#stephanie foo

Because expressing the kindness to yourself that you deserve often reminds you of the kindness you didn't get. Trauma isn't just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. . . . Trauma is also mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had. . . . That sadness—the sadness of loss—is a different flavor than the sadness of reckoning. The sadness of reckoning feels visceral and angry and tinged with violence. It feels healable, somehow, with revenge or justice. But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.

I want to have words for what my bones know.

“But after a couple of weeks of listing things I was grateful for, I came to see that the little things were everything. The little things were what I held on to at the end of the day. Single jokes that gave me the giggles. A beautiful flower arrangement, viewed through the window of a café. The fact that my cat came to cuddle me when she saw I was sad. These things gave me hope, pleasure, solace. Together, they added up to a fulfilling life. If a simple flower arrangement could make this world just a little more bearable, then perhaps my own small actions meant more than I was giving them credit for. Maybe when I made dinner, or listened to a friend rant, or complimented a woman on her incredible garden, I was helping make this world survivable for others. Perhaps that evening, when tallying up their own wins and losses for the day, someone would think of something I’d done and smile.”

Estrangement is not freeing. It has not felt joyful. It has not been happy. It has only felt necessary [...] The silence now is not so different from the lonely holidays I endured over the years, an extension of the months of silence we’d exchanged but more total. There is one major difference: I don’t have to work on earning his love anymore. I can just work on accepting that I will never have it. That is far from peace. But it is what it is.