling hills, full of natural beauty, still hide the stadium from the glare of city lights.

Yet for me, every explosion feels like an assault on my senses.

Gabe is a junior and not the starter. This is okay, because time moves like the blink of an eye. This is his last season as the low man on the totem pole. A place almost every adult who has played a sport remembers. With eight minutes left in the second quarter, our team is winning.

It is one of those moments when, as a parent, you find yourself hoping: Maybe he’ll get a chance to play but also realizing that this is someone else’s last season to shine.

After COVID, he found his love for football. When he was little, his autism made sports hard. We tried soccer and baseball. Instead of watching the batter, he would pick flowers in the outfield. Instead of kicking the soccer ball, he would follow the butterfly and go the other way.

So for him to thrive in football last year was incredible. I got to watch him come alive on the field. I got to watch my son find something that lit him up.

That was the first fall after the assault. I was already hypervigilant, but I could still gently calm myself enough to enjoy the energy of the crowd.

Then my employer force-transferred me into a confined, dark, cold closet.

After that, I developed a new kind of fear: agoraphobia.

Now I hear everything.

Every whisper. Every scrape. Every creak.

My ears became too alive, my body too aware. Even now, the faintest sound—a water bottle crinkling, a pen clicking—can feel like a warning:

Danger is near.

Friday night lights Farmington Cardinal Statium

Every touchdown brings another firework, another surge of beauty and panic intertwined. I watch colors bloom across the dark horizon, and I flinch anyway. The crowd cheers, and then the announcer plays “Kickstart My Heart.”

That song came out when I was in high school—when the world still felt wide open and loud in a good way. Hearing it now makes time fold in on itself, my youth and my son’s overlapping in the glow of the Friday night lights. In my mind, I can almost see the girl I was in those stands, laughing and carefree, unaware of what life would take and what it would teach.

The song’s the same, but I’m not.

Now it hits differently much louder somehow, as if it’s reminding me that my son is growing up inside the same rhythm that once carried me, and I’m fighting to stay steady enough to witness it.

My heart won’t stop. My mind won’t stop.

It feels like fighting a mental battle with the cancer of my memories—something that grows inside me without permission, spreading through nerves and thoughts alike. Surviving it feels like chemotherapy for the soul: exhausting, brutal, but necessary if I ever want to live again.

I look out onto the field and notice a girl with green cat-ear headphones snapping pictures of the team. I assume they are for the yearbook. Even though her ears are adorably covered, I notice that she, too, flinches when the fireworks burst.

I wonder if maybe she understands, or maybe she’s simply doing her job. Somehow, the reason doesn’t matter. Noticing her reaction steadies me. It reminds me that I may not be the only one enduring the noise in order to capture something that matters.

When the crowd gets too loud, I retreat to the concession stand and then find myself slipping beneath the bleachers to hide my tears from the world.

I know I am here because I love my son. I also refuse to let fear win.

Mind you, I know every part of me wants to go home. But I choose to stay, even while trembling, breathing too fast, and sick to my stomach. I remind myself that this moment matters.

Fighting through it matters.

Making moments become larger than pain matters.

I know trauma isn’t invisible; it’s physical. The symptoms I experience live in my bones, my pulse, in the way every nerve hums with false alarms. I carry it like a chronic illness—the cancer of memory that threatens to consume what’s left of my peace.

But I keep fighting, even if survival looks nothing like healing.

Tonight, I’m not whole. I’m not calm.

But I’m here.

I’m showing up in a place that once felt safe, even though it still hurts to inhabit. That, for now, is enough.

And as I look around, I wonder how many others are missing these moments.

It is not because they don’t care or because they don’t love deeply. I can promise you that is definitely not the case. The reason is much more complicated. Trauma or anxiety is stealing their sense of safety.

Maybe they’re sitting in parked cars outside stadiums or in dark rooms at home, wishing they could be there but unable to bear the noise from the internal alarm system trauma created.

One can only hope that maybe one day showing up won’t feel like survival for anyone who is suffering. Maybe one day the sun will set on our pain long enough for the celebration to feel like living.

Healing must be conducted personally, but suffering should never have to be.

I want others to know they are truly not sitting in the stands alone.

I am right there next to you.

Let’s move toward healing together.

The Scream They Never Heard

I want to scream.

I want to yell.

I want to curse at the people who hurt me.

I want to physically fight back in the way that, mentally, I can’t.

I want to look those who tormented me straight in the eye and say:

How could you do this to me?

I am hurting and in shock.

Frustrated.

Mentally collapsing.

And angry, oh so very angry.

I don’t mean the kind of anger that comes and goes.

I mean the kind of anger that hides under your skin.

The kind hidden beneath the outward professionalism, the polite emails, and the carefully chosen words.

Underneath every please and thank you I typed to those responsible who tried so hard to make me invisible.

Underneath every morning that required every ounce of strength I had just to show up and walk back through those doors.

I walked into work every morning as the victim of a sexual assault that had occurred during my lunch break—during my workday.

And there was the irony of walking into a public health facility, a center charged with protecting woman’s health and offering them support at some of life’s most vulnerable moments.

Think about that contradiction for a minute.

I worked for an agency connected to resources for domestic violence, human trafficking, mental health crises and suicide prevention—the agency responsible for answering the 988 crisis line in the state of Arkansas.

988.

The number you are told to call when you feel like you have nothing left to live for.

And I worked there.

I walked through the employee entrance barely able to remember who I was.

Maybe I simply wasn’t as important because I was an employee.

It felt as though employee health and comfort didn’t matter at least not mine.

All I was expected to do was get the job done and leave.

I still had a computer.

I could still type.

I could still answer emails.

I could still say good morning.

Sometimes I could even make my voice sound normal.

They thought because I showed up I must have been okay.

Or maybe it was because I wouldn’t leave maybe that was the true issue.

But I was NOT okay!!

There were times I could barely remember my own name, let alone remember how to care for myself.

How do you explain that?

How do you explain being a grown woman who had spent decades working, raising children, solving problems, paying bills, fixing houses, caring for every other person and handling whatever life threw at her and then suddenly having to fight to remember things that used to happen automatically?

Eat.

Shower.

Pay the bill.

Find the keys.

Answer the message.

Remember what day it is.

Remember why you walked into the room.

Remember the sentence you were trying to finish.

Remember who you were before all of this happened.

My brain couldn’t manage a life anymore.

It could only manage surviving minutes at a time.

Yet somehow, I still kept showing up.

Maybe that was the part that fooled everyone.

But my medical team help me tried to get help.

Even when complete mental collapse felt all but imminent, all five tried.

I saw my psychiatrist every month.

I went to two different therapists every week.

I saw my chiropractor weekly, and even my chiropractor wanted to help with accommodation paperwork because he could see what was happening to me.

My general practitioner tried.

My endocrinologist tried.

My therapists tried.

My psychiatrist tried.

I had five different medical professionals submit requests for ADA accommodations on my behalf.

They could see something was terribly wrong.

And it wasn’t only medical professionals.

I could tell an ordinary person what had happened without giving them graphic details.

I didn’t have to describe the deer blind.

I didn’t have to describe what happened to my body.

I could simply say:

I was sexually assaulted during my lunch break.

Afterward, I was moved from the work I had send almost half my life conducting, then moved again, and eventually I spent nine months working in a windowless room while trying to get help for what was happening to me.

Their faces would change.

Oh my God.

I am so sorry.

It was almost instinctual—the empathetic side of a stranger.

A human being hears that another human being was hurt.

A human being responds with compassion, empathy and concern.

It isn’t complicated.

They didn’t need medical records to believe me.

They didn’t need lawyers or discovery to prove to them what had happened.

They didn’t need an accommodation committee.

They didn’t need to understand Complex PTSD.

They didn’t need every detail.

They simply needed to listen long enough to hear my pain and suffering and understand:

Something terrible happened to her.

Normal human empathy.

That was the thing that seemed to be withheld from me.

Now mind you, I didn’t stay silent.

I wrote state representatives.

I wrote legislators.

I wrote to the Governor’s office.

I filed Equal Opportunity charges.

I hired lawyers.

My medical providers sent letters and filled out forms.

My therapists asked questions.

My attorney asked questions.

I asked questions.

I asked the Arkansas ACLU.

I reached out to disability organizations.

I begged.

I pleaded.

Everybody seemed to be asking questions.

And yet what reached me almost every time seemed to be the exact same thing:

Silence.

Or what seemed to be the same nonexistent answer.

Don’t talk about that.

Be quiet.

Move on.

Almost every accommodation request seemed to arrive at the same conclusion.

There were discussions about whether I would be put back somewhere.

About whether working from home might continue for a very long time.

About what would happen to me.

There seemed to be endless discussion about me.

But one question felt painfully absent:

What do you think would help you?

What environment would allow you to function?

What would make you feel safe enough to concentrate?

What do you think an accommodation looks like?

I didn’t expect to get everything I wanted.

But I should have had a seat at the table and the option to look through the menu.

I wanted to participate in the conversation about my own survival.

Instead, other people were deciding.

Other people determining where I should be.

Other people determining what should happen next.

Other people deciding what was best for me.

Other people talking about my body, my work, my future and my trauma while I was struggling to hear my own voice.

It was a feeling that was painfully familiar.

Again, after two men had used my body without listening to my voice repeatedly say:

No.

A lifetime of other people telling me what they wanted.

What my body should do for them.

What I should tolerate.

Who I should be.

Where I should go.

What I should accept.

What was best for me.

It became the relative movie role the narrative I had heard all too often throughout my life:

Be obedient.

Don’t stand up.

You are weak.

You don’t matter.

And the message from my employer felt painfully familiar.

Different circumstances. Different people. Different actions.

But once again, other people were determining what would happen to me while my own voice seemed to matter the least.

Except this time the damage became so severe that the numbing darkness grew louder than everything else.

Eventually, my own voice became almost impossible to hear.

The effects began showing themselves in symptoms and medically supported diagnoses.

Then there were days inside that windowless room my employer put me in when my mind became so desperate to understand what prolonged powerlessness was doing to me that I asked myself a question I had almost been afraid to admit:

Is this what a concentration camp was like?

I knew my experience was not equivalent to the imprisonment, torture, starvation, murder and atrocities endured by victims of concentration camps.

That wasn’t the comparison I was trying to make.

I was trying to somehow rationalize what it felt like to be psychologically captive—to feel trapped inside circumstances I could not control, constantly asking for help while feeling as though no one was listening.

My mind was searching desperately for language large enough to understand what prolonged powerlessness was doing to it.

What happens to a human being when she feels powerless for long enough?

What happens when choice begins disappearing?

What happens when dignity and worth are forced?

What happens when your world becomes smaller and smaller until you no longer feel like a person moving through life, but something being contained and managed?

I didn’t have language big enough to express it or fight off the growing darkness.

The word stress wasn’t big enough.

No, anxiety wasn’t big enough.

No, depression wasn’t big enough.

Sometimes even the word trauma didn’t feel big enough.

I felt dehumanized.

