What I Learned to Call Normal
It wasn’t one moment that changed me—it was the quiet exhaustion of always bracing.
Abuse didn’t arrive as violence.
It arrived as confusion. As rules that kept changing. As love that felt conditional and somehow urgent at the same time.
I didn’t recognize it at first because nothing looked broken from the outside. There were good days. Apologies. Moments of tenderness that made me question my own memory.
That’s how it works.
Abuse rarely announces itself as harm. It introduces itself as intimacy.
I learned to read the room before speaking. To track moods like weather. To adjust myself in advance, hoping prevention might pass as peace.
Over time, my body learned things my mind hadn’t named yet.
A tight chest before certain conversations. A flinch at raised voices—even gentle ones. A constant scanning for what I might have done wrong.
I told myself I was sensitive. Difficult. Too much.
It never occurred to me that what I was experiencing had a name.
Abuse trains you to doubt your own thirst.
You begin to believe that wanting clarity is demanding. That needing safety is inconvenient. That your discomfort is evidence of failure, not a signal.
So you normalize the ache.
You call it love. You call it loyalty. You call it patience.
And slowly, quietly, you disappear inside the effort to be acceptable.
What broke the spell wasn’t a dramatic event.
It was exhaustion.
The kind that doesn’t lift with sleep. The kind that settles into your bones and asks a single, unbearable question:
Why do I feel like I’m always bracing?
That question was the beginning.
Not of healing—but of naming.
Naming the way my voice had learned to shrink. Naming the way my boundaries had been negotiated away. Naming the cost of being loved only when I was easy to manage.
Abuse doesn’t just hurt you.
It rearranges your relationship with yourself.
You stop trusting your instincts. You second-guess your needs. You confuse endurance with virtue.
Recovery, for me, didn’t look like confrontation.
It looked like listening.
Listening to my body when it said enough. Listening to the fear without obeying it. Listening to the quiet part of me that still knew what safety felt like—even if it hadn’t felt it in a long time.
Water doesn’t argue with thirst.
It responds.
Learning to heal meant relearning how to drink without permission. To take space without apology. To believe that kindness does not require self-erasure.
Some days, the old patterns still knock.
The urge to explain myself too much. To stay when leaving would be kinder. To mistake intensity for intimacy.
But now, I notice.
And noticing is power.
This is what I know now:
Love does not require fear. Care does not ask you to disappear. And safety is not something you earn by being smaller.
If you are reading this and something in your body is stirring—tightening, recognizing, remembering—know this:
You are not imagining it. You are not weak for surviving it. And you are not broken for needing gentleness now.
Healing from abuse is not about becoming tougher.
It’s about becoming honest.
About learning to trust your thirst again.
And choosing, one sip at a time, to give yourself the care you were always owed.
Hello, World!