Healing, Glowing, and Growing – One Act of Self-Care At a Time

Some days, I still wake up with the weight of my past pressing down on me before my eyes even open. PTSD doesn’t knock. It doesn’t wait for a convenient moment. It just arrives—suddenly, heavily—like a storm you can feel in your bones.

There are days when the smallest trigger sends me spiraling into a place I never meant to return to. Days when I’m tired of being strong. Days when my chest tightens, my body reacts, and I can’t explain why until much later.

And on those days—the ones that break me—I have a choice.

I can abandon myself, like I learned to do for survival…

or I can stay, even when staying hurts.

Staying is what healing looks like for me now.

Not polished. Not perfect.

Just real, messy, and honest.

Where It All Began: Before I Understood Trauma or Trust

When I was a young Sailor in the Navy, my first duty station was onboard the USS COMSTOCK. I was new, hopeful, and still soft around the edges. I believed in kindness—not the performative kind, but the kind that comes from wanting to make the world hurt a little less.

I believed in the law of attraction. In putting out good energy, and in treating people with compassion because the world already had enough cruelty. I helped whoever needed help and kept only the overtly harmful people at a safe distance.

But it wasn’t the obvious threats I needed to fear.

It was the man who became my mentor.

The one I had to report to.

The one who defended me when others tried to harm me.

The one who spent years earning my trust so slowly and so skillfully that I didn’t even realize my guard had been lowered.

I didn’t have the language for grooming.

I didn’t know how predators hide in kindness.

I didn’t realize I was being conditioned to feel safe with the wrong person.

Until the day he revealed who he really was.

When I said “No.”

He replied:

“You didn’t think I was actually kind to you all this time because I wanted to be your friend, did you?”

And then he shoved me behind the EPCP in AUX1 and assaulted me.

The Part I Still Can’t Remember

There are things about that day that are burned into me… and things that are gone completely.

Even to this day, I don’t remember the assault itself.

My memory goes fuzzy the instant his hands were on me.

It’s like a film reel that burns out mid-scene.

I don’t remember how he left.

I don’t remember standing up.

I don’t remember fixing my uniform, or walking out of AUX1, or what time it was, or who I saw afterward.

There is just… nothing.

That kind of nothing used to terrify me.

Now I understand it was dissociation—my brain shutting down every sense it could to keep me alive, to protect me from the full impact of what was happening.

My mind saved me, but the cost was everything I couldn’t process for years.

The Lie I Told Myself to Survive

I think part of me said, “You’re okay. It’s over. You’re leaving the command soon. You’ll never have to see him again.”

And I clung to that.

Hard.

I didn’t understand that trauma doesn’t care about timelines.

I didn’t know that leaving the command didn’t mean leaving the pain.

I didn’t realize that numbness isn’t healing.

I thought distance was closure.

I thought silence was strength.

I thought forgetting the details meant I had “moved on.”

But I wasn’t okay.

And it would take me almost 20 years to realize that.

Twenty years to understand why certain things triggered me.

Twenty years to understand the nightmares, the panic, the self-blame.

Twenty years to understand that trauma doesn’t disappear just because you walk away from the place it happened.

Why I Refuse to Abandon Myself Now

I can’t rewrite what happened.

I can’t recover the missing memories.

I can’t relive the past in a way that makes it make sense.

But I can stay with myself in the present.

I can stand beside the version of me who survived what she should never have had to survive.

I can offer myself the compassion I didn’t know how to give myself back then.

Every day I choose to stay is a day I reclaim something.

Some days I’m strong.

Some days I’m broken.

Most days I’m somewhere in between.

But every day, I remind myself:

“Even on the days that break me, I refuse to turn my back on myself.”

Because abandoning myself was a survival strategy then…

but staying with myself is my healing now.

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