I Thought This Was as Good as It Gets

My life is safer now, but my body still lives like it isn’t. I can tell you exactly how much my life has changed. I have been sober since December 2003, and I am in recovery from an eating disorder and self-injury. I have a supportive partner, a great job, and my own business. Most days, I feel pretty stable. Dare I even say it, I feel okay. I have built a life so different from the one I once lived that sometimes I have to stop and recognize just how much has changed. By almost every measure I can think of, I am doing better. And still, I am constantly bracing.

I am incredibly jumpy. I startle very easily. I wake up screaming from night terrors. There are still so many things that can trigger me, sometimes things I don't even recognize as triggers until my body has already reacted. I prepare for the worst-case scenario almost constantly. I can walk into a room and start assessing it without consciously deciding to do so. I can be around someone I trust and still find myself paying attention to their every move, their expression, their mood. I can know that I am safe and still not feel safe. Most of the time, I don't even think I am making a decision to be vigilant. It is just what my body does.

There are reasons for that. I lived through years of childhood sexual abuse and a decade-long domestic violence marriage. My body learned that paying attention mattered. It learned to listen for changes in voices, footsteps, doors, moods, and silence. It learned to anticipate what might happen next because sometimes anticipating what might happen next was the only protection available. I don't think my body is stupid for still doing this. I think it learned exactly what I taught it to learn when I was trying to survive. The problem is that I am not living that life anymore, and my body doesn't always seem to know that.

I keep coming back to the word bracing because that is what it feels like. I am bracing all the time. There is this constant sense that something could happen and I need to be ready for it. I brace for bad news, for someone to change, for pain, for conflict, for something I haven't anticipated yet. Even when nothing is happening, some part of my body seems to be preparing for what might happen next.

That kind of vigilance is exhausting. It costs me time and so much energy. It makes going out harder. It makes relaxing damn near impossible. It makes it difficult to be completely present because some part of me is always checking the room, the situation, the people around me, and my own body. It makes trusting other humans difficult enough that friendship can feel like a risk and I am not sure if I am willing to take it. I already live with chronic pain and migraines, and I know that spending so much of my time physically braced is probably not helping. I am tired of being tired. I am tired of feeling like even rest is impossible.

The strange thing is that I want to rest. I really do. I talk about rest. I know how important it is for disabled and chronically ill bodies. And yet I am resistant to it. There is something difficult about asking a body that has spent years preparing for danger to suddenly loosen its grip and trust that nothing is going to happen. Sometimes rest itself feels vulnerable. Sometimes being still leaves too much room to notice everything that is happening inside me. Sometimes my body seems to believe that if I stop paying attention, something will get past me.

For a long time, I think I assumed that if I kept doing the work, eventually this would all go away. I would process enough, understand enough, change enough, and one day I would be able to look back and say that I had finally moved past it. I don't believe in that finish line anymore. There are things I have changed, things I have survived, things I have learned, and things that no longer control my life in the way they once did. There are also things that still hurt. There are things I don't think I will ever completely get over, and I am trying to be honest about that instead of forcing myself to turn everything into a success story.

I don't feel like I am failing. That is important to me. I don't look at my life and think I haven't done enough. I think what has surprised me is that I have done so much, and I still struggle. Somewhere along the way, I think I quietly started believing that this was as good as it gets. Maybe this is just what life feels like after everything. Maybe I will always be this jumpy. Maybe I will always have to think twice about going out. Maybe I will always be someone who has a hard time trusting people. Maybe I will always be tired from carrying a body that doesn't know how to stop preparing.

There is grief in that realization. I grieve the person I might have been if I hadn't spent so much of my life learning how to survive. I wish every day that I didn't have to be this version of myself, the version who can feel panicked just going out into the world, who has trouble relaxing, who can struggle to trust another person enough to let them become a friend. I wish I could sleep without my body keeping watch. I wish I could experience joy without some part of me waiting for something to ruin it. I wish I could simply be somewhere without immediately thinking about what could go wrong. And yet, I don't want to erase the person I have become either.

That is the complicated part. I can grieve what trauma has taken from me and still be grateful for the life I have built. I can be proud that I have been sober since 2003 and still mourn the years I lost. I can love my partner and still have a hard time trusting safety. I can have work I care about and my own business and still have days when leaving the house feels overwhelming. I can know that my life is better and still struggle to feel safe inside it. None of those things cancel each other out.

Maybe I have been trying to measure my life by the wrong thing. I keep asking whether I am healed, when perhaps the more honest question is whether I am living differently. And I am. I am living differently. I have more choices. I have relationships I couldn't have imagined before. I have work that matters to me. I have created a life that belongs to me. My body is still carrying things that haven't gone away, but that doesn't erase everything that has changed.

I don't need to pretend that trauma hasn't shaped me in order to prove that I have gotten better. I don't need to be grateful for what happened to me. I don't need to turn every wound into a lesson or convince myself that everything happens for a reason. Some things were simply terrible, and some of what they left behind is still terrible to live with. I can acknowledge that without deciding that my life is hopeless.

What I am trying to do now is leave a little room for the possibility that things can become easier. I don't mean that I expect to become fearless or completely free from the effects of trauma. I don't know if I will ever feel consistently safe in the way I wish I could. There are things I don't think I will ever completely get over, and I am trying to make peace with that uncertainty. At the same time, I am beginning to wonder if there is a space between being completely okay and being stuck exactly where I am now. Maybe my body can learn that it doesn't have to brace quite so hard. Maybe I can have more moments where I am not waiting for something to happen. Maybe I can learn what rest feels like when I don't have to fight my way into it. Maybe there can be more joy than there is right now. I don't know. But I don't think I have to know.

I am getting better, and I am still struggling. I don't think I need to choose between those truths anymore. I can recognize how far I have come without pretending that everything is okay. I can grieve what I lost without deciding that nothing else is possible. I can live with the parts of me that still expect danger while continuing to build a life where danger is no longer the center of everything. For a long time, I thought this was as good as it gets. Maybe I am finally willing to believe that I don't know that yet.