I believe talking is one of the best ways to process almost anything.
Sometimes your mind is moving so fast that you cannot even tell what you actually think.
Then you try to explain it to somebody.
You have to slow down.
You have to put one thought in front of another.
You have to find words for something that, five minutes earlier, was just noise inside your head.
I think there is something powerful in that.
But I have also learned that talking about pain and processing pain are not always the same thing.
There were times when talking helped me understand what I was carrying.
There were other times when talking about it made me angry all over again.
When injustices were fresh, I could feel myself going right back into them.
The anger.
The sadness.
The disbelief.
Sometimes I even acted angrier than I felt because I wanted other people to keep talking about what happened.
I did not want it quietly accepted.
I did not want everybody to move on while I was still standing there thinking, “How can everyone just let this go?”
I wanted a fight because what happened felt worth fighting over.
Maybe some of it was.
But eventually you have to ask yourself a different question.
Am I telling this because it needs to be told, or am I living inside it again every time I tell it?
I think there is a difference.
I am still learning where that line is.
Acceptance is not the same thing as peace
I do not know if I can perfectly explain the moment when processing becomes different from spiraling.
I am not completely at peace with everything.
Maybe I never will be.
But there are things I have accepted.
The present.
The past.
The trauma.
The things I can change.
The things I cannot.
Acceptance is strange because it does not necessarily make something hurt less immediately.
It just means you stop arguing with the fact that it happened.
For a long time, I think I was running from myself.
Maybe longer than I understood.
I had a hard time believing in myself.
I could not see things in me that other people apparently could.
And when pain came later, it became even easier to lose sight of who I was underneath all of it.
That might be one of the most dangerous things about trauma.
Eventually, you can become so focused on what happened to you that you forget there was a person there before it happened.
And there is still a person there afterward.
Sometimes you find yourself playing a game you never agreed to
There is something exhausting about constantly defending yourself.
Even just playing defense wears you down.
Sometimes you find yourself in a game you did not even realize you were playing.
You did not know the rules.
You did not know who all the players were.
You did not even know a game existed.
Then suddenly you are expected to respond to things, correct things, explain yourself, defend yourself, and somehow keep track of what everybody else thinks.
If you are anything like me, eventually you realize something.
You never wanted to play in the first place.
So why are you spending your whole life trying to win?
There was a point where I started realizing that I did not actually care about winning some strange game of perception.
I wanted out.
That sounds simple.
It is not.
Because walking away sometimes means accepting that someone else may keep their version of you.
They may believe something you wish they did not.
They may tell a story about you that you would never tell about yourself.
They may feel like they won.
And maybe, in their world, they did.
That is difficult to accept.
But there comes a point where protecting your peace means being willing to let somebody else be wrong about you.
You do not have to win every version of yourself that exists inside somebody else’s mind.
You have to live with the person you actually are.
I used to think understanding would set me free
There were times when I thought I needed people to understand before I could move forward.
If they just knew.
If they saw the whole picture.
If I explained it clearly enough.
If the right person finally understood what happened.
Maybe then I could put it down.
I learned something hard.
You cannot build your peace that way.
You cannot make everybody understand.
You cannot control what somebody is willing to hear.
You cannot control which version of events somebody chooses to believe.
You cannot control what another person says after you leave the room.
I am still struggling with that.
Not because I need everybody to like me.
It is bigger than that for me.
I know the good I want to do in the world.
And when somebody’s perception of you makes that harder, it can be incredibly frustrating.
There are times when it can feel almost impossible.
But I also know this:
I am not going to stop.
I have to be happy with myself.
I have to focus on my world.
The people I love.
The things I can build.
The things I can create.
The good I can actually do instead of spending all of my energy trying to convince somebody that I am capable of doing it.
Writing gives everything somewhere to go
Right now, writing is my form of talking.
And it gives me hope.
I think creative outlets can be incredibly valuable because they give you somewhere to put things that otherwise stay trapped inside you.
For me, they are almost vital.
My memo pad on my phone is packed with writing.
Thoughts.
Ideas.
Pieces of things.
Things I needed to say.
Things I may never show anybody.
When I write something down, it gets it out of my head and puts it in front of me.
And somehow it does not seem as big anymore.
That feeling goes back much further than these blogs.
It actually goes all the way back to elementary school.
Ms. Raymond saw something I could not
I was in fourth grade when I had a teacher named Ms. Raymond.
I was the kid who was always getting in trouble.
That was not exactly a secret.
But Ms. Raymond made me apply myself to writing.
I remember writing a report for her.
When she graded it, she told me it was one of the best reports she had ever read.
Then she did something I have never forgotten.
She read it out loud to the class.
She asked everybody to guess who wrote it.
Naturally, people guessed the honor roll students.
And rightfully so.
There were kids like Tabitha and Conrad who seemed to live and breathe education.
Of course everybody assumed it was one of them.
Then Ms. Raymond told the class it was me.
Little old, always-in-trouble Josh.
I still remember that feeling.
I was proud of myself.
Really proud.
I felt accomplished.
And maybe more importantly, someone I felt safe with, someone I looked up to, someone who genuinely looked out for me, was proud of me too.
She saw something underneath what everybody else saw on the surface.
I think about that now.
Because maybe she saw something in that kid that I spent a very long time having trouble seeing in myself.
The acting out was visible.
The pain underneath it was not always visible.
I am only now starting to understand some of that.
And maybe part of what I am doing with these blogs is trying to find that feeling again.
Not applause.
Not attention.
That feeling of creating something and looking at it afterward and thinking:
I did that.
There is something in me worth using.
