I Am More Than the Worst Thing That’s Happened to Me
For a long time, I believed my life could be summarized by its fractures.
As if what was done to me had rewritten my name.
As if violence could claim ownership over my body, my story, my worth.
It can’t.
As if grief were my name.
As if loss were my identity.
As if the worst moments were the truest ones
My experiences are not just events that happened around me.
They happened to me.
It invaded my sense of safety, my relationship with my body, my understanding of trust.
It left echoes that followed me into rooms where nothing was wrong and nights where sleep felt dangerous.
For a while, it felt like that was all anyone would ever see.
Like my body was evidence.
Like my past was a warning label.
But I am not an act of violence.
I am not a moment where my consent was stolen.
I am not the worst thing someone chose to do to me.
I am the person who lived afterward.
The one who learned how to breathe again in a body that no longer felt like home.
The one who learned how to say no and yes again, carefully, shakily, bravely.
The one who survived the silence, the shame that was never mine to carry.
I am not an event.
I am not a diagnosis.
I am not a before-and-after story told in hushed voices.
I am the quiet moments that followed.
The mornings I got up anyway.
The nights I survived without witnesses.
The way I learned to exist inside a body that remembers things I wish it wouldn’t.
I am the way I learned to soften without breaking.
The way I carry grief without letting it own me.
The way I can hold both sorrow and beauty in the same breath.
The worst thing that happened to me tried to shrink my world.
It tried to reduce me to a single chapter, a single wound, a single ache.
But I kept becoming.
I became someone who knows the shape of loss and still chooses tenderness.
Someone who understands that healing doesn’t mean erasing pain.
It means refusing to let pain be the only truth.
I am not defined by what I lost.
I am defined by what I continue to love.
By what I protect.
By what I refuse to harden into.
What happened to me tried to reduce me to a wound.
It tried to turn my body into a crime scene and my life into a before-and-after.
But I kept becoming.
I became someone who understands that healing is not linear.
That triggers are not failures.
That survival doesn’t always look like strength, sometimes it looks like staying.
Sometimes it looks like softness.
Sometimes it looks like rage.
I am allowed to be angry.
I am allowed to grieve the version of myself that existed before.
I am allowed to take up space without explaining what happened to me.
There are parts of me untouched by what was done.
Parts that still laugh.
Parts that still trust, even if carefully.
Parts that still believe my body belongs to me.
Trauma is something I survived.
It is not who I am.
I am more than the worst thing that’s happened to me.
I am the one who is still here.
Crow and Flame 