Back on Track?

By Charity, Mary, Laura, and Allegra

We know that many folks are coming through a difficult time of year, and we commend everyone for doing what they need to do to take care of themselves. And we hope that those who have been struggling are doing better now, or at least on their way to doing better.

While we don't have seasonal triggers any more (the ones that we did have were not the type most often discussed [among survivors]), we have been dealing with ongoing struggles that come with major life changes and with simply getting older. (The body gets older; people in our system don't.)

For us getting older on the outside is a mixed blessing: We move forward on our healing journey, and we gain wisdom; at the same time, we gain wisdom from general life experience as well. We would not want to go back to a time before we gained this wisdom, because we know how important this progress and the tools we develop are to our quality of life.

It's hard to not wish we could go back for a "do-over," though. As a survivor, we so often feel that we've been cheated out of the happy life that non-survivors supposedly have. Our T reminds us that nobody's life is devoid of pain; it's just that out of necessity, people become adept at hiding this pain in order to fit into society and navigate daily life.

We want more than this. We want the freedom to be authentic. But we can't change society or human nature; they are what they are. All we can do is do is take care of ourselves as best we can and build a life that has meaning for us.

It's hard. Many days we want to crawl back under the rock that we crawled out from when we opened our eyes that morning. And it's hard to know when to push ourselves and when to go easy on ourselves, when to take a step back and when to stop isolating. We're not struggling as much as we were for so long earlier this year, but we have a long way to go before we get on track the way that we'd like to be.