There always was.
Pain made me forget that I liked to build things
I have caught myself telling the same painful stories over and over.
A lot.
Sometimes you do it because you are still trying to understand them.
Sometimes because you want someone else to understand.
Sometimes because you are hoping that the next time you tell it, something about the ending will feel different.
But there comes a point when repeating something stops helping.
One of the things that helped me most was being reminded of everything I had been doing before pain made it hard to breathe.
Things I had built.
Things I had created.
Ideas I had chased.
Work I had done.
Pieces of myself that existed before everything became so heavy.
Seeing that again made me want to start.
Not fix everything.
Just start.
Then little by little, I wanted to build more.
Create more.
Think about things that had nothing to do with what hurt me.
I am still not one hundred percent.
I do not know what one hundred percent would even look like.
But something changed.
The desire to build and create started becoming more important to me than the pain.
It started filling more space.
That matters.
Because pain takes up as much room as you give it.
Sometimes healing is not about making the pain disappear.
Sometimes you start filling the room with other things.
Moving on does not mean pretending
I think people misunderstand what it means to move on.
Moving on does not mean something was okay.
It does not mean forgetting.
It does not mean staying quiet forever.
It does not mean forgiving somebody because everyone tells you that you are supposed to.
It does not mean you stop caring about what happened.
To me, moving on means refusing to let something consume you.
Refusing to let it control your future.
Refusing to let it turn you into someone you are not.
That is different.
You can still say:
That was wrong.
That hurt me.
That changed things.
I wish it had never happened.
And then get up the next morning and build a life anyway.
Those things are allowed to exist together.
I got tired of feeling robbed
There are things I can talk about calmly today that I could not have talked about calmly years ago.
The facts did not change.
I did.
At some point, I was just tired.
I wanted to be happy again.
Some of the hardest trauma in my life hit during one of the happiest periods of my life.
And for a long time, that made me feel robbed.
Robbed of time.
Robbed of peace.
Robbed of parts of myself.
Eventually I got tired of feeling robbed.
I wanted to go find my happy again.
That sounds almost too simple when I write it.
But I think there is something important in it.
Sometimes healing does not begin with some profound realization.
Sometimes you are just tired of hurting.
Tired of being angry.
Tired of giving something you hate the first thought in the morning and the last thought at night.
And somewhere inside that exhaustion is a decision.
I want something else now.
Sometimes the other person does win
There is a phrase people like to use when somebody is trying to let go of anger:
“Do not let them win.”
I understand what people mean.
But sometimes they do win.
Sometimes something unfair happens and you cannot fix it.
Sometimes you can be right.
You can try harder than you knew how to try.
You can yell the truth until your throat hurts.
And it still does not change the outcome.
I think pretending otherwise can make people feel even more trapped.
Because now you are not only hurt.
You also think healing means admitting defeat.
I do not believe that.
Taking care of yourself is not surrender.
Bandaging your wounds is not giving up.
Healing is not an admission that what happened was acceptable.
Moving forward can be a victory too.
Even if the only person who sees that victory is you.
Maybe especially then.
I refuse to let pain define me
There is a lot I have lost in different seasons of my life.
I cannot change all of that.
But there are things I refuse to voluntarily hand over.
My peace.
My relationship.
My children.
My future.
My ability to trust.
My identity.
My time.
All of it.
I refuse to let pain decide who I am.
That does not mean pain did not shape me.
Of course it did.
Everything we live through shapes us.
But shaping something is different from owning it.
Pain can be part of me without becoming the definition of me.
Healing does not require silence
I absolutely believe some stories still need to be told after you heal.
Healing is not closing the book and throwing it away.
It is moving to the next chapter.
Humans have always told stories.
Good stories.
Bad stories.
Stories about mistakes.
Stories about survival.
Stories that point somebody in the right direction.
Stories that warn somebody not to take the road we took.
Stories that remind another person they are not the first human being to feel what they are feeling.
We learn from each other that way.
So I do not think moving forward means never speaking about the past again.
The difference is what the story is doing to you when you tell it.
Are you using the story?
Or is the story still using you?
That is a question I am learning to ask myself.
Get out of the current
If you have spent years replaying the worst thing that ever happened to you, you probably know every inch of it.
Every conversation.
Every injustice.
Every mistake.
Every moment you wish you could change.
Every thing you wish you had said.
Every thing you wish somebody else had done.
You can know that story so well that eventually you stop noticing how much of your present life is passing while you are staring backward.
I do not say that as someone standing safely on shore giving advice.
I say it because I know what it feels like to be in the water.
A rip current is powerful because fighting straight against it exhausts you.
You can spend everything you have trying to overpower something stronger than you.
And eventually you have nothing left.
Sometimes surviving means stopping that fight.
Not because the current was right.
Not because you wanted to go where it took you.
Not because you surrendered.
Because you realized fighting it the same way was going to drown you.
You move differently.
You get yourself out.
Then you find the shore again.
I think pain can be like that.
You can spend years fighting yesterday.
Trying to change it.
Trying to win against it.
Trying to make everybody see it exactly the way you do.
And meanwhile, today keeps happening.
There is still a life happening around you.
People who love you.
Things waiting to be built.
Things you have not created yet.
Places you have not been.
People you have not met.
Versions of yourself you have not become.
Your story deserves to be told.
Tell it honestly.
Tell it when telling it has purpose.
Learn from it.
Let somebody else learn from it too.
But remember something.
You are allowed to leave the scene.
You are allowed to find the shore.
You are allowed to go be happy again.
Your story can be part of your life without becoming the place where you live.