STOP APOLOGIZING FOR SURVIVING
On Living Through Your Own Funeral (and the Poetry That Comes From It)
There’s a moment when you realize you’ve been living someone else’s life.
It happens quietly. Maybe you’re filling out a therapy worksheet, writing things like you are deserving of love and you can trust yourself, and the pen feels foreign in your hand. Like you’re forging a signature.
Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe you catch yourself apologizing for taking up space again.
The realization doesn’t come with fanfare. Just this quiet recognition that somewhere along the way, you stopped being yourself and started being what someone else needed you to be. What they could tolerate. What kept you safe.
And safety, you learn, is not the same thing as living.
WHEN TRAUMA REWRITES YOUR CODE
I spent years thinking I deserved everything that happened. Every cruel word felt earned. Every boundary crossed seemed justified. I disappeared so completely into other people’s versions of who I should be that I forgot I had a say in the matter.
Trauma does that.
It rewrites your operating system while you’re busy trying to survive. One day you’re making decisions based on your own values, and the next you’re running someone else’s software. Their fears become your fears. Their voice becomes the one in your head telling you what’s acceptable, what’s too much, what’s asking for trouble.
The girl who used to be brave gets buried under all that learned helplessness.
But she doesn’t disappear.
She waits.
THE CRUEL MATHEMATICS OF SURVIVAL
The thing about survival is that it changes you on a cellular level. You can’t go back to who you were before—that person literally doesn’t exist anymore. And for the longest time, I thought that was the tragedy.
That I’d lost myself.
But what if that’s not loss?
What if that’s EVOLUTION?
The me that survived my own funeral isn’t the same person who went under. She’s someone who knows things the old me never had to learn. She’s someone who can spot manipulation from across a room, who can feel the difference between intuition and trauma response, who knows that healing isn’t about going back.
It’s about finally moving forward.
EXCAVATING WHO YOU ARE AFTER
Recovery doesn’t ask you to remember who you were before the breaking. They’re asking you to excavate who you are after the surviving.
You are love. You are resilience. You are proof that terrible things don’t get the final word.
Writing those words feels like signing your name to a life you’re not sure belongs to you yet.
But it does.
It belongs to the version of you that survived her own funeral and decided to stick around for the resurrection. The version that learned the difference between keeping the peace and keeping herself. The version that stopped apologizing for existing and started insisting on it instead.
Every boundary you set is proof you existed before someone tried to erase you.
Every time you choose yourself over someone else’s comfort, you’re conducting a small act of rebellion against everything that tried to convince you that you were disposable.
You’re not trying to get your old life back.
You’re building a completely new one.
And maybe that’s the point of those seventeen circles. Not to collect evidence of who you used to be, but to document who you’re becoming. To practice signing your name to a life that’s actually yours.
The pen doesn’t feel foreign anymore.
It feels like coming home.
Here’s a poem I wrote about exactly that.
