From Survivor To Weaponized Healer: The Art Of Becoming Dangerous.

Viewing life from a trauma lens skews your perception of the world, causing the world to feel foreboding, uninviting, unforgiving, and ruthless. When you are bogged down in the quagmire, you develop survival skills - those skills needed to navigate through a trauma. Skills such as hypervigilance, stealth, hyper-fixation, hyper-alertness.  Always thinking two-steps ahead of everyone else. Always having a master plan. Nervous system firing. Watching and waiting. These things got you through, allowed you to to move through the world with finesse as you navigated yourself through fragile experiences, building the exit strategy.

But these things can become your greatest strengths.

Viewing life through a trauma lens shaped how I view the world - even now. Looking through the trauma lens brought a heightened level of self-awareness. Being alone, living inside my head for so many years at a visceral level, allowed me to study my mind with precision, study my body with scrutiny, look for flaws, look for mistakes, or discover the truth. I studied how I interacted with the world around me. I studied everyone else. I learned to feel things deeply, to care deeply, and to see the richness and beauty of everyday life. 

I don’t consider myself an optimist. I never have. I am an opportunist. I can take any situation in life and find the angle that makes it an opportunity. I don’t consider myself religious - and yet, I can see “signs” all around me when I am blindly forging a path ahead. Signs that bring validation in my choices, even if I don’t know the ultimate destination or the end result. I do not believe in serendipity. I do not believe in karma. I do believe in the butterfly effect - small, seemingly insignificant actions that can cause massive, unpredictable consequences over time.

These survival skills turned into life skills. These skills served me well in trauma, but they serve me well in life after trauma. I move through the world with stealth and grace. And because of this, I am grateful. I honor my past. I honor where I was. But I am loyal to my future and love the possibilities of it.

-Steady.Engine-