Brie Nicole Inked

Heal. The word stalks me. It circles like a blade glinting in low light. I have to heal. I know this with a bone-deep certainty, but healing is not a gentle verb. It is excavation. It is prying open a rusted door and stepping into a house I abandoned decades ago. To heal means to process, and to process means to sift through years of rot and memory and silence. It means unearthing trauma I buried so deep beneath bravado and distraction that I no longer recognize the landscape of myself. I would not know where to press my hands into the soil to begin digging.

And I am meant to do this sober. Clear-eyed. Without the merciful blur of intoxication. Without the warm, dissolving haze I have used as both shield and lullaby. No more hiding behind the half-baked smile, the easy laughter that floats just high enough to avoid touching anything real. I have run toward that haze as if it were salvation, when all it ever did was dim the outline of my pain. To face it without anesthesia feels like volunteering for surgery without morphine. It feels cruel. It feels impossible.

I am terrified. Not of the word ‘trauma’, but of its texture. How it still lives inside me, filament thin and venomous. The threads were never cut. They drift through my chest like smoke, sometimes slack, sometimes tightening without warning. There are days I feel them coil around my throat, deliberate and patient, until breath becomes negotiation. Until every inhale feels borrowed. I have learned to function while strangled. I have learned to smile while suffocating. That may be the most damning truth of all.

How do I heal when the past is not past? When it rises uninvited, slick with memory, pressing its thumb into old bruises just to see if I still flinch? Healing sounds clean in theory, but in practice it is mud and blood and broken nails. It is sitting still while my mind claws at the walls. It is allowing grief to have a body instead of dissolving it in a glass. It is admitting that what happened did happen, and that it mattered, and that it marked me.

And yet, beneath the fear, beneath the reflex to run, there is a quieter knowing. I know what I am supposed to do. Or perhaps I know what I can no longer avoid. I need to feel it. All of it. The rage that crackles under my skin. The sorrow that pools heavy in my gut. The shame that whispers I should have been stronger. I need to let them speak without drowning them. I need to survive my own honesty.

Maybe healing will not make me pristine. Maybe I will never be “whole” in the way I once imagined, unfractured, seamless, untouched. Maybe the cracks will remain, visible and undeniable. But if I do this, if I endure the rawness instead of numbing it. I may no longer be so catastrophically broken that I turn my hands against myself. I may not become perfect, but I might become safe. I might become someone who breathes without a noose of memory tightening at the neck.

Heal. The word still frightens me. But it no longer feels like a blade alone. It feels like fire, terrible, cleansing, alive. And if I must burn to cauterize the wound, then let it be deliberate. Let it be conscious. Let it be the kind of pain that leads somewhere other than oblivion.