🌿 HEALING LAYERS – PART 1 

Where My Healing Truly Began: January 2024

Healing isn’t linear, and this reflection comes from a real moment in my journey. I share it as lived experience—honest, unfiltered, and still unfolding.

January 2024 was the moment everything inside me began to overflow.

What I thought was a mental spiral was actually my nervous system reaching its limit. Years of suppression, silence, and pretending I was okay had built up to a point where nothing could be pushed down anymore. This time, it wasn’t an interruption I could survive and then move past. This time, it was an eruption—and there was no putting it back together the way it had been before.

At the time, I truly believed I was going crazy. My thoughts were racing, my body felt overwhelmed, and the pain I had ignored for so long began surfacing all at once. But what I understand now is that I wasn’t breaking—I was waking up.

I was awakening to the pain.

Awakening to the trauma.

Awakening to the truth that what hurt me in the past was still happening in the present.

And something inside me was done holding it quietly.

That’s when I entered what I now call my “I am done” era. I stopped pretending things were okay. I started speaking up—even when my voice was shaking, even when I was quiet, even when it made things harder for everyone involved. At the time, it felt like everything got worse. And in many ways, it did.

But healing often disrupts what depends on your silence.

For most of my life, my pain was allowed to exist only as a story—something sad, unfair, unfortunate. People could hear it, acknowledge it, even sympathize. But when I started connecting the dots—when I tried to show that what had been done to me was still being done to me—that’s when discomfort entered the room.

Healing isn’t about presenting two sides of a story like a courtroom.

It’s about telling your story.

What happened.

How it made you feel.

And what it took to survive—and eventually overcome it.

Before I could step into who I was always meant to be, I completely unraveled. And in that unraveling, I hurt people.

I want to say this clearly and honestly: I did not hurt people with lies. I hurt people by sharing truths that should have been held with more care. They were valid. They were real. But they were spoken from a breaking point, when I didn’t yet have the tools to contain the depth of what I was carrying.

To those I hurt in that season, I am truly sorry.

I spent my entire life surviving—staying quiet, enduring pain and treatment I never deserved. But what I never did was heal. Instead, I buried it all so deeply that only my nervous system remembered it. My mind forgot much of it. My body did not.

And when you begin unwrapping trauma layer by layer, there are days when the pain becomes so intense you can’t function. All you can do is cry, breathe, and survive the moment. Until one day, you begin to see how those experiences shaped traits within you that were never meant to be permanent. They were survival responses—not identity.

This is why so many people choose silence.

Why they protect the toxic.

Why they pretend things are fine.

Because healing is harder than surviving.

But survival builds a dangerous nervous system. One that stays hyper-vigilant, reactive, exhausted. One that eventually collapses under the weight of everything it was forced to hold.

I know this because I lived it.

Healing, on the other hand, changes everything. Your mindset changes. Your body changes. Your health changes. Some things take time to repair. Some damage may linger longer. But the direction is different. The intention is different. And the peace that begins to settle in is unlike anything survival ever offered.

After awareness comes what I call the waiting or feeling it period. The space where you step away—not out of anger, but out of necessity. Where you finally allow yourself to take in what was done to you, without minimizing it or explaining it away.

Forgiveness came easier for me than proximity. Because forgiveness doesn’t require continued exposure to unhealthy behavior. And healing requires discernment.

There is no such thing as perfect—only healthy and unhealthy. Healthy people can engage with unhealthy environments briefly, but they don’t stay long. Because environments shape us. I learned that the hard way.

January 2024 was the moment I unknowingly chose healing.

I chose it messily. Imperfectly. Uncomfortably.

But I chose it.

And this is where my healing journey truly began.

Healing happens in layers, and this is one moment along the way. If this reflection resonated with you, take what feels supportive and leave the rest. There is no rush here—only permission to move at your own pace.

Shared as lived experience, not professional advice.