The Women We Carry

Domestic Violence Awareness Month isn’t just about statistics or purple ribbons; it’s about what comes before, during, and after. The long, quiet work of learning to live in a body that remembers everything, of raising children while re-raising yourself, of loving the versions of you that got you through.

This reflection is for every survivor who’s ever looked at her life and thought, “I should be further along by now.”

It’s for those of us who are still carrying our younger selves with us, angry, brave, funny, fragile, brilliant, and trying every day to turn survival into something that feels like peace.

We all carry a small crowd inside us.
Versions of ourselves built in the fires we had to survive.

There’s the warrior who swung back.
The ghost who couldn’t.
The dreamer who built her exits out of stories.
The quiet one who mistook disappearing for safety.

Survivorship isn’t a straight line out of the darkness.
It’s a long walk through shifting light. Past doors we’ve locked behind us and memories that still whisper our names in the dark.
Every version of us trails along, sometimes holding hands, sometimes tripping us up, and sometimes refusing to go any farther.

Some mornings, I can feel them all stirring before I even open my eyes.
The girl who connected breathing patterns and subtle facial twitches to danger levels.
The young woman who mistook invisibility for devotion.
The mother who learned how to laugh again, but still checks every shadow before turning off the lights.

They often war over who kept us alive.

And the world around us argues, too.
About how survivors should heal, how long it should take, and what we should have done.
As if survival were ever neat enough for rules.

People love a tidy redemption story,
But they rarely want to hold the mess that comes before it.
They want the headline, not the homework.
They want strength without the shaking.

So we learn to hide the harder truths.
The fear that looks like efficiency,
The exhaustion that passes for dedication,
The panic we wrestle into competence.
We try to smile in ways that make everyone comfortable.
We shrink our grief into something polite.

But healing was never meant to be palatable.

Hyper-vigilance. Perfectionism. People-pleasing.
Words that sound clinical until you remember they were survival skills.
They taught us to sense danger, to anticipate chaos, to stay three steps ahead of pain. They built walls to protect the soul while the body was being ravaged.

They once saved us.
Now they sometimes keep us tired.

Healing asks us to retrain those same instincts,
to let the sentry rest,
to teach the fixer that not everything is broken or our fault,
to tell the people-pleaser she can stop earning her right to exist.

Loving the women we used to be is hard work.
We blamed them for too long, for staying, for freezing, for not screaming loud enough.
But those versions of us were geniuses of survival.
They built something out of nothing.
They kept the heart beating when the world tried to stop it.

While others judged from a safe distance,
We were doing the sacred labor of staying alive.

So now we practice gratitude for the grit that got us here.
We keep their skills, but we rewrite their purpose.
The watcher becomes the boundary-keeper.
The peacemaker becomes the teacher of calm.
The overachiever learns that rest is also resistance.

Mothering, working, loving, it all sits on top of that history.
We raise children while learning to re-parent ourselves.
We build homes while still convincing our nervous systems they’re safe.
We hold our partners close while reminding our bodies that touch can be tender.

Some days, the old patterns win.
We snap too quickly.
We over-explain.
We disappear into busyness.
And still, we circle back.
We apologize. We repair. We try again.

I used to think healing meant becoming someone new.
Now I know it means seeing everyone I’ve ever been
And learning to love them all.

Every survivor I’ve met carries this same quiet genius.
To keep showing up, to keep loving, to build a life out of the shards.
We are mosaics, fractured, reframed, shining when the light hits us just right.

So if you are reading this and still wondering if you’re enough…
Yes, every version of you has always been enough.

That’s the work.
That’s the miracle.

And today, that’s what we celebrate.
Not just survival, but the sacred, complicated, beautifully human art of honoring all the women we carry.