There is life after survival.

“It ends or it doesn’t. That’s what you say. That’s how you get through it. The tunnel, the night, the pain, the love. It ends or it doesn’t. If the sun never comes up, you find a way to live without it. If they don’t come back, you sleep in the middle of the bed, learn how to make enough coffee for yourself alone. Adapt. Adjust. It ends or it doesn’t. It ends or it doesn’t. We do not perish.”

She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free. What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveller may never reach the end of it.

Image description: Read these out loud

And kid, you’ve got to love yourself. You’ve got wake up at four in the morning, brew black coffee, and stare at the birds drowning in the darkness of the dawn. You’ve got to sit next to the man at the train station who’s reading your favorite book and start a conversation. You’ve got to come home after a bad day and burn your skin from a shower. Then you’ve got to wash all your sheets until they smell of lemon detergent you bought for four dollars at the local grocery store. You’ve got to stop taking everything so goddamn personally. You are not the moon kissing the black sky. You’ve got to compliment someones crooked brows at an art fair and tell them that their eyes remind you of green swimming pools in mid July. You’ve got to stop letting yourself get upset about things that won’t matter in two years. Sleep in on Saturday mornings and wake yourself up early on Sunday. You’ve got to stop worrying about what you’re going to tell her when she finds out. You’ve got to stop over thinking why he stopped caring about you over six months ago. You’ve got to stop asking everyone for their opinions. Fuck it. Love yourself, kiddo. You’ve got to love yourself.

bloom beautifully dangerously loudly bloom softly however you need just bloom

Trauma is weird. It takes up the whole body: you sweat it out. It lives in your skin and in the depths of your intestines and between your legs. It shakes and dizzies and bends you double. Trauma can’t be compared: it doesn’t matter that someone else survived the same thing without a scratch, or that someone is getting by in a different way. Your body has its own rules and you have to follow them. It took me a long time to understand this.

my parents: you can’t live without us

I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.

People will tell you that emotional abuse isn’t real and what you’re dealing with isn’t that big a deal and you’re just exaggerating, but let me tell you something.

I am blooming from the wound where I once bled.

I’ve read that trauma is always in the present tense. The body marries the then with the now. Like radical politics, the body knows not gradation. There is safe and there is danger. There is inside and outside, friend and enemy, stay out or flee. I’m either on the verge of agoraphobia–I think–or a spiritual awakening.

The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis. That’s the kind of love we’re terribly bad at giving ourselves, especially on the left.