Twenty years ago, I created a video set to Nina Simone’s beautiful rendition of “Here Comes the Sun.” At the time, I was emerging from two years spent in and out of psychosis. I created the video as a way of reclaiming my life, finding hope in the darkness, and reminding myself that I was more than the trauma I had endured. It represented my transformation from a victim into a survivor.
Twenty years later, I find myself returning to that same video, but this time with a different perspective and a different purpose.
The past two years have brought some of the most significant changes of my adult life. They have challenged my sense of identity, reopened old wounds, and forced me to confront parts of myself and my past that I believed I had already made peace with.
During my admission into the VA’s RCTP program, I learned valuable skills to help me navigate life with Complex PTSD. But healing is not linear, and despite the progress I’ve made, I continue to struggle with depression, anxiety, and the lasting effects of trauma.
And then there’s turning 50.
Something about reaching this milestone has profoundly changed the way I look at my life. Perhaps it’s the realization that time is moving much faster than I ever imagined. Perhaps it’s recognizing just how much of my life I’ve spent looking backward instead of appreciating what’s right in front of me.
I cannot change what happened yesterday, ten years ago, or twenty years ago. I cannot undo the painful experiences, the betrayals, the mistakes, or the moments that forever changed the trajectory of my life.
Yet, for years, I’ve allowed those moments to dictate how I feel about myself today.
I’ve carried shame that was never entirely mine to carry. I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of emotional energy trying to prove to people from my past that I’m not “crazy,” that my experiences were real, that my pain was justified, and that I am worthy of being understood.
But here’s something I’m finally beginning to understand: I don’t need the people who contributed to my pain to validate my reality in order for me to heal.
For years, I’ve tried to outrun my past. I’ve buried myself in responsibilities, work, and distractions, believing that if I just kept moving, the memories would eventually lose their power.
For nearly three decades, being a UPSer provided structure, purpose, and a constant distraction. Now that this chapter of my life has ended, the silence has become almost deafening.
Without the daily demands of that career, I find myself bombarded with memories, unanswered questions, regrets, and emotions that I never truly allowed myself to process.
I’ve come to recognize that, in many ways, I’ve been living in a state of emotional paralysis. What trauma survivors often refer to as freeze mode.
I survived the experiences that nearly destroyed me, but somewhere along the way, I became stuck in the very survival strategies that once kept me alive.
And that’s another realization I’ve had recently.
Not everything that helped me survive is going to help me live.
Like so many people who have experienced trauma, I developed coping mechanisms to make it through circumstances that felt unbearable. At one time, those strategies served an important purpose. They protected me when I didn’t have the tools or resources to protect myself differently.
But what once kept me afloat has gradually become the very weight pulling me under.
Recently, I began Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) as another step in my healing journey. I’m learning that healing doesn’t mean pretending the past never happened. It doesn’t mean forgetting, forgiving everything, or somehow becoming immune to painful memories.
It means learning how to acknowledge what happened, process the emotions I’ve spent years avoiding, and stop allowing yesterday’s pain to control today’s possibilities.
I also recognize that fifty years of experiences, beliefs, and deeply ingrained thought patterns aren’t going to change overnight.
There will still be difficult anniversaries. There will still be triggers. There will be mornings when depression feels heavier than hope and moments when anxiety makes the future seem overwhelming.
But I’m beginning to understand that progress doesn’t require perfection.
And perhaps most importantly, I no longer want to spend the rest of my life waiting for the past to make sense before giving myself permission to be happy.
Life is simply too short.
I’ve already lost too much time to shame, regret, fear, and the exhausting pursuit of answers that may never come.
I don’t want to reach the end of my life and realize that I spent so much time mourning what happened that I forgot to appreciate what remained.
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating:
I’m ready to stop merely surviving and begin thriving again.
Not because my trauma has disappeared. Not because I’ve suddenly found all the answers. And certainly not because the road ahead will be easy.
But because, at 50 years old, I finally recognize that I deserve more than a life defined by what happened to me.
I deserve peace. I deserve joy. I deserve to experience the present without constantly being pulled back into the past.
And I deserve the opportunity to discover who I am beyond my trauma, beyond my career, and beyond the person I had to become simply to survive.
My goal is to live to the very ripe old age of 99. 😊 And if life has other plans, I hope that whenever my time comes, I leave this world with something I haven’t always known how to experience:
A quiet mind. A peaceful heart. And the knowledge that I finally allowed myself to truly live.
Twenty years ago, I created this video to remind myself that I could survive the darkness.
Today, I’m sharing it again to remind myself that I don’t have to keep living there.
The past will always be part of my story, but it doesn’t have to write the rest of it.
And maybe that’s what beginning again really means.
Not erasing the chapters that came before, but finally giving myself permission to write something different.
☀️ Here comes the sun. And this time, I intend to step into it. ❤️
