I used to think pain was a language we all spoke the same.
But then I met people who wore my wounds like armor, while I tried to turn mine into wings.
We had the same bruises in different places. The same stories told in different voices. We both knew the sound of a door slamming that wasn’t just a door but a warning. We both knew the silence that followed too well, the kind that didn’t mean peace, but punishment. And still, they walked out harder, sharper, more closed. I walked out with my palms open, hoping to catch light or rain or anything that felt like softness.
It’s wild how two people can survive the same fire and carry the heat in completely different ways. Some become flame themselves, burning anything that gets too close. Others spend the rest of their lives flinching at the smallest spark. I think about this a lot. How survival isn’t a shared destination but a thousand separate roads paved with choices, coping, timing, and whatever scraps of love we were lucky enough to find.
I used to believe trauma molded us like clay. That it pressed its fingers into us and that’s why we cracked the way we did. But maybe that’s only part of the truth. Maybe trauma is more like a pile of raw materials dumped at your feet. Grief like steel. Loneliness like stone. Rage like rope. You don’t choose the pile, but you do decide what to build. Some build prisons. Some build walls. Some build bridges to a self they’ve never met before.
For a long time, I tried to build silence. I thought if I didn’t speak about it, it would stop growing. But pain doesn’t work that way. Pain is a seed. If you don’t name it, it grows anyway, just deeper and darker, winding through your bloodline, waiting to bloom in someone else. I learned that the hard way.
Motherhood cracked something open in me that I didn’t even know was sealed shut. I remember holding my son for the first time and suddenly realizing that I wasn’t just responsible for his body, but for his story. His emotional blueprint. His inner voice. His sense of safety in the world. And it hit me like a wave I didn’t see coming. Everything I hadn’t healed might one day echo through him. Not because I wanted it to, but because unspoken pain finds its way. Always.
And that terrified me.
It also gave me purpose.
Now, when I choose to sit with my hurt instead of numbing it, I’m not just doing it for me. I’m doing it so my child doesn’t have to carry what was never his. I’m doing it so that love can feel like a resting place and not a battlefield. I’m doing it because someone in every bloodline has to decide that the story changes here.
And still, I wonder. Was this always the path? Was there a version of me, already written, already waiting? Or did I fight my way into her? Did I dig her out with every boundary I set, every truth I spoke, every time I looked my past in the face and said, I’m not going to let you win?
Sometimes I feel like my life has always been on the edge of something. On the edge of becoming. On the edge of breaking. Like I’ve been holding the pen with shaking hands, trying to write my name over a story that began before I ever had a voice. I think that’s what reclaiming your life really means. Not erasing what happened, but choosing how it’s remembered. How it’s used. How it ends.
Pain doesn’t make us the same. Neither does survival. I have seen people crumble under the weight of things I carried in silence. I have watched people laugh with joy after surviving storms that would’ve leveled me. There’s no ranking of pain, no chart for resilience. Only choices. Only outcomes. Only who we become after the fire.
I no longer look for meaning in the things that hurt me. Some things just hurt. But I do believe in the meaning I can create because I lived through them. I believe in turning pain into language. Into softness. Into understanding. Into legacy.
So no, the things we survive don’t make us the same.
But maybe that’s the point.
Maybe survival is the beginning of art. The place where we each pick up our broken pieces and say, this is what I’m making out of mine.
And maybe someone else will see it and think, I didn’t know you could build something beautiful out of that.
And maybe that’s how we save each other.