I’ve always been told that sharing my story would help me heal. That talking about it would somehow set me free. But what if there is no story? No clear memory to lay out, no beginning, middle, or end—just flashes, blackouts where memories should be, just a dreadful feeling. Just a body that locks up before your mind can even register why. No one tells you what to do when you flinch at a hug from someone you trust or when touch feels less like comfort and more like trespassing.
A hand on my arm, and suddenly my skin feels too tight. A certain smell, and my vision tunnels. A familiar tone of voice, and I’m somewhere else entirely—frozen, numb, shivering, gone. Not screaming. Not fighting. Just… vanishing. And yet, every time I flinch, every time I pull away, every time I don’t have an explanation for why I feel like I’m falling through ice, I’m met with, "Why aren’t you over it yet?"—as if trauma has an expiration date.
Then I stumbled upon this line in The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk:
"The act of telling the story doesn’t necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time."
And it hit me like a punch to the gut. Because trauma isn’t just a bad memory—it’s a glitch in the system, a short circuit in the body’s wiring. It doesn’t care that I don’t remember the details. It lives in my bones, in the way my hands shake when someone stands too close, in the way I disappear inside myself at the wrong kind of touch. People act like healing is a motivational montage, like I can just journal my way out of flinching at sudden noises or feeling like a crime scene in my own skin. But some ghosts don’t care if you name them. Some wounds don’t close just because you’ve acknowledged they exist. they just scab over and split open again.
And honestly? If I had a dollar for every time someone told me to just let it go, I’d have enough money to disappear into the woods, where at least the trees don’t ask why I still flinch at shadows.
