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

Eight months ago, my body finally shut down.

But the truth is — the collapse wasn’t sudden.

It didn’t come out of nowhere.

It was years and years in the making.

Looking back now, I can see the breadcrumbs.

The slow erosion.

The exhaustion that never fully went away.

The way my mind and body kept whispering this is too much long before they ever screamed it.

If I’m honest, the breaking didn’t start eight months ago.

It started years earlier — maybe even decades.

I think the first time I lost myself was when I was medically separated from the Navy.

But I didn’t have the language, the awareness, or the permission to understand it back then.

All I knew was:

I had pain, but I still needed to function.

I had trauma, but I still needed to work.

I had wounds, but survival mode didn’t give me space to feel them.

So I did what I was trained to do — what trauma taught me to do long before the military ever did:

I pushed through it.

I pushed past the pain.

Past the fear.

Past the grief I didn’t even recognize as grief.

Past the identity loss that shattered me in ways I would only understand years later.

I kept going, because I thought that was strength.

I kept going, because stopping felt dangerous.

I kept going, because I didn’t know any other way to survive.

And for years, that’s exactly what I did: I survived.

Until eight months ago, when my body finally said

“I can’t carry this anymore.”

The shutdown wasn’t a moment — it was the final stage of a process that had been unfolding inside me for so long I didn’t even see it happening. Every symptom, every flare, every moment of exhaustion was my body trying to warn me:

You’ve been holding too much for too long.

When the breakdown hit, I couldn’t work.

I couldn’t override the physical symptoms anymore.

I couldn’t force myself to be the version of me that made survival look effortless.

My body made the decision I never gave myself permission to make.

And when I could no longer run on survival mode, everything I had been avoiding — everything I had been conditioned to minimize — rose to the surface all at once:

The memories.

The trauma.

The betrayal.

The rage at what was stolen from me.

The grief for a life lived in pain without acknowledgment.

The heartbreak of realizing how long I had been suffering alone.

But something else happened too — something equally life-changing:

I finally received the validation I had been missing for years.

The validation I never got from past therapists.

The validation that made everything click.

The validation that told me,

“What you’ve been carrying is real.

What happened to you matters.

Your body makes sense.

Your pain makes sense.

You are not exaggerating.

You are not imagining things.

You are not alone.”

That acknowledgment cracked something open in me.

It gave me permission to feel what I had been pushing away since the day I left the Navy — and long before that.

It wasn’t healing, not instantly anyways.

But it was the beginning of truth.

And in that truth, I began creating the one thing I had never truly had:

a safe space for myself.

Boundaries became necessary.

Not because I suddenly felt strong, but because my body needed safety more than I needed anyone’s approval.

Protecting my nervous system became non-negotiable.

My healing stopped being a choice and became a responsibility.

In that safe space, the emotions I’d buried for decades poured out — the grief, the anger, the heartbreak, the mourning of the identity I lost when I was medically separated, and the identity I lost again eight months ago.

It’s been painful.

It’s been overwhelming.

It has forced me to face things I would have avoided forever if my body hadn’t interrupted my life.

But in the middle of the grief and rage and unraveling, something else has been growing — something small but steady:

Clarity.

Not all at once.

Not loud.

Not dramatic.

Just tiny moments where the fog lifts.

Little flashes of understanding.

Soft reminders that my collapse wasn’t weakness — it was truth breaking through.

Every day, the clarity expands a little more.

Enough to see that this isn’t where I end.

This is where I begin again.

Eight months ago, my body broke its silence.

Years ago, I lost myself.

But today — right now — I’m starting to find pieces of who I am beneath all the survival.

This is My Chapter 1.

Of telling the truth.

Of honoring the breakdown.

Of acknowledging the years that led me here.

Of reclaiming the identity I didn’t realize I’d lost.

Of slowly, painfully, beautifully, becoming whole again.