Not My Pain: Part 3

The Real Shift Begins In the Body

I've been noticing radical changes in me.

Feeling like an early winter morning by the foggy lake. Blurry, murky, but fresh. I didn't know healing could feel like this—messy, inconvenient, but strangely alive.

I always thought recovery would feel like calm, or lightness, or some cinematic soft glow around the edges of my life. But lately, it's felt more like an unexpected surge of emotion in the middle of the most mundane event, like cooking, or a stray memory ambushing me when I'm brushing my teeth. It's irritation bubbling up where numbness used to sit like stone.

If I'm honest, I thought I was regressing. I thought feeling more meant something inside me was breaking again.

But it wasn't.

Numbness Dissolving

It was thawing.

I was becoming free of the anxiety. My trembled heart, shaken by fear and grief, was now bathed in the warmth of positive self-regard (love).

All these years, I lived in varying degrees of freeze—the dorsal vagal shutdown (a survival response to overwhelming stress in which the body "freezes" or "shuts down" to conserve energy, triggered when escape seems impossible), though I didn't have the words for it then. It was the quiet collapse beneath the surface of "I'm fine." And now that the freeze is thawing, everything is coming back online: the waves of emotion, the weeping that catches me mid-sentence, the heat in my chest when old thought patterns rise uninvited.

This isn't peace. But it's proof of life.

The numbness is dissolving. And beneath it, a pulse.

What looks like chaos might actually be my system trying to re-establish order.

The Sharper Awareness of Triggers Instead of Being Swallowed by Them

I'm catching my reactions sooner.

My previous self would drown before she remembered to stretch her legs and realize the water was only up to her waist.

Now, I can feel the shift—the tightening, the prickling, the inhaling that never quite made it to my stomach. When a trigger appears, instead of being swallowed whole, I watch myself respond. There is that space now, the space I knew existed but hardly ever was able to utilize. A thin but growing layer of awareness between the emotional storm and my body.

Trigger → Sensation → Emotion → Awareness → Choice. A concept that is familiar, but almost impossible to perceive when in the grip of fear and anxiety.

Now it feels effortless.

Though it seems the smallest doorway, it is a doorway. The confidence I gained to walk through it taught me what it would mean if I stayed.

Consistency of Recovery > the Appearance of Calm

Can I remain cool, calm, and collected all the time?

NO.

Do the spirals down still happen?

YES.

The overwhelm, the shaking, the moments when my mind rushes back to the old catastrophic stories told by my fear, as if they're happening now. But they can't overpower me the way they used to. I return quicker. I recover without collapsing. I don't vanish into the fog for days.

I'm learning that healing doesn't mean I never fall into survival mode; it just means I don't stay there. My nervous system is becoming flexible again. Adaptable. I am capable of returning to baseline instead of hovering in chaos. Days of staying stuck are now behind.

Consistency of returning is worth more than the illusion of calmness.

Moments of dysregulation still happen. Feeling overwhelming, grieving, shutting down, and irritated still pay a visit, but to signal the system is doing the work.

My New Relationship to Safety

This one is the most obvious: my old coping mechanisms aren't comforting anymore.

As I feel the nervous system is stepping out of the past, I change the way I do things, A LOT, and automatically. Thoughts and things that used to comfort me and ground me in the safe zone of perpetual procrastination no longer work the same way.

Things like:

The hoarding of information. Consuming and saving knowledge, but don't produce anything out of it. (It felt safe to have, and to know more).

The over-functioning. Multi-tasking, being as productive as I could be. (Hoarding to feel safe).

Perfectionism that once felt like armor. (The 'I'm not good enough' mentality).

The dissociation that once felt like safety.

People-pleasing. (I serve the world first, not me).

And more.

...start to feel wrong. Heavy.

I questioned what "safe" means. I adjusted and drew new boundaries as these patterns shifted. I logged them down, I reflected, and measured.

I used to rely on these shields to survive.

Now my body whispers, We don't need them anymore.

And that is its own kind of earthquake—a destabilization that signals something new growing beneath the rubble.

The Emergence of Tiny Pockets of Safety Where There Used to Be None

Not bliss. Not calm.

Just a momentary softening that appears throughout my day, like soft glimmers in a field that once felt barren.

A deeper breath than I expected, which goes until reaching the stomach. It's become easier to allow myself to 'just rest'.

My shoulders can drop and open up without instruction (because of the opening and softening of the heart).

Allowing myself a quiet moment where my body isn't preparing for loss and needing to do more has become effortless. Reading a five-hundred-page novel in one weekend is a walk in the park.

Tedious logging and planning are my history. My obsession with hoarding to-do lists and memory keeping in my planners is dead. Remember or forget, I let it go.

These aren't grand epiphanies. They are tiny rearrangements of the soul.

And they are rewiring me.

Can't be reborn with the new Self, using the operating system of the old one.

The Psychological Arc Behind All These Signs

Healing is not the dissolving of discomfort. It is the capacity to stay present with discomfort without collapsing, shutting down, or attacking myself.

If I map the arc of my healing, it begins with this:

First, the thaw: emotions returning.

Then, the awareness: understanding my own triggers. Most crucially, when they hit.

Then, differentiation: recognizing where I am is my emotional state, not my identity. This temporary feeling is not who I am.

Then, the regulation: finding my way back to myself with more ease. Once it happens, you'll be able to tell the difference. Forcing exit will feel different from gliding out of it with ease.

Then comes the repatterning: the gradual shifts in identity as the old defenses fall away. The earthquake and the collapse of the old structure.

And when it's all integrated, safety becomes something I don't have to earn, perform, or suffer for. It resides in me. Always have, always will.

This is the truth I embodied. Not just know.

This process is not linear, but it's reliable. I have spiraled here before, and it felt different every time. Deeper, more substantial, more clear.

And it's mine.

If I had to name the truth of it, I'd say this:

Nervous system healing is the slow re-awakening of the body’s capacity to feel, respond, and return to safety—not the disappearance of difficult states, but the transformation of my relationship to them.

And for the first time, I'm beginning to trust that coming home to myself is not just possible—

It's already happening.

Healing, I'm learning, is not a loud thing.

It's the subtle shifts, the half-exhale, the stray moment when I feel—even for a breath—that I am safe in my own skin.

🌟Closing Reflection

There's a moment, somewhere between who I was and who I am becoming, where the air feels different. I can't name it exactly. It isn't triumph, and it isn't relief. It's something quieter—like standing at the edge of a long corridor and realizing the door at the far end has been open this whole time.

For years, I thought my healing would come from learning how to hold the world without breaking. Now I see it was never about holding more; it was about holding me. It's about building a home inside my own nervous system, one breath, one small defrosted feeling at a time.

I'm still learning. I still flinch. I still brace. I still slip into old patterns as if muscle memory were destiny. But then something unexpected happens—a pause, a softening, a second thought—and I know the wiring is changing. I know I'm not abandoning myself anymore.

Maybe this is what healing really is: It's not the grand unveiling of a new life,
but the steady, almost invisible decision to stay with myself, and choose me first, when I once would have disappeared.

And maybe I don’t need to rush the rest of the journey. Maybe I can trust this rhythm—thawing, noticing, returning—the body's ancient way of finding its way back to safety.

Back to the truth.

Back to its own quiet brilliance.

If I listen closely, beneath all the noise and the old fear, I can feel something inside me finally unclenching.

Not my pain.

Not my burden.

Not my destiny.

Just my life—opening gently, authentically, in its own eternal now.

I hope you get to experience this; with consistency, things will change. Just don't quit when it hurts.

Remember, it's not your pain.