We, as humans, have a way of always playing down our pain. We compare our situation to those who have it worse and swallow our pain like a large pill. Even when we are young we are told things like “starving kids in Africa would be grateful to have that food!” Now, this saying comes from a very positive place of just wanting to teach your children to have perspective and be disciplined. However this trend of comparing our lives to others tends to only grow with age and can really affect your ability to process pain.

Two winters ago I processed a lot of traumatic event from my early childhood that I had buried away from thought. My very core was ravished by agony and heartbreak, I didn’t know who I was or how to recover… But through all of this I felt guilt. As if I didn’t deserve to feel that shattered because my trauma wasn’t as extreme as it could’ve been.

Who was I to feel this broken when I got to escape my abuser? I felt like because I was never really trapped I didn’t deserve to grieve, I felt like I should just push on with my life and not dwell on the negative. However when I expressed these feelings to my mother, the feelings of helplessness, sorrow, and guilt… She drove me to the beach and told me to scream.

I threw at least a hundred pieces of ice into the ocean that day, I screamed, laughed, and cried through the fits of emotion that gripped me. But at the end of the day, I felt clean. The sadness hadn’t gone away, nor had any of the emotions. However my feeling of helplessness had been scrubbed away by the winter breeze.

I realized that you have to reach out for help and talk about your pain. You have to cry until you're done. Feel the agony until you think you can’t go on, and then watch yourself figure out how to anyway. Because throughout everything you are a strong and resilient human being, you deserve to feel the pain without having to hide it, and most importantly you deserve to recover.

So no matter what your trauma derives from, it is valid. It is not to be compared to anyone else's, or to be lessened in anyway, it is to stand alone as yours and no one else's.

Because your trauma is valid.

That's really all I wanted to say this week...

So keep on fighting, and if you haven’t heard it recently… I’m really proud of you. Overcoming trauma is really difficult and just putting in the effort make you stronger than some.

So thank you,