I don’t want to get better, I want to become well. I know how to lose myself in guided meditation, or colour in intricate patterns until the pain melts away. I have learnt how I can practice yoga, go for a run or listen to: ‘mood matching music’. I am so well versed in shadow work that I have guided others into the deep recesses of their souls and genuinely helped them, as if pulling them out from an echoey cavern.

You know what?! Still I feel like a failure. Still I feel like a victim. It doesn’t matter how many times I hold the survivor placard. It doesn’t matter how often I invoke my inner warrior, digging the soles of feet into my yoga mat, clinging with my toes and rising from my heart centre, like a Phoenix re-birthing from the ashes. It makes no difference whatsoever how often I tell others that they can achieve anything they want. I still feel like I cannot.

There is a silent reassurance in claiming victimhood. There is a relief in letting go of the label of being: ‘A survivor’. Because survival merely becomes yet another word to live life by. To constantly survive is exhausting. What will I have to: ‘survive’ next?!

It feels like the deepest sigh from the very essence of my being to finally let go. It’s only now that I truly begin  to heal. It’s only now that I can see how the thoughts that pervade even my most ‘zen’ mindset, were never my own but, are the thoughts of my aggressors, thoughts so carefully sewn into my subconscious that they were not only claimed as my own but, believed as an absolute fact.

Despite all of the masks of serenity, I had within me the words of my abusers tattooed upon my soul: ‘You are a bad mother. ‘You are an idiot’ ‘You cannot cook’ ‘You ruin everything.’ ‘You are ugly’. ‘You will never survive alone’. I had the hands of my rapists still on me, erasing my self worth and extinguishing parts of me I am yet even to meet.

Two shadow aspects of me had been created by those invading words, and treacherous hands. One part believed it all, and the other part desperately wanted to prove all of it wrong. I could survive anything, I wasn’t worthless, I was surviving. While the most beautiful part of me that I was yet to meet, laid dormant like some kind of mystical deep sea mermaid, just waiting for the chance to surface.

It was the moment that I stopped trying to survive, the moment I just gave it all up. That was the moment everything both fell apart and simultaneously started to come together again. Embodying the victim, as truly ironic as it sounds, empowered me, and allowed me to start clawing back the pieces of who I was, who I am, and who I am yet to be.

It has given me the courage to pick up the phone and ask for help. It has afforded me the strength to finally  really feel the trauma in my body, and to give permission for my muscles to relax just enough for some of that residual energy to be released….shaking through my system like the echoing of a huge bass drum.

I still do my yoga, I still laugh at memes, I still meditate, I still bake and I still do a multitude of little/big things,  to self-soothe, and improve my day.

The difference is that now, instead of surviving I am finally ready to thrive, instead of being a survivor I am a victim, a victim who needs help, and just for now, that is absolutely OK.