I felt managed.

I felt as though something fundamental had been taken from me, and I could not figure out how to get it back.

And the rage underneath my pain was just as enormous.

Because other people got to go home from their days work.

They could rest.

Recoup.

Recharge themselves.

Eat dinner.

Watch television.

Laugh.

Sleep.

Wake up.

Live.

My mind didn’t get an opportunity. My trauma filled me home. It followed me in every corner of every room 24 hours a day. My nervous system didn’t realize it could rest. It couldn’t stop preparing for another fight.

No matter how hard I fought to get myself back, back to a version I thought I once was, I basically had to fight and try to remember how to be a person at all.

How could they do this to me?

How could they watch me deteriorate and still expect me to perform?

How could I tell them I was drowning from the fallout of a violent crime and somehow become the problem because I couldn’t breathe?

How could medical professionals tell them again and again that I needed help, and their response still feel like silence?

I wanted them to look at me.

Really look.

Not as an employee.

Not as a complaint.

Not as an accommodation request.

Not as a problem that needed to be managed.

Me.

LOOK AT ME.

I am one of those people you have policies to save.

I am one of those people you hope will tear a strip of the paper hidden behind the door in the bathroom stall.!

I could barely think.

I could barely sleep.

I could barely take care of myself.

I no longer recognized myself, and you still expected me to act normal?

The worst flashbacks were not always memories of what happened to me in that deer blind or through the employment discrimination.

The worst moments were due to realing what was happening to my children while I was having a complete mental collapse.

Because the damage didn’t stay at work.

It came home.

The numbing darkness began to swallow my entire family.

Each of my children processed my pain differently during my darkest times.

My daughter had just turned twenty when this began.

As I deteriorated, she became more distant.

Colder.

Almost unable to feel what was happening to me, allowing herself to slowly internalize her own pain alone.

And for a long time, that hurt.

Oh God, it hurt.

Because she had always needed me to be strong.

She had needed me to help her with her health issues, to remember the important things, to be the person who held things together.

But I also knew she needed something I couldn’t give her anymore.

She was surviving it too.

The opposite occurred with my son.

He was thirteen when this began.

He is sixteen now.

He had always been a handful.

A child who could challenge me, frustrate me, exhaust me and make me laugh, sometimes within the same five minutes.

But during those years, he became the child who saw the darkest parts of me over and over again.

He saw my darkness in public settings.

He learned how to read my facial expressions.

He noticed when a room became too much for me and instantly checked whether I needed reassurance or protection.

He heard my speech patterns change.

Which is terribly painful to even acknowledge.

My son became fluent in my childlike dialect.

My mind became metaphorically small.

Something inside my brain had fractured in a way that made the adult part of me harder and harder to reach, and somehow my son learned to interpret what it meant.

My nervous system became so incapable of regulation that the smallest thing would and often did become enormous.

This was the downward spiral of a total internal system collapse.

A noise.

A question.

Something misplaced.

One more demand when my brain had absolutely nothing left to give.

Sometimes I would react like an infant having a tantrum because the adult part of me simply could not reach the controls fast enough to turn down the noise.

I couldn’t sleep.

I couldn’t regulate myself.

I couldn’t control any of my emotions that once would have passed through me without taking over the entire room.

And my son lived inside that with me more than anyone.

Sometimes this caused fits of rage in which I would explode toward anyone within the blast zone because my nervous system was at peak fight-or-flight.

The smallest thing would feel enormous, and once my body crossed that threshold, I could not always reach the part of myself that knew how to calm down before it switch was thrown.

There were times my son would curl himself into a ball and cry because his mother could not calm herself enough to make him feel safe while I screamed with uncontrollable anger.

That memory destroys me the most and cuts deep.

My temper tantrum caused my own child to curl into himself, sobbing with his arms around his knees.

He was supposed to be the child.

Instead, there were moments when he became frighteningly close to a parent to me.

He watched me.

He studied me.

He learned my fear.

He experienced moments when the woman who was supposed to regulate the room could no longer regulate herself.

My daughter protected herself by moving away emotionally.

My son protected me by moving closer and becoming the adult.

Neither of them should have needed a survival strategy for their own mother.

But they did.

People at work saw me continue showing up.

My children saw what came home.

While everyone was debating what I was entitled to at work, my children were paying the price at home.

And eventually something changed inside me.

The fear did not disappear.

The anger did not disappear.

I simply became too exhausted to keep feeling all of it.

Day after day, nothing seemed to get anyone’s attention.

Another letter.

Another provider.

Another question.

Another explanation.

Another attempt to make somebody understand.

And every time hope seemed to appear from behind a darkness, giving just enough light to believe that perhaps this person would finally hear me, it seemed to collapse again.

And again.

Eventually even hope became exhausting.

And I drifted farther and farther into what I can only describe as:

The oblivion of numbness.

It was a darkness many trauma survivors know.

It isn’t sadness.

It isn’t even fear.

It is something beyond both.

It is what happens when your nervous system has screamed for so long that eventually there is nothing left to scream with.

Feeling becomes too expensive.

All feeling equals pain.

So your body begins shutting the lights off.

You stop crying because crying requires feeling.

You stop getting angry because anger requires energy.

You stop imagining tomorrow because tomorrow requires hope.

You breathe.

You go to work.

You answer the email.

You come home.

You stare at the people you love and intellectually know that you love them while wondering why you cannot reach the feeling that once came so naturally.

That was when the darkness almost controlled it all.

I wasn’t simply disappearing.

Little by little, I already had.

And the darkness had all but gained control.

The darkness didn’t only take away my ability to feel.

