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

For so long, I told myself that surviving was enough.

And for a while, it was.

Survival kept me breathing when everything in me felt weighed down. It got me through days that demanded more than I had to give. It kept me moving forward when my world felt like it was collapsing behind me.

But survival also took things from me—quietly, steadily, without asking permission.

I didn’t notice it happening.

When you live in survival mode long enough, you stop feeling the loss. You stop noticing how much of yourself you’re sacrificing just to stay upright. You get used to the tension, the hypervigilance, the constant internal alarms.

Then one day, you look at your life and realize you’ve been living on emergency settings for years.

I’ve lost so much time this way.

Time I should’ve spent growing, dreaming, resting, taking up space.

Time where I wasn’t fully present because my body still believed I was in danger.

Time where softness felt unsafe and peace felt suspicious.

And recently… the truth of those lost years hit me with a force I couldn’t outrun.

It wasn’t gentle.

It wasn’t quiet.

It was the kind of emotional collapse that shakes something loose inside you—rage, grief, exhaustion, heartbreak, all rising at once in a body that has nothing left to contain it.

I reached rock bottom.

Not metaphorically.

Not in a cute, “bounce back stronger” kind of way.

I hit the kind of bottom where your mind, heart, and body all finally give out at the same time. The kind where you can’t pretend anymore, can’t push anymore, can’t numb anymore.

And beneath all of it, I could feel what survival had been doing to my physical health for years.

Stress tightening into pain.

Pain turning into symptoms.

Symptoms piling into exhaustion.

Exhaustion crashing into collapse.

My body forced me to stop in a way I couldn’t negotiate with.

I had no choice but to listen.

But here’s what I’ve also realized:

this moment—the breaking, the awakening, the grief—didn’t appear out of nowhere.

It’s the culmination of months of work I didn’t even know was preparing me for this shift.

Six or seven months of shadow work.

Of looking at pieces of myself I used to hide from.

Of asking hard questions about why I react the way I do, why I shrink, why I push myself past every limit.

Months of reflecting on the wounds I tried to minimize.

Months of peeling back the emotional armor I grew up relying on.

And somewhere in that process, something inside me began to soften.

Slowly.

Quietly.

Almost imperceptibly.

I started learning how to treat myself with a kind of care I never received.

I started recognizing the difference between love and survival.

I started seeing myself as someone worth protecting in a new way—not through hypervigilance, but through compassion.

So when the crash came…

it didn’t destroy me.

It revealed me.

It showed me the cost of living on alert for so long.

It showed me the grief I’d been carrying.

It showed me the parts of myself I’d abandoned to keep going.

It showed me the life I’ve been too exhausted to step into.

I can’t get the lost years back.

I can’t undo the survival mechanisms that shaped so much of my life.

But I can finally see them clearly—and for the first time, I’m choosing differently.

This is the ongoing work now:

Learning how to live in a body that deserves rest, not constant tension.

Learning how to breathe without bracing.

Learning how to love myself in ways I never learned growing up.

Learning how to exist without mistaking hypervigilance for safety.

This is not a tidy healing story.

It’s a messy, painful reclamation of the years ahead of me.

It’s a slow awakening to the truth that I am worthy of more than survival.

And even though I’m still learning how to believe that, I can feel something shifting.

For the first time, I’m not just enduring my life.

I’m beginning to reclaim it.

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You can explore the tools I have created for my own personal healing journey here:

👉 Stan Store: https://stan.store/Shroompy

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