I keep asking myself how to stop bracing, like it’s a switch I should be able to flip if I just want it badly enough. But I don’t think that’s how it works. I think my body learned this for good reasons. I think it learned it because of last year, because of the way everything kept happening on top of everything else, because surviving became the main skill I was practicing.
I moved back home because I was scared I wouldn’t make it otherwise. That felt like failure at first, even though it wasn’t. It felt like giving up independence, even though what it actually gave me was safety. Regular meals. Medication I actually take. A nervous system that can rest because someone else is helping hold the structure of my life. Being part of a unit again saved me. I can feel that now, even if I couldn’t fully trust it at first.
Last year was brutal. I relapsed a couple of times. I went through a breakup that hollowed me out in a way I didn’t expect, someone I’d known forever, someone I thought would treat me gently, instead denying me care and intimacy that should have been basic. Being broken up with over a .pdf sent on Discord still feels unreal to write. We say we’re friends, but it doesn’t feel like friendship. It feels like distance dressed up as politeness.
I was deeply depressed. Not poetic depression. The kind where weeks disappear and getting out of bed feels impossible. Panic attacks so severe I couldn’t go to class without sobbing. Months where leaving the house only happened for family or doctors. There were stretches where my world got very small and very quiet, and not in a peaceful way.
My mom and stepdad separating shook the ground under me. Being raped in early December cracked something open that I’m still learning how to look at without flinching. There is just so much. Sometimes it feels like my life last year was less a timeline and more a pile.
And now I’m here, noticing that I’m not actively falling apart, and somehow that scares me too. I notice when my chest tightens before I even know why. I notice when I’m yearning for pain, which is a sentence I hate but recognize as true. I notice how unfamiliar it feels to be okay without catastrophe. I’m still in survival mode even when the emergency is over.
I don’t think you can just stop that by deciding to. I don’t think you can logic yourself out of a nervous system that learned vigilance as protection. My body isn’t wrong for this. It’s remembering.
What I can do, what I am doing is noticing. Catching the moments when I’m bracing. Letting myself soften for seconds at a time. Practicing receiving care without waiting for it to be taken away. Having conversations where I don’t guard every word, where I let myself be seen and let the other person respond with the skills I’ve learned to trust.
I keep realizing that so much of my identity has been shaped by suffering. Pain became the organizing principle. When things were bad, I knew who I was: the one who endures, the one who holds it together, the one who survives. Without the pain, I feel disoriented. Like I’m missing a map I learned by heart.
I don’t always recognize myself yet. I feel like I exist in fragments, versions of me that don’t always talk to each other. There’s a scared child part that just wants to be held and promised safety. There’s a teenage part that is furious and protective and ready to fight. There’s an adult part that performs competence, that knows how to look functional even when everything inside is loud. None of them are wrong. They’re all trying to keep me alive.
Maybe the reason I feel like I’m “not myself” is because there was never just one self to return to. Maybe I’m not broken maybe I’m layered. Maybe healing isn’t becoming who I was before, but learning how these parts can coexist without one of them having to suffer for the others.
I think about how pain and creativity have been tangled for me. How suffering felt like proof that my art was real. How control and self-destruction once felt like clarity. I don’t miss wanting to hurt myself, but I do miss the certainty that came with it. I miss knowing exactly where the edges were.
Now the edges are softer. Scarier. More alive.
I don’t have to unpack everything in order. I don’t have to make sense of last year tonight. I survived it. That’s already true. I cried. I unraveled. I asked for help. I am still here.
I can let this be enough for now. I can rest. I can trust that bracing kept me alive, and that easing out of it will take time. I can believe that I don’t have to be in pain to be real, and that discovering who I am without constant crisis is not a loss, but a beginning.
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