It convinced me that I deserved everything that had happened to me.

That may have been the most dangerous part.

Because once I could no longer feel my own worth clearly, everything painful that had ever happened became evidence against me.

Maybe I am the reason.

Maybe every bad decision proves it.

Maybe all these people treated me this way because there is something about me that makes people do this.

If it happened again and again, surely the common denominator must be me.

The darkness collected everything.

Every failed relationship.

Every person I trusted who hurt me.

Every time I stayed too long.

Every time I didn’t leave quickly enough.

Every time I didn’t stand up and demand I be valued.

Every bad decision.

Every mistake.

Every moment when I reacted terribly because I was overwhelmed.

And it whispered:

See? It has to be you.

I could fight everybody else to prove that what happened to me mattered while privately wondering whether I deserved to matter at all.

I could fight relentlessly for myself while not believing in myself.

Those things somehow existed at the same time.

I wrote.

I documented.

I asked.

I begged.

I found doctors.

I found therapists.

I contacted representatives.

I filed charges.

I filed lawsuits.

I kept trying to make someone hear me.

But there was one person I could no longer convince that I really deserved to be heard at all.

Me.

The only voice I could no longer hear was my own.

Even now, my body sometimes reminds me how deep that went.

I can be standing safely in my own yard trying to process all of this when my body begins to shake.

My stomach hurts.

My nervous system reacts before my mind knows what happened.

A squirrel drops a nut in front of me.

I startle.

I turn and yell up at it.

Then I hear myself.

That voice.

Small.

Frightened.

Childlike.

For just a moment I hear the six-year-old I once was, the little girl who had already experienced too much before she ever turned seven.

I am standing in my own yard.

I know where I am.

I know I’m an adult.

I know there is no threat.

I know it was a squirrel dropping a nut.

My mind knows.

My body answers first anyway.

The calendar keeps moving.

My body sometimes doesn’t.

And suddenly I understand again what my children heard.

They heard the child inside their mother before I ever knew she was speaking.

They watched me become frightened by things that made no sense to them.

They watched me struggle to explain my involuntary reactions that did not make sense and was unable to stop.

They saw the person who had spent her entire life taking care of everyone else become someone who sometimes could not figure out how to take care of herself.

And that is hardest thing to forgive myself for occuring..

Even knowing everything I know and understand now.

Even understanding what trauma can do and how painfully hard healing is

Even understanding what chronic hyperarousal and sleep deprivation were doing to me.

There is still a mother inside me who looks backward and thinks:

You hurt your children.

And the darkness takes that thought and tries to turn it into something larger.

See?

It was always you.

Maybe you deserved all of it.

Maybe everybody was right.

Maybe the reason you can’t hear your own voice is because your voice never mattered.

And that is where I went.

That far.

I didn’t know how I was going to get out.

I didn’t know whether there was an out.

I wasn’t looking for someone to solve my entire life.

I wasn’t asking anyone to erase what happened.

I wasn’t asking my employer to become my therapist.

I needed accommodation.

I needed help.

I needed enough human kindness for someone to recognize that a human being was deteriorating and ask:

What can we do to stop making this worse?

I needed enough room to breathe long enough to hear my own voice again.

But by then, I wasn’t sure I would recognize it if it came back.

This is how far down I went.

That was the darkness.

And maybe that is why they never heard my desperate, blood-curdling scream.

Because the loudest scream of my life never came out of my mouth.

At first, it screamed inside me over and over:

How could you do this to me?

Then I became too numb even to scream.

And eventually, underneath everybody else’s voices, everyone else’s decisions, everyone else’s expectations and everyone else’s version of what was best for me—

I can no longer hear my own voice.

Only the weeping of the deeply lost little girl inside me.

Slowly, but Surely, I Disappeared

People tend to imagine disappearance as dramatic.

A slammed door.
A final goodbye.
A body walking away.

Mine was quieter than that.

Mine happened one toilet flush at a time. One door slam. One scream from the hallway. One sudden laugh behind a wall. One startled jump of my nervous system after another.

Slowly, but surely, I disappeared.

Not physically.

I still showed up to work. I still answered emails. I still attempted to do the job that had been assigned to me without my choosing, for an employer I had spent nearly half my life serving.

From the outside, I was still there.

That was the problem.

By then, internally, my world had already started to shrink. Eventually, that shrinking became both mental and physical.

It was at that point that I found myself sitting inside a room that I would later label “the box.”

But that room was not the first box I had lived inside.

Long before there were four walls suffocating around me, I had trained myself to contain life’s difficulties inside that same, yet metaphorical, box.

Pain went into one corner.

Fear into another.

Memories I could not understand were buried somewhere deeper, covered in cobwebs and dust.

I knew they were there.

A part of me always had.

But the deeper I buried them, the easier it was to remain numb to what had happened.

So they stayed untouched, almost as if they carried their own warning label:

DO NOT OPEN. DANGER.

That numbness allowed me to keep stacking life on top of them.

Work.

Motherhood.

Responsibility.

Education.

Competence.

Humor.

Sheer determination.

Layer after layer, they became the identity that numbness allowed me to build—the version of myself I could live as without disturbing what remained buried underneath.

Internally, as long as those boxes stayed buried in the darkness, outwardly the world believed I could continue to function.

I could work.

I could build things.

I could raise children.

I could solve problems.

I could walk into chaos and somehow become the calmest person in the room.

Looking back now, I believe I treated the pain inside my mind—the things hidden in those dark, frightening shadows—as my own Pandora’s box.

Something you could acknowledge from the outside.

Something you never forgot was there.

But something you did not open.

