The Process of Unlearning

Unraveling tightly wound strings filled with coping mechanisms which once kept me safe now prevent me from being free.

There’s a line from Grey’s Anatomy that has settled deep into my bones:

"Yes, horrible things do happen. Happiness, in the face of all of that, that's not the goal. Feeling horrible, and knowing that you're not gonna die from those feelings, that's the point."

-Dr. Katherine Wyatt, “Here Comes the Flood”

For a long time, I thought survival was about holding it together, about swallowing the pain and pushing forward. Trauma after trauma, loss after loss, I became an expert at compartmentalizing—shoving my grief into neatly labeled boxes and stacking them in the attic of my mind, hoping they’d collect dust instead of weight.

However, thats the thing about trauma - it doesn’t just sit quietly.

It seeps. It festers. It demands to be known.

And eventually, I couldn’t keep ignoring it.

Recently, I wrote about how I’ve become invested in the intense process of unlearning - unraveling the tightly wound strings which held together years of self-identified and managed coping skills. We’re talking about skills which at one point protected me from harm in the moments that I needed them most, and recognizing that now, most of them don’t serve me in the way they used to. In fact, many of them actually prevent me from moving forward with healing at this juncture, especially after all of this work that I’ve put in. And that, I simply will not allow.

So, I’m learning which skills can stay, to be used at specific points in time, and which skills must go, removing them without thinking twice about the emotional chaos they’ll undoubtedly leave behind themselves as they rush out the door.

One thing has become abundantly clear to me in this process - I am very much a story still unfolding; there’s no box, no shelf, just the next chapter.

As you can imagine, I’m just now recognizing that I’m currently living right in the middle of my story, with none of the trauma or loss compartmentalized or stacked in boxes in the attic of my my mind, but rather haphazardly spread out surrounding me. There are unruly stacks of papers in piles in every room of the house that must be handled gently, with care, re-read, re-sorted, processed, and maybe then one day filed away.

At first, I told myself that if I just got through the next hard thing—if I could survive infertility, if I could survive the emergency surgery that saved my life but stole my baby, if I could survive the devastating medical neglect, the gaslighting, the assault—then maybe I’d get to happiness. Maybe that was the prize at the end of all this suffering.

But happiness was never the destination.

What I had to learn—what I am still learning—is that survival isn’t about outrunning the darkness. It’s about sitting in it and knowing I won’t be swallowed whole. It’s about feeling the grief, the rage, the despair, the exhaustion, and recognizing that those feelings won’t kill me.

I have spent so much of my life fighting the hard.

I’m trying to learn how to just feel it.

Sidenote - I had no idea how awful this would be. But as someone very wise once said to me: “It’s terrible to have to feel this. It’s dangerous not to.” These words have reverberated in my mind since then, knowing that what I’m doing is absolutely necessary, even if it feels like garbage while I’m in the thick of it.

Because the truth is, the feelings don’t go away just because you ignore them. The body keeps score. The mind rewrites the narrative in ways you don’t even recognize at first. The nervous system wires itself for survival, not peace, and one day, you wake up exhausted from the sheer weight of existing.

For me, that moment came when I realized I was afraid of my own emotions. That the thought of sitting with my grief felt more terrifying than any of the traumas themselves.

I didn’t trust that I could feel the pain and survive it.

But I have.

And I am.

Some days, the weight of my past still crushes my chest. Some days, I wake up and I swear I can feel the echoes of every loss, every betrayal, every moment my body was not my own. But I try not to run anymore. I let myself feel it. I remind myself that these feelings are just that—feelings. They are not an ending.

I don’t always know what healing looks like. But I know it’s not about reaching some mythical land of happiness where the pain no longer exists. It’s about sitting with the hard and knowing it won’t break me. It’s about allowing myself to feel it all—the grief, the anger, the sadness—without letting it define my future.

It’s about survival in its rawest, truest form.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.