Choose Your Words With Compassion
A survivor speaks out.
I am the broken remains of a mosaic that was once a person. My humanity was killed, resuscitated, and killed again many times over. I survived literal death three times in my life. If you think I can’t handle comments on it full of sunshiny rainbows of misguided mindsets, you only see me in my broken places. You forgot that I kept dancing before the bones were set.
People have this idea about survivors of trauma that I want to lay to rest. It’s PTSD awareness month — so why not shed light on the articles you may be reading before your itchy fingers drift toward the comments?
Everything I’m about to tell you comes directly from comments that have been said to me. I don’t like to paint myself as the poster girl for trauma but life handed me that brush when I was too young to understand what it was. I’ve been through more than a lot of people, not as much as a few, but enough to know that I do not speak for all trauma survivors.
I am, however, going to do my damndest to protect them.
Here’s the reality of the world — the intention behind the words you say rarely matters as much as the way they’re interpreted. It only matters to you — not to the person to whom you’re speaking. I can not ask you to choose words with an understanding that you can’t…