You did not touch it.

You did not look too closely at what was inside.

Because somewhere inside me was the belief that if that lid ever came off and everything escaped, destruction would follow in its path.

And there would be no putting it all back.

No returning to the person I had been before.

It just so happened that, for a very, very long time, the containment system worked.

Or at least I thought it had.

Then my mind was subjected to a violent crime.

Pandora’s box cracked open, and the darkness I had kept buried for so long began to ever so slightly escape through the very fine hairline crack.

At first, that crack caused what felt like a numb, dazed confusion.

My body did not yet understand that what was surfacing was the reflection of every painful thing I had hidden inside of me.

But the things that had accumulated for years seemed to recognize that this was their chance to surface.

Pandora’s box had been shaken so violently by the actions of two men that the hairline crack could no longer hold.

It split wide open, unleashing the mental wreckage I had spent a lifetime containing and stripping away the numbness that had allowed me to survive it.

Suddenly, the things I had spent so long keeping separate came crashing together in one overwhelming powerhouse of helplessness, attaching themselves to what had just happened.

Old pain with new pain.

Old fear with new fear.

Past trauma with present trauma.

The lid was now fully open, and every fiber of my nervous system felt exposed to the open air around me.

Sounds became warnings.

Closed spaces became different.

Silence felt different.

My own memories began showing up without being invited.

The past stopped behaving like the past.

Everything that had once passed through my world unnoticed now seemed capable of reaching straight inside me.

And at the most important moment—when I needed safety to begin sorting through what I had physically escaped—the walls that had once contained my own Pandora’s box finally crumbled.

Internally, everything was spilling out.

Externally, the walls around me were beginning to close in.

My world became smaller.

My employer removed me from the work, the office, the community, and the personal connections I had known for nearly two and a half decades and placed me in a remodeled storage closet inside a public health clinic.

The room had no windows.

For nine hours a day, for more than nine months, I had virtually no face-to-face human connection.

The room sat directly across from a break room, between two restrooms, and beside a hallway door that constantly slammed.

Children cried as they were being vaccinated.

People talked and held conversations directly outside my doorway.

I constantly heard other doors opening and closing.

And without warning, I would hear the toilets flush so clearly it sometimes sounded as though I were in the room with the person using them.

My office phone barely rang—maybe two or three times a week at most over the course of those nine months.

But there were times when it did ring that I physically jumped out of my seat, as if someone had suddenly walked up behind me and yelled, “Boo.”

To everyone else, these were ordinary sounds in an ordinary building—a busy public health clinic functioning exactly as it was supposed to.

To my nervous system, they were impact after impact.

Sometimes they hit me like firecrackers.

And it was at that point that I began calling the room the box.

There is something painfully ironic about spending a lifetime putting pain into boxes—containing it, confining it, burying it deeply enough that you could continue to function despite a lifetime of traumatic experiences—only to eventually find yourself physically sitting inside one.

It was around this point that I began to understand just how confining that room had become.

For nearly twenty-four years, I had been a field employee. I had never spent my working life confined to an office, much less a windowless room with almost no human connection.

Yet somehow, this was the place my employer had decided was best suited for me.

Because when a person is still breathing, still reporting to work, still answering emails, and still functioning just enough to appear intact, people assume she must be okay.

They see that she can still work.

And if she can still work, perhaps she can perform a new job—one she did not choose, but one someone else decided would better serve the needs of the agency.

No matter how hard I tried to explain it, they did not see what survival was costing me inside that box.

The room itself held reminders of the violent crime I had been subjected to.

The isolation.

The confinement.

The lack of control.

The sudden, unpredictable sounds that reached my body before my mind had time to understand them.

Every day I continued to function inside that room, might have been mistaken for evidence that I was managing.

It was not.

I was simply surviving it.

It was at this point that I asked again for accommodations for the disability created by the violent crime I had survived.

I submitted documentation.

I filled out paperwork.

I explained my triggers.

I tried to articulate what post-traumatic stress disorder actually felt like inside a body that had once been physically trapped and now felt metaphorically trapped all over again.

I thought my words would matter.

I thought following policies and protocols was the responsible thing to do.

I thought providing evidence would matter.

And somewhere deep down, I believed the people in charge would simply understand what was happening inside me.

I believed that if I explained it clearly enough, they might understand that choices I had not made for myself were having consequences they could not see.

That they might reasonably understand that continuing to place me in a loud, unpredictable, confining environment was not helping me recover.

It was making things much, much worse.

So I kept explaining.

And explaining.

And explaining.

Meanwhile, my body kept reacting to what my mind perceived as constant threats.

It was at this point that I began documenting everything—not for anyone else, but for my own sanity.

The notes I took did not look like journal entries.

They looked like surveillance logs.

8:14 — talking in the hallway.

8:15 — door slam.

8:26 — cough.

8:35 — door closes; heart jumps.

8:41 — toilet flush.

8:48 — child cries.

To anyone else, those notes probably looked absurd.

Meaningless.

But to me, they were proof.

Proof that I was not imagining the sounds.

Proof that my body was reacting exactly as I said it was.

Proof that something was happening to me even when no one else could see it.

I wasn’t journaling.

I was recording my nervous system in data form.

Looking back now, I realize that every sound had an internal consequence.

Toilet flush — heart jumps.

Child screams — flash of terror.

Footsteps — body braces.

My muscles would begin tightening before I could tell them not to.

My mind would wander back to the confinement I had experienced at the hands of those two men.

And the longer I remained confined inside that box, the more intense the electrical shocks, panic, and aftereffects became as they moved through my body.

