Trauma taught me how to survive. Healing is teaching me how to live.

The first time my baby had a fever, I couldn’t breathe.

I held his tiny body in my arms, pressed cool cloths to his forehead, whispered every prayer I knew—but inside, a quiet terror began to hum. A familiar one. A voice I’d met before, in the sterile halls of hospitals. One that said:
This is it. It’s happening again. Don’t relax. Don’t trust this moment.

That’s what trauma does.
It teaches your body to expect disaster, even in the middle of everyday life.
Especially when you’ve faced death and come back. Especially when your own body has betrayed you before.

After cancer, after abuse, after assault—
I didn’t just fear sickness.
I feared everything I loved being taken from me.

My trauma taught me how to survive. But healing has had to teach me how to live.

I had to learn how to soothe the panic without denying it.
How to stay grounded in the now, even while the past tried to pull me back.
How to parent from a place of trust, not fear.
How to believe that not every fever is the beginning of the end.

Some days I do this better than others.
Some days, when one of my boys is pale and tired, my body still tenses.
My chest tightens. I rehearse worst-case scenarios before I even realize it.

But I am learning to breathe through it.
To name it.
To remind myself: This is fear speaking. This is not truth.

I’ve walked through illness.
I’ve faced loss, betrayal, violation, grief.
And still—
Here I am. Holding my babies. Making lunch. Living. Healing.

Maybe you’ve known that voice, too—the one that tells you it’s safer not to hope.
Maybe you’ve stood at the edge of something too big for words and made it through.

I want to remind you:
You don’t owe the world a perfectly calm, unbothered version of yourself.
You’re allowed to shake. You’re allowed to panic.
But you’re also allowed to heal.

You’re allowed to say:
“Not this time. I am safe now. I am not where I was.”

All my love,

-J.

---

“When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought me joy.”
—Psalm 94:19