A Letter to Someone Who Has Experienced Extreme Trauma

Why I Wrote This Letter

There are days I still feel like I’m moving in slow motion while the rest of the world rushes past me. Days when I touch a memory and it disappears. Days when the fear returns even though I’m safe now. Trauma doesn’t always scream. Sometimes it hums quietly in your bones, pretending to be part of you.

I’ve learned that the world isn’t always good at talking about trauma, especially the kind that splits your timeline into Before and After. The kind that makes you forget what you saw or question if it even happened. The kind that makes you tired in a way that sleep can’t reach.

So I wrote this letter for the ones who feel like that. For you. For me. For anyone who has ever survived something that shattered them and then quietly kept going.

This letter is a place to rest. A place to be seen. A place to remember that you are not alone.

To the One Sitting in the Aftermath

still blinking through the smoke,
still trying to name the shape of what broke you, this is for you.

Not to fix you.
Not to tell you to be strong.
Not to make it prettier than it was.

But to see you.
To sit beside you in the wreckage.
To say the thing that maybe no one else has said yet:

I believe you.
I believe what happened was real.
I believe what you felt.
I believe how it changed you.

What Trauma Actually Does

We talk about trauma like it’s a moment, but it’s not.
It’s an echo.
It’s a reorganization of your nervous system.
It’s your brain doing everything it can to keep you alive, even if that means forgetting, freezing, or fleeing in ways you don’t understand.

Trauma distorts memory because your brain isn’t trying to create a record…it’s trying to protect you. When things happen that are too big, too fast, or too much, your mind may tuck them behind a veil.
Not gone.
Just hidden.
Fogged.

And when you remember it…maybe in flashes, in dreams, in triggers (eek, I hate that word)…you may wonder why it feels so surreal. Why your body reacts before your brain does.
That’s not weakness.
That’s your biology.
That’s survival.

If your memory is a fog, patchy, strange, unreliable…
if you can almost touch it some days,
and other days it feels like maybe it never happened at all,
you are not losing your mind.

That’s just how trauma talks.
In whispers.
In static.
In stories told from underwater.

You are not broken.
You are reshaped.
And that is allowed.

The Slow-Motion Feeling

Maybe you’ve felt it too:

The way time moves differently now.
Like you’re stuck in slow motion while the world spins by at full speed.
Like you’re watching yourself through glass,
your thoughts just slightly outside of your skull.
Like you’re both here and not.

That’s not weakness. That’s freeze.
A state of stillness your body uses when it doesn’t know how to run or fight.
You didn’t choose it.
You didn’t fail.
Your body chose survival in the only way it could.

You’re not slow. You’re not lazy.
You’re recovering from something that tore your nervous system wide open.

Shadow People and Thin Veils

And maybe you’ve seen things.
Felt things.
Movement at the edge of your vision.
Shadows that don't belong to anything.
The weight of presence with no name.

You're not imagining it.
Sleep deprivation. Grief. Dissociation. Spiritual sensitivity.
Call it what you want.
But when the veil is thin, you start noticing what others don’t.

It doesn’t have to mean something is wrong.
Maybe it means something is witnessing you.
Maybe it’s your soul trying to say:
There is more than this pain. There is mystery here, too.

You Are Allowed to Feel Sorry for Yourself

I want to say something that might surprise you:

You’re allowed to feel sorry for yourself.

Yes. You are.

You are allowed to say,
“This hurts and it shouldn’t have happened.”
You are allowed to mourn the version of you that existed before.
To cry for the safety you lost.
To ache for softness you didn’t get to keep.

Grief is not self-pity.
It is recognition.
It is self-witnessing.
It is sacred.

When the Days Are Too Heavy

If today the sorrow is louder than the hope, if your hands are trembling and your heart feels ancient and tired,
please know:

You are not weak.
You are not alone.
You are not doing this wrong.

You are healing, even when it looks like falling apart.

And healing does not always look like smiling in the mirror or meditating in the sunlight.
Sometimes it looks like staring into space.
Sometimes it looks like crying in the grocery store.
Sometimes it looks like writing five blog posts to feel real again.
Sometimes it looks like resting even though guilt whispers you haven’t done enough.

But you have.
You have.

Some Gentle Things That Might Help

These may not be cures. But they are anchors.

• Warm water. Baths, showers, tea. Anything that reminds your body it is safe and being held.

• Gentle music or silence. Let sound soothe or disappear.

• Breathing with your hands on your chest. Feel it rise and fall. That rhythm is yours. It means you’re still here.

• Telling the truth. Even if it’s just to yourself. I am tired. I am scared. I am healing.

• Letting someone sit beside you in it. Even if it’s a voice like mine, through a screen.

You don’t have to fix everything. You just have to stay.

For the Days You…

• Forget what it felt like before the trauma
  —You are still in there. Even if you can’t see right now.

• Feel like you’re too far gone
  —You’re not. The fact that you’re still here means there’s still hope.

• Think you’re imagining it
  —You’re not. Trauma distorts perception, but not truth.

• Don’t want to sleep because the other world feels safer
  —That’s okay. But when you’re ready, come home to rest. You deserve peace.

• Hate that it still hurts
  —It hurts because you loved. Because you hoped. Because you tried. And that is sacred.

A Final Whisper

You are not here by accident.
You are not fragile, you are just carrying something immense.
You’ve survived something that rearranged the stars for you.

But you are not your pain.
You are not your fear.
You are not your trauma.

You are the one who walked through the fire and lived.

And even if the world doesn’t see it yet, I do.

So if no one else tells you this today, let me:

You are not broken.
You are not too late.
You are not alone.

You are allowed to rest now.

With all the love and good vibes in the universe,
Michele