Eventually, everything became reaction first.

Understanding came later.

It was as if my nervous system had become so short-circuited that my brain itself became almost infantile.

I could still speak.

I could still show up.

At times, I could still perform enough of a job to appear functional from the outside.

But there were also moments when I could not complete the simplest things.

I could not put a box together even with instructions in front of me and someone assisting me.

That was how far away I had become from the woman who had spent her life building things, solving problems, and figuring things out on her own.

It was not that the knowledge had disappeared.

I simply could not reach it.

My body reacted first, and my thinking brain seemed to arrive sometime later.

The worst part was that eventually it was not even the noise itself.

It was anticipating the noise.

Anticipation became its own trauma.

I would sit there knowing another door would eventually slam.

Another toilet would flush.

Another child would scream.

Someone would hold yet another conversation directly outside my doorway.

I knew it was coming.

I just never knew when.

So even in the quiet, my body was waiting for the next impact.

Hypervigilance is a brutal way of teaching your body to live—in constant, never-ending prediction.

How to scan for danger.

How to brace for the unknown.

How to prepare for the next thing because danger begins to feel as though it is always waiting right behind the last one.

Hypervigilance sounds clinical.

Living inside it is not.

It is exhausting.

It drains the life right out of you and slowly teaches your body that everything might be the next threat.

Your body becomes its own alarm system, except eventually it no longer knows when it is allowed to turn itself off.

Unfortunately for me, the longer I stayed activated, the less of myself there seemed to be left for me to reach.

First it was my concentration.

Then my motivation.

Then whatever confidence I still had left in my own abilities.

Things that had once been automatic became difficult.

Remembering which direction I needed to go.

What day of the week it was.

Which way was left and which way was right.

There were probably days when I barely knew which leg to put into my pants first.

Every decision became harder.

My ability to communicate changed.

My ability to reason changed.

My ability to simply hold a logical conversation changed.

I had a master’s degree in negotiation, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding, yet there were moments when I could barely figure out which way was left and which way was right.

My ability to organize information completely changed.

I knew the knowledge was still there.

I knew I still had a lifetime of experience.

But somehow it felt as though there were layers between me and the part of my brain where all of it lived.

Looking back now, I realize I was not losing my intelligence.

I had lost access to myself.

And somewhere in all of that, my body was still trying to do the one thing it had learned to do so well—stay numb enough to survive the constant hypervigilance and perceived threats around me.

That is a difficult distinction to explain unless you are the one living inside it.

Eventually, even the version of myself I had trusted for decades—the competent one, the strong one, the woman who could walk into chaos and figure out what needed to be done—all but disappeared.

I had gone from being the person other people looked to for answers to sometimes needing someone to hold my hand and tell me what I needed to do that day.

In my place was someone who tracked toilet flushes to prove she wasn’t losing her mind.

I wrote words in notebooks that still break my heart.

I don’t feel normal.

I don’t know who I am anymore.

Trauma does not only hurt.

It has the ability to alter your identity.

It was at this point that I realized I was no longer only grieving what had happened to me.

I was grieving who I used to be.

And the cruelest part was that I was disappearing in plain sight.

People passed my doorway.

They laughed.

They talked.

They went about their ordinary lives.

Meanwhile, inside that room, my nervous system was fighting a silent war no one could hear—and one that some of the people making decisions about my work seemed unable to understand.

Because you can answer emails while falling apart.

You can sound professional while your heart is pounding.

You can continue working while struggling to remember who you were before survival consumed so much of your brain.

You can appear functional while losing pieces of yourself every single day.

That is the part I don’t think people understand about the darkness.

Darkness does not always arrive all at once.

In my case, it accumulated.

One experience attached itself to the next.

One memory awakened another.

One frightened response taught my body to expect that the next one was just around the corner.

My world became smaller.

My mind became louder.

And the confidence I once carried began to all but silence itself.

Then one day you look around and realize you are living inside that box—somewhere you were never meant to go.

I had spent a lifetime learning how to contain pain.

But when the lid finally came off, instead of being given enough safety to begin sorting through everything that had escaped, I was placed inside another box and expected to keep functioning.

Expected to keep working.

Expected to move forward with a career as though nothing inside me had fundamentally changed.

The box did not contain the darkness.

It gave the darkness somewhere to grow.

And that is where things became so very much worse.

Not because everything dark in my life happened inside that one room.

It didn’t.

And not because every piece of darkness came from the actions of those two men.

It didn’t.

There is more darkness in this story.

Much more.

But that room helps explain how I got there.

How a nervous system already overwhelmed by trauma learned to expect impact everywhere.

How a woman who had survived by containing everything finally reached the point where Pandora’s box could no longer hold what was inside.

Slowly, but surely, I disappeared.

Or at least, looking back now, that is what it felt like.

Because even then, somewhere underneath everything that had escaped, something remained.

I could not stop writing.

At first, I wrote as a way to document the discrimination I was being subjected too.

Dates.

Times.

Sounds.

Proof.

But writing became something greater than evidence collecting.

It became the journal of my mind.

When I could not explain what was happening inside me, I could put it on paper.

The fear.

The anger.

The confusion.

The memories.

The pain my body seemed determined to keep carrying.

And I slowly began to realize that putting those things into words gave them somewhere else to exist.

They no longer had to live only inside me.

Maybe there were other people carrying their own darkness who had no idea how to put it into words either.

Maybe words could give some of that darkness a way out.

Writing did not erase the pain.

It did not heal me.

It did not close Pandora’s box or put everything neatly back where it had once been.

But every time I moved something from inside my body onto the page, it felt as though I had released a little of what I had been carrying.

