More Than What You Survived
I am a survivor — and I am also so much more than what happened to me.
Have you considered that what you lived through is part of your story — but not the whole of it? It shaped you. It taught you things you wish you had not had to learn. But it is not the whole of you, and it does not get to be the whole of you, unless you give it more room than it has earned.
You are also the person who notices the way the light comes through the kitchen window in the morning. You are the person who has a favorite weather. You are the person who laughs at certain things and is moved by certain other things, and who has small loves nobody else may know about. You are interests, and tenderness, and curiosity, and patience, and a hundred other quiet truths that have nothing to do with what was done to you.
Honoring what you survived does not mean letting it sit at the center of your life forever. It means letting it be one chapter in a much longer book. The chapter mattered. The chapter changed everything. The chapter is not the whole title.
As the years go on, you will notice that the parts of your life that have nothing to do with what happened slowly grow. You will spend hours, and then days, in your own real life — the one that is being built one ordinary moment at a time — and the widening will be unmistakable. That widening is healing. That widening is allowed. You are allowed to be a whole person, with many rooms, only some of which contain the past.