What If You Never Had a Before

Some people had a before. A before the accident. A before the divorce. A before the loss. They can look back at a time when they were whole and imagine healing as returning to that place.

I never had a before. My trauma started the moment I was born. My environment was never stable. My face was never “normal.” I never got the baseline of what safe or easy was supposed to feel like. I did not lose something. I started behind.

That matters. Because when you do not have a before, healing is not about returning. It is about inventing. You are building something that has never existed before. And that work is not light. Trauma slows you down. It limits your opportunities. It shapes your behavior before you even know what choice feels like. By the time you figure out you are carrying baggage, it has already cost you years.

I get why people say healing is unfair. It is. You feel cheated. Other people got handed safety. You had to build it. You are fighting for the ground they did not even know they had.

The irony is that survival gives you skills. I can solve your problems in five minutes flat but I can barely solve my own. I can carry everyone else and forget to carry myself. Survival makes you quick, sharp, and resourceful. It also leaves you restless when you finally get still. Peace feels like discomfort when you never knew it before.

I had seen a video of a man whose car was swallowed by floodwater. He was standing there in soaked jeans, holding his sneakers, laughing, asking FEMA to pull up. All I could think was he must have lived through some crazy shit to be that calm while his car disappeared. I thought about him later in the school pickup line, where twenty minutes to move a quarter of a block nearly had me undone.

That is what trauma does. It shifts your nervous system. I can be calm when the world is on fire, but then I nearly unravel in the most ordinary situations. Survival trained me for chaos, not for patience.

For those of us without a before, healing will never look like going back. There is nowhere to go back to. Healing looks like invention. Like learning how to live without carrying every ounce of the weight. Like laughing in the floodwaters instead of cursing in the school pickup line.

When trauma is your baseline, you build joy from scratch. You build safety from scratch. You build yourself from scratch. It is slow, it is heavy, and it is work most people will never understand. But the fact that you can do it at all is proof of what survival gave you.

Not a return. An invention.

xoxo,

HH 💋