And when even the smallest amount of darkness escaped, it left room for something else to enter.

Just a touch of light.

I did not know it then, but maybe that was the beginning.

Not of being healed.

Not of being finished.

Just the first crack in the darkness where light could find its way back in.

The beginning of becoming unboxed.

The Grain Beneath

So as I was working on an old door today—a vintage door, I’m not sure how old it is, but it looks like it was probably an exterior door with a single pane of glass in the middle—it hit me.

It’s one of those things I bought because I knew I would do something with it someday.
And then everything happened.

Now it has become one more project that sat too long—whether from procrastination, exhaustion, trauma, or simply life getting in the way.
And maybe that’s me too.

I don’t feel very yellow brick road right now.

And the sad part is, I had so many good words in me today.

Most people look at things as disposable. At least in today’s world, that’s what it feels like anyway.

There are a lot of people who would ask themselves, what’s the point in fighting for something that has three layers of paint on it when it would be easier to simply replace it?

Maybe that’s part of why I see the world with rose-colored glasses.

But I guess the thing people misunderstand about rose-colored glasses is that it doesn’t mean you think everything is always beautiful.

Sometimes it simply means you can still see beauty in something after it has been neglected.

Because that door has a story.
Just like any of us do.

Whether it’s a person or a thing, from the moment we are born—or built—everything begins to shape us into what we become.

As I worked on this door, I used two containers of paint remover. The battery kept dying on my electric sander. The sandpaper was too fine and couldn’t get down into the deeper grooves.

And the weathered side of that door—the side that had taken the beating—held onto that paint like it had fused into its DNA.

No matter how much stripper I put on it, that paint was ingrained.

At least the top layer was easily removable, and didn’t put up a fight. That of course was just the visible superficial layer, that layer that the world sees without having to dig too deep or as too many questions.

And somewhere in the middle of removing the visual easy superficial paint, I started to see myself.

There were layers and layers of difficult, complicated things that had attached themselves to me over time.

Things that harmed me.

Things that changed the way I move through the world.

Things my own mind still struggles to fully comprehend sometimes.

And over time, it made me feel weathered too.

Worn.

Like life had sat on me a little too long.

And I guess I began to realize that the final layer—that deep-seated, rooted, hard-to-remove layer of paint—was the part of me that feels like the trauma of the last couple of years.

Because the more I worked on that door, the more I could see the beauty underneath it.

The grain.

The movement.

The oak waving through in places where the paint finally gave up.

And what struck me was that those lines weren’t man-made.

They were created by nature.

They were the backbone of that door.

Its original structure.

Its truth.

At one point, it was a living thing until it was cut down and turned into something meant to become useful—maybe even beautiful—to someone else.

And that made me think about how healing from complex post-traumatic stress disorder—complex PTSD—is not simple.

Complex PTSD can develop through repeated or prolonged trauma, where painful experiences layer themselves into the mind and body over time.

It is not one event.

It is not one wound.

It is not one memory.

Every layer you remove exposes another layer underneath it.

And just like I fought to get the paint off that door, I fight to understand what caused all of it underneath me.

Why I react the way I do.

Why certain things still live in my body.

Why some pain is surface-level and some pain feels like it has soaked so far in that you don’t know if it can ever fully be stripped away.

Now the average human—and I don’t say that with disrespect—would say enough is enough.
They would have thrown the door away.

I fought with that door for five days, and I’m still not done.
And it still needs repair.

But then again…
I’d say that about me too.
And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the point isn’t that it should have been easy.

Maybe the point isn’t whether it would be cheaper, faster, or more practical to replace it.

Maybe the point is that some things still deserve to be saved.

Not because they are perfect.

Not because they are convenient.

Not because they haven’t been damaged.

But because underneath all the layers, there is still something solid there.

Still something real.

Still something worth bringing back to life.

As I continued to sand the door, I noticed something else.

The layers of damage were deepest in the most delicate parts of it—the places with the most detail, the places that had the most exposure to the harshness of the world.

And I realized I had come to a crossroads:

Do I repair it until it looks like new?

Or do I sand it and allow the finished product to still carry evidence of what time and neglect had done?

That question hit me harder than I expected.

Because I realized that in me, too, every layer exposed through this journey has left jagged places and missing pieces—things a Band-Aid could never simply cover.

As I looked at that door, I saw the pitted sections.

The softened places.

The rotten wounds.

And I realized that with grace, time, and just the right amount of pressure, even damaged things can still become something.

I think my complex PTSD was shaped, in part, by all the years I never allowed myself the time to heal.

I always rushed.

I, like that door, spent so much of my life shielding others from the harsh elements that I never stopped long enough to deal with what all of it was doing to me.

I tried too fast and too hard to get over things.

To be fine.
To function.
To keep going.

They are there as proof.

To pretend the weather had not reached all the way in.

But this time, just like that door—the one that had been discarded as useless, too far gone, too much of a burden to repair—I finally see something different.

The scars are not proof that it is ruined.

They are evidence that it made it through the storm.

I also realized, while working on that door, that some of the wood had been too weathered to survive.

As I sanded, parts of the rotted edges came away.

And that made me think about something I had not fully put into words before:

Was the goal to make it look new again?

To repair it so completely that someone else would never know the original damage had ever occurred?

At first, that feels like the right answer.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that doing that would also remove the real story.

The real truth.

Because nothing once damaged is ever truly new again.

And maybe that is not failure.
Maybe that is simply reality.

Maybe beauty was never supposed to come from pretending the storm never happened.

Maybe beauty comes from surviving it.

