Coming Back

Content Note:

This discusses nervous system collapse, the physiology of “coming back online,” and the fragile, disorienting process of returning from shutdown. Read gently.
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The nervous system cannot sustain being in dorsal vagal shut down for a long period of time, as the body basically thinks it's dying and conserves energy. Coming out of it isn't a big rising moment of being fine and back to any semblance of normalcy. It's a flickering of the possibility of hope. It's no longer walking into your house and falling to the floor sobbing... at least not every day. It's seeing that though you still feel like shit that you are taking steps to try to live.

I spoke to my new therapist about how my lifetime of suicidal ideation was different this time. The thoughts were violent in a way that shocked me. In all my death plans it was always going to be done with drugs...I wanted out of the pain. I had flashes of wondering if the bars outside my deck would hold my weight. I lightly brushed knives across my wrists to see what it would feel like. I told myself I'd never do it but also saw that all it would take is one more bad moment to fully drown me in my despair.

What's hitting me most right now is the shame of it all. You can break a leg, get physical therapy, and everyone understands. If you're diagnosed with a heart condition and need to get on medication there will be empathy and concern. But if you mind breaks, if your nervous system gives out, if you spiral into emptiness...you'll find most people around you can't comprehend and don't know what to do. It's not their fault, it's not your fault, yet this takes you further into isolation and feeling that you are completely on your own. I've been held with compassion by so many and at the same time I feel ashamed that I wasn't strong enough to keep it together. Shame that I've shared and everyone knows I had a nervous breakdown.

Coming out of this feels disorienting; you're living in a body that's shifting faster than your narrative can explain. Nothing about this is linear. I've had days I feel almost normal, though my normal was depressed it wasn't catastrophic. And then in a moment the hysterics can begin again without warning. The nervous system doesn't care about your schedule. It doesn't care that your life is on fire or that you're trying desperately to hold it all together. 

Today I made future plans, I went back to big ideas I was forming before I crumbled, and while wiping tears I tried again. For today...

Though sharing all this brings me embarrassment, shame, and the sense that something is broken in me beyond repair, I know someone else needs to hear it. I know there is someone else out there who needs to be seen and told they aren't the only one. And something deep in me, some place of hope and transformation, some relentless part of me believes my purpose lives in telling the truth of this.

Staying Alive

I’m writing for my life. Not metaphorically...literally. As if saying everything I've suppressed will somehow heal me. Or stabilize me. Or keep me breathing. These sentences are the thin thread I’m holding onto while my nervous system tries to remember how to breathe. I'm not crying for a year, I'm crying for a lifetime. I realized a few days have passed without me thinking "I wish I could die". Now it's more of a sigh of "You have no choice. You unfortunately have to live right now."

People keep offering me hope and advice and tidy encouragements, and I know they mean well. But there are kinds of pain you should never speak into unless you’ve lived them. And the thing is the comments aren’t cruel. They’re well-meaning. They come wrapped in care, in love, in concern. But even well-meaning words can hurt when they land on someone who’s already at the edge and can’t take one more misjudgment or another blow.

A sentence meant to “encourage” can feel like sandpaper on an open wound. A suggestion meant to “help” can feel like someone saying they’re tired of watching you bleed. And the moment I try to explain this, the moment I try to say, “That actually hurt,” I’m met with puzzled eyes, or silence, because they have never lived in a body that collapses before it cries. And that kind of terror cannot be comforted with “You’ll get there,” or “Just keep working on yourself" or "Hold on". 

One of the only ways I’ve ever been lucky in life was getting pregnant. I didn’t “earn” it. I didn’t “manifest” it. I didn’t work for it. I went off the pill and got pregnant immediately, pure timing, pure chance. If infertility had been my story, my ex would never have paid for treatment. But chance worked in my favor that one time, and I’ve never forgotten that.

So, when a woman longs for a child and loses pregnancy after pregnancy, I don’t tell her how to feel. I don’t hand her clichés. I don’t insist she “stay positive.” I don’t push lessons or silver linings or timelines for when she should feel better. I don’t shame her for despair or push her toward gratitude because her pain makes me uncomfortable. Because I haven't lived it, I can't speak to it, and I allow her to feel in any way she needs without my commentary. I tell her, “I can’t imagine what this feels like, but I see what it’s doing to you, and your feelings are valid.” And then I shut up. Because it is cruel to narrate someone else’s suffering when you have never stood inside it.

What people don’t understand is that the same rules apply to catastrophic emotional trauma, to lifelong loneliness, to the kind of grief that rearranges a body from the inside out. Good intentions don’t make the commentary hurt less. Sometimes the “help” hurts more, because it reminds you how far away safety has always been.

That’s the part people miss when they talk to me about my trauma, my loneliness, my collapse. They don’t see that their lives of partnership, stability, and emotional safety were also, at least partly, products of chance. They met someone at the right time. They found someone who stayed. They got the kind of luck I never did.

And still, they talk to me like my pain has a simple fix, like healing is a choice I haven’t made yet.

They don’t know the physics of decades without protection.
They don’t know what it’s like to always be the one without a person. They don’t know what it is to never be chosen in any lasting way.

And I want all those good things for them...truly.
But there is still a small, feral girl in me who whispers, Why not me? Why not ever me?

This is the part nobody sees.
This is the part I’m writing from.
This is staying alive.