On Surviving as a Woman in the Wake of Childhood Shadows

The world expects you to sew the seams of your torn childhood with dainty stitches, as if the needle were your wand and the thread your redemption. They say, “Rise above,” as though survival were an airy thing, a kite unspooling freely into the ether, instead of this iron weight chained to your ribs.

To be a woman who has survived is to walk through modern society with both a burning heart and ash in your mouth. It is to greet the day with a smile that feels like borrowed silk, stretching over the cracks they beg you to keep hidden…for what is more unseemly than a woman who remembers?

They tell you to forget it-that foggy, unspeakable thing that crouched at the edge of your childhood. But forgetting is not so simple when the bones of it are woven into your own. The ghosts are clever-they haunt you not in shrieks, but in the quiet moments: a smell, a phrase, the tilt of a stranger’s head.

Modern society loves a survivor but only if she is neat about it. They’ll applaud the glossy memoir, the triumphant Instagram post, but God forbid you weep too loudly or show the bloodied underside of the wound. No, you must be a phoenix-always burning, never showing the blisters.

And yet, there is something ferocious in surviving. It is a rebellion to breathe, to laugh, to love, in spite of what was stolen. To exist as a woman who has faced the unthinkable is to carry the war inside you, to learn to make music from it, even when the notes come sour.

You become fluent in silences, reading the spaces between words. You find other women-other survivors-and in their eyes, you see the same unspoken truths. Together, you weave a sisterhood out of shared shadows, out of knowing.

To survive is not to be whole; it is to be raw and real, to be jagged and still standing. It is to build a life with trembling hands, to declare: I am here, I am here, I am here.

And maybe that is enough.

🤍B

Originally published at http://thepedophilehuntress.com on December 31, 2024.