Not by announcing every scar.

Not by turning every wound into an identity.

Not by using pain as a shield of protection the way I once did.
But by understanding that the scars are not there to make me harder.

Proof that I still exist in spite of the harsh elements that once tried to wear me down.
And maybe the most sacred realization of all is this:

That on the inside, the softer parts of me—

the healthy parts,

the loving parts,

the hopeful parts,

the parts that still wanted beauty, connection, gentleness, and peace—
those were the parts worth protecting all along.

Not the armor.

Not the survival mode.

Not the shell.

The softness.

The softness was never a weakness.

It was the part of me that survived.

And maybe healing is not about pretending the weather never touched you.

Maybe it’s about stripping away what was never supposed to stay on you in the first place.

Maybe it’s about realizing that the deepest parts of who you are were never the damage.

They were always the grain.

They were always the oak.

They were always the part that remained after everything else started coming off.

And maybe that’s why I keep fighting with old doors.

Maybe that’s why I keep fighting with myself.

Because somewhere underneath the exhaustion, the fear, the anger, the grief, the years of surviving, the shutting down, the hypervigilance, the overthinking, the numbness, and the scars…

I know there is still something beautiful under there.

Not untouched.

Not unbroken.

But beautiful all the same.
And maybe the world would call it too much work.

But I don’t.

Because I know what it means to look at something weathered and still see its worth.

And maybe that’s why I keep going.

Because I am not disposable either.

The Way My Mind Remembers : Trauma, Memory, and the Pain of Healing

People have often asked me how it is that I’m able to remember so many details.

The truth is, I don’t remember quite as well as I once did. A lifetime of incredibly difficult and unusual circumstances, wrapped up in the word trauma, changed the way my mind holds onto things.

Trauma has a way of affecting even someone who once could catalog everything in their mind down to the smallest detail.

That does not make me extraordinarily brilliant.

Quite the contrary.

I learned that much of my ability to remember came from my life circumstances. Somewhere along the way, remembering became one of the most important parts of me.

Maybe it came from what life threw at me.

Maybe it came from something much simpler.

I never wanted to be forgotten.

Maybe that is part of why I learned to remember so much. I remembered the details of people—their words, their faces, the things that mattered to them—because remembering felt important.

If I remembered you, you mattered. And somewhere inside me, I wanted to know that I mattered enough to be remembered too.

Remembering was also a defense mechanism because I never wanted to allow myself to become trapped, questioned, or ridiculed in a harmful situation again.

It is hard to explain what it feels like to have a mind shaped by trauma while trying to work through it, heal from it, and explain to others how deeply life’s experiences can become ingrained—so deeply that they are physically felt too.

I can often remember the sounds from an event—the flashes of light, the temperature—before I remember the words in the conversation.

I can remember the feeling in my chest before I remember the words someone spoke to me.

I can remember how the light shined.

I can remember their faces as they walked out of the room.

And sometimes I can still almost see the silence—the cold shoulder, the lack of empathy or care, the way someone can throw silence at you.

Maybe this is simply one of the skills a trauma survivor develops.

I can remember the weight of each moment as though my nervous system were keeping its own journal, a record of both positive and negative memories.

Other people may be able to remember joy simply as happiness. I often feel as though I remember all of it—the joy, the fear, the atmosphere, the weight of the moment—as though my nervous system is always keeping score because it never completely rests.

Maybe that is because I don’t simply remember what happened.

I experience it over and over again.

There is another part that has always been difficult to explain, and sometimes it can make you feel incredibly alone.

What can feel like a trauma survivor’s superpower is the nervous system’s ability to brace and sense, with every fiber of your being, the potential danger that may be around you.

Is that why, when I see memories, it feels as though I’m watching a movie from the outside?

Watching every scene of that memory, whether it is positive or negative?

Is that why I need to remember the whole thing?

But remembering everything is painful—the bad and the good.

Maybe that is part of why surviving trauma can feel so lonely. Life itself can become a painful, constantly on-guard experience.

It is hard to explain how you can see yourself standing somewhere and know what is about to happen. As you watch every moment unfolding in the past, you wish you could reach through the screen of your mind and change the ending.

I can’t.

No one who has survived incredibly difficult and complicated circumstances, all wrapped up in the word trauma, and made it to the other side can reach backward and change what happened.

Even though every fiber of your being can make it feel as though it is happening again, the movie always plays the same way.

For many years, I wondered if something was wrong with me because my memories felt different.
My descriptions felt deeper.

My words seemed to touch people as I told them the complicated stories of life with a passion that made them want to hear more.

I suppose it is only now that I understand that this is simply the way my mind learned to survive something overwhelmingly painful.

It is through this realization that I have changed the way I look at myself.

I no longer judge myself because a sound makes my heart race or because a memory arrives carrying the same physical sensations it carried the first time around.

I understand now that my body was paying attention even when my mind was desperately trying to survive.

Maybe that is why I remember so much.
My memories were never stored only as stories.
They were stored as sounds.

As sensations.

As images.

As fear.

As silence.

And remembering is painful whether the memory is bad or good.

Maybe this is what defines trauma healing and why it is so painful, because the pain is what stops or stalls the healing process.

So for now, I write these stories not because I could change anything when those things happened, but because I am no longer trapped as the woman inside those scenes.

Now I am also the woman watching—and healing in the process.

My hope is that, as you read these stories, you see yourself not in my incredibly difficult circumstances or trauma, but as the individual trying to change your own scene, grow, and heal outside of the trauma that has defined so much of your life.

Maybe healing is learning that trauma can be part of your story without being the only thing that defines you.