When the World Is Burning and You Are Still Healing

I have been reading about the #Epstein files. I scroll past headlines about domestic #abuse being legalized somewhere. Every few minutes, another #statistic. Another missing girl. Another #rape reported in India - one every fifteen minutes. And in the middle of all of this, I am doing something small and private. I AM #HEALING.

As a survivor of sexual abuse, my trauma has lived in my nervous system for decades. It shows up in subtle contractions, in unexpected triggers, in the slow and deliberate work of rebuilding safety inside my own body. But lately, something else has been surfacing. GUILT.

While girls are going missing. While women are being brutalized. While systems protect perpetrators. While injustice feels institutionalized.

I catch myself thinking: Who am I to sit here healing? Who am I to feel broken when others are being shattered daily? Is my pain even significant in comparison?

It is a dangerous comparison. Because trauma is not a competition. There is no global scoreboard of suffering. Pain does not shrink because more of it exists elsewhere. A nervous system does not measure itself against statistics.

And yet, the guilt lingers.

I realize now that what I am feeling is not just SURVIVOR'S GUILT. It is MORAL TENSION. 

The discomfort of being relatively safe in a world that is not safe for many. The weight of knowing I survived, I function, I build a life - while others are still trapped in violence. It feels almost like betrayal.

But healing is NOT betrayal. Healing is refusal - #Refusal to let harm define the rest of my life. Refusal to stay silent inside myself. Refusal to normalize what was never normal.

There is something uniquely overwhelming about being a survivor in a world that constantly reports abuse. Headlines do not land as “news.” They land in the body. They activate memory. They whisper: See? It’s still happening.

The nervous system does not differentiate between past and present when it comes to threat.

So while I am grounding, regulating, breathing, rebuilding - the world keeps flashing reminders of harm. And sometimes I FEEL SMALL. Small for focusing on myself. Small for taking up space with my story. Small for not doing more.

But when I step back, I see something else. I am not doing nothing. I am doing what I can, in the ways I know how. Through the counseling sessions I hold. Through the listening I offer without judgment. Through the safe spaces I try to create. Through the example I choose to become - someone who faced trauma and did not let it calcify into bitterness or silence.

I may not be changing laws. I may not be dismantling systems overnight. But I am interrupting cycles - one conversation at a time. And that MATTERS.

Privilege does not cancel pain. Pain does not cancel responsibility. BOTH CAN CO-EXIST. I can acknowledge that others have less access to support , and still honor that I was harmed. I can grieve for missing girls, and still hold compassion for the child I once was. I can be aware of systemic injustice, and still prioritize repairing my own nervous system. One does not invalidate the other.

WHAT I AM LEARNING IS THIS:

Awareness without boundaries becomes re-traumatization. Empathy without regulation becomes self-abandonment. I do not have to ingest every headline to prove I care. I do not have to suffer more to deserve healing.

Sometimes the most radical act in a violent world is not noise; it is nervous system repair. It is breaking silence internally before breaking it publicly. It is refusing to pass unprocessed pain to the next generation. Healing is not small work. It is generational work. It is relational work. It is systemic work in its most intimate form.

Every time a survivor chooses regulation over rage, boundaries over collapse, voice over silence, presence over dissociation - something shifts in the collective. I may not dismantle institutions alone. But I can dismantle the legacy of trauma inside me. And that is not insignificant.

The world may still be unsafe in many places. But I will not make my own body unsafe by abandoning it. I will heal. I will listen. I will hold space. I will become the example I once needed.

And that, in its quiet way, is RESISTANCE.