Just a Girl in Her Twenties Trying to Thrive, Not Just Survive

There’s something I wish someone had said to younger me years ago, and it wasn’t advice or a plan, just someone sitting with me and saying: 
“I see how much you’re carrying, and I promise it’s going to get better even if you can’t believe that right now. You’re going to be okay.” 

So, here I am saying it to you now. I’m not writing this because I have everything figured out, because I really, really don’t.

But because I know what it’s like to drown in darkness and wonder if it’s ever going to get better. And I want you to know that the other side does exist, even when it feels impossible.

I spent years looking completely fine on the outside: national competitions, scholarships, a packed CV, topping college and countless extracurriculars, the kind of person people look at and assume has it all together. But no one knew that I was falling apart inside every single day.

When I first went to therapy, my therapist asked me when I felt happy. I wrecked my brain but couldn’t answer, and it wasn’t because I was overthinking everything like I usually do, but because I genuinely couldn’t name a single moment where I did feel happy. That’s how numb I was.

What’s different now isn’t that everything is perfect or that I have it all figured out. I don’t, and some weeks that’s still really obvious. But happiness and lightness do exist in my life now, and for a long time I genuinely didn’t know that was possible for me.

I thought the heaviness was just how things were. But now I have real friendships, the kind where people show up for you in real ways. I have an internal stability I had to build slowly and deliberately, through repetition, through learning to be a little kinder to myself. From being unable to answer a phone call, I travelled alone to another country and stood in a crowd of thousands and felt completely alive for the first time I could remember. That moment felt as big as it did because of everything that came before it.

I’m writing this blog because I spent years feeling like I was the only one, like everyone else had access to some basic okay-ness that I’d somehow missed out on, and because I know the loneliness of looking completely fine on the outside while falling apart inside, and how isolating it is when nobody around you can see it.

So that’s what this is. Honest writing about complex trauma and healing, about being a highly sensitive person, about what it actually costs to keep performing fine when you’re not. And what happens, slowly, when you stop.

I’m not a therapist. I’m not writing from the tidy end of a transformation. I’m writing from the middle of it, because if you’re someone who’s only ever known all-consuming darkness and you’ve started to wonder if things ever actually get better, the answer is YES. Not maybe. Definitely.

Because your body simply cannot sustain that much intensity forever. The pain does decrease. You just have to hold on long enough to see it for yourself. And while you’re surviving, I want you to feel a little less alone in it.