Sarah Smith’s Path to Healing

who do I even greet now that it’s just me? Hey me?

Let’s try that:

Hey me,

feels weird to just be talking to myself but it is what it is.

The title says it all really… I survived.

I read that sentence while exchanging thoughts (if you can call it that) with AI. I was talking about my last two posts and the AI said that I survived.

Past tense.. Survived.

Not surviving. not trying. not becoming. Survived.

That hit me like a ton of bricks because for the first time I fully understood what it meant to be surviving.

It didn’t mean that I was trying to stay alive. it didn’t mean that I was fighting. It meant that I was using everything in my power to protect the pieces within me that add up to create the person I am.

Surviving meant that I was doing everything in my power to keep the person alive that I was meant to be. It meant that I was fighting for my life to be able to feel true joy again, to be authentic again and to enjoy life as myself.

Surviving literally meant keeping me alive. not in the sense that my body was staying alive but that my personality was staying alive, because what is a living body if it has no personality?

To hear it in the past tense made me realise that I have brought everything back that I was protecting so much. I was able to find every last piece of it and either integrate it or let it go in peace.

I survived.

It wasn’t in vain. It wasn’t for nothing. It wasn’t useless.

I fought the war and I actually won. I won everything that I had been fighting for. I didn’t lose a thing.

I feel like if this moment was a scene in a war movie it would be this one:

All the sons of the family went to war after hearing that their father went missing. The mother was left behind to fend for everything so that her boys would be able to come back to a home.

The scene that I am feeling right now is this one:

We’ve seen the men fight, we’ve seen the mother endure and we’ve seen all of them yearn for each other without knowing if the others are still alive.

Now one by one everyone arrives at the home they used to live in. The house doesn’t exist anymore but every last person arrives. First the mother that we have been following, then the sons one by one and the last son arrives with the father.

This relief that they and the viewer must feel is what I am experiencing right now.

I honestly just feel relieved to know that I have survived.

Everything will be easier now because I am not fighting alone anymore… I have everything I need now to thrive and rebuild.

I survived. I am allowed to live now.

I am alive now.

I survived.

Lots of love
Me