I Didn’t Know.

For the longest time, I genuinely believed the way I moved through the world was normal.

I thought everyone lived with a tight chest and a body that never fully exhaled. I thought everyone scanned every room, replayed every conversation, braced for every worst-case scenario. I thought lying awake at night, heart pounding for no reason, was just part of being human.

I didn’t know I was traumatized.

I didn’t have that language.

I just had symptoms I thought were personality traits.

I told myself I was “just being strong.”

Just being responsible.

Just being prepared.

Just being whatever I needed to be in order to make it through one more day.

But the truth is: I wasn’t living — I was surviving.

And the worst part?

I didn’t even know it.

No one ever told me that the constant tension wasn’t normal. No one ever taught me that being hyperaware of everyone’s moods was a defense mechanism. No one explained that the heaviness, the alertness, the emotional numbness, the inability to rest… were all signs of a nervous system shaped by hurt.

This was just my everyday existence. My baseline.

My “normal.”

I didn’t know there was another way to live.

I didn’t know my body had been whispering its story for years — through aches, fatigue, panic, overthinking, self-protection disguised as independence — and I had been too busy surviving to hear it.

Healing didn’t begin when everything got better.

It began when I realized:

Nothing about the way I was functioning felt safe.

It began when I finally saw that what I thought was “just me” — the overthinking, the tension, the need to anticipate everything — was actually the version of me that learned how to endure.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

You start to notice the moments when your body flinches at kindness.

When rest feels like danger.

When peace feels unfamiliar.

When receiving feels suspicious.

When softness feels like a setup.

You realize it wasn’t a personality flaw.

It was a survival pattern.

And slowly, gently, you begin to wonder:

What would life feel like if I didn’t have to brace for it?

Healing is not about becoming someone new — it’s about remembering who you were before you had to armor up. It’s about teaching your body that safety exists now. That calm isn’t a threat. That you don’t have to live like the danger is still happening.

There is another way to live.

You just have to give yourself permission to find it.

And if you’re only realizing now what you’ve carried for so long, that’s not failure.

That’s the beginning.