When Your Brain, Body, Heart & Soul Are Still Fighting The Past

WHEN YOUR BRAIN, BODY, HEART & SOUL ARE STILL FIGHTING THE PAST

There are some wounds you can see.

And then there are the wounds you carry quietly, underneath your skin, underneath your smile, underneath the person everyone thinks they know.

I have endured abuse for most of my life.

And when I say endured, I don’t mean that lightly. I mean survived things that changed me. Things that left marks on my heart, my soul, my spirit and, physically, on my body and my brain.

Some wounds healed with scars.

Some never really healed at all.

My body carries its own history. I have a dislocated kneecap from what I have endured. My brain carries damage too, including damage to my frontal temporal lobe. And sometimes I think people don’t understand what it means to live inside a brain that doesn’t always work the way it is supposed to.

Because trauma isn’t simply remembering something terrible that happened to you.

Trauma can change the way you experience the world.

It can change how your body responds to things. It can change how quickly you become overwhelmed. It can change how you process emotions, stress, fear, noise, conflict and even ordinary situations that shouldn’t feel threatening.

And when there is physical damage to the brain on top of the wounds created by years of trauma, functioning can become incredibly difficult.

There are days when I desperately want to be “normal”.

I want to wake up, get on with my day, deal with what needs to be dealt with, laugh, work, communicate, love people and simply exist without having to fight my own mind.

But sometimes my brain misfires.

Sometimes something inside me gets triggered and I don’t even understand why.

A sound.

A word.

A look.

A tone of voice.

A situation that resembles something from the past.

Sometimes I don’t even know what the trigger was.

My body knows before my mind does.

And suddenly I am fighting something that isn’t happening in the present, while my nervous system is reacting as though I am back in the past.

That is one of the hardest things about trauma.

You can know intellectually that you are safe, while your body and brain are screaming that you aren’t.

You can tell yourself, “It’s okay. You’re okay. This is now. That was then.”

But sometimes your brain doesn’t listen.

And when your brain isn’t regulating properly, neither do your emotions.

Sometimes everything becomes too loud.

Too intense.

Too much.

The smallest thing can feel enormous because your system is already overloaded. You can become overwhelmed by emotions that seem disproportionate to the situation. You can struggle to calm yourself down. You can desperately try to reason with yourself, breathe, pray, distract yourself, rest, remove yourself from the situation… and still feel like your brain is running at a speed you cannot control.

And that is exhausting.

People often see the reaction.

They don’t see the battle happening underneath it.

They don’t see the years that came before that moment.

They don’t see the scars.

They don’t see the neurological damage.

They don’t see the wounds that never had the opportunity to properly heal.

They don’t see how hard I am sometimes fighting to regulate myself.

They just see the person standing in front of them.

And I understand that.

But I also wish people understood that sometimes I am doing everything I can.

There are moments when the only thing that seems to switch everything off is sleep.

Not because I don’t care.

Not because I’m lazy.

Not because I want to escape my responsibilities.

Because sometimes my brain simply needs to stop.

Sometimes I need to sleep so deeply that everything goes quiet.

No thoughts racing.

No memories surfacing.

No triggers.

No emotional overload.

No constant internal noise.

Just silence.

And there is something heartbreaking about needing to sleep simply because being awake has become too exhausting.

I have spent so much of my life trying to function like everyone else.

Trying to be strong.

Trying to carry on.

Trying to work.

Trying to love.

Trying to show up.

Trying to be responsible.

Trying to make sense of things that don’t always make sense inside my own head.

And sometimes I succeed.

Sometimes I have incredible days.

Sometimes I laugh until my stomach hurts. Sometimes I feel completely present. Sometimes I am productive and focused and feel like I have finally got myself back.

And then there are the days when my brain doesn’t cooperate.

The days when the scars feel closer to the surface.

The days when something gets triggered.

The days when regulating my emotions feels like trying to hold back an ocean with my bare hands.

Those days don’t erase the progress.

They don’t make me weak.

They don’t make me broken.

They remind me that I am living with injuries… some physical, some neurological, some emotional, some spiritual… that have consequences.

I am learning that surviving something does not mean you walk away untouched.

Sometimes survival changes you.

Sometimes it leaves scars that other people cannot see.

Sometimes healing is not about becoming the person you were before.

Maybe healing is learning how to live compassionately with the person you became.

I don’t always get it right.

I lose my balance.

I get overwhelmed.

I react.

I shut down.

I struggle to regulate.

I sometimes don’t understand my own responses until much later.

But I am still here.

And that matters.

Because after everything that was done to me, I am still trying to build a life.

I am still trying to love.

I am still trying to work.

I am still trying to laugh.

I am still trying to find peace.

I am still trying to believe that my story is bigger than what happened to me.

My heart has been hurt.

My soul has been wounded.

My spirit has been tested.

My body carries scars.

My brain carries damage.

But none of those things mean that I have no future.

They mean I have had to fight harder for the things other people may take for granted.

Peace.

Safety.

Stability.

Rest.

Normality.

Sometimes I have to fight just to quiet my own mind.

And perhaps that is the part people don’t understand.

I am not trying to be difficult.

I am trying to function.

I am not trying to overreact.

I am trying to regulate a system that has been through more than it should have had to endure.

I am not trying to live in the past.

I am trying to teach my brain that the past is no longer happening.

And I am not giving up.

Because somewhere underneath the scars, underneath the trauma, underneath the damage, underneath everything that tried to destroy me, there is still a part of me that refuses to die.

There is still a part of me that says:

“You survived this.”

“You are still here.”

“Keep going.”

And so I do.

One day at a time.

Sometimes one hour at a time.

Sometimes one breath at a time.

Not because it is easy.

But because I have already survived too much to stop fighting for the life that remains.

And maybe healing isn’t about pretending that none of it happened.

Maybe healing is finally being able to say: