I broke down this week. I felt like I was not being appreciated or quite honestly even seen. It wears on you after a while. It’s an all too familiar feeling of numbness which brings back tidal waves on emotion in and of itself from past trauma. There’s beauty in being vulnerable, but there is also immense pain. The kind of pain you don’t really know how to put into words. Your heart is numb.

I have spent more time crying in the last three days then I have in a long time. You see, Thanksgiving was always my favorite. I love spending time with my insanely large and obnoxious family. I love the chaos and the tag in the aisles of the market. The smell of mushrooms and onions cooking in an obscene amount of butter, sausage links, and fresh raspberry danishes. I fricken love it. Two years ago Thanksgiving became my least favorite day because of someone I let into my life. It sucks. I am reminded everyday of the choices I made and the journey it has been to get back to being okay. I say it all the time, but trauma fucking sucks. It never lets you go. It's the elephant on your chest when you pass a stupid exit sign where you got left multiple times to fend for yourself. It's the Facebook memories of supposed great times that were tainted by harassment. It's time alone that you can't catch your breath because something triggered you. It's hard. I don't have a magic answer on how to fix it, but I try like hell to normalize the suck, because I didn't know when I was going through the thick of it that it was happening to anyone else and I felt alone. I refuse to let anyone else feel alone